picking up information useful for the royal ears. We read that "everything good or evil that was done in Ireland she used to relate to the king in the House of the Red Branch at the end of the day." When Conor was shut up during the famous Siege of Howth on the rocky heights of the peninsula, and unable to obtain a supply of provisions, he was sustained by a daily supply of food brought by Levarcham on her back all the way from the royal palace of Emain Macha (i.e. Navan Fort, near Armagh). When undergoing these prodigious feats a fearful and horrible change came over the swift messenger. We read that "her feet and knees turned and went behind her, and her heels and thighs came before her!" while, besides her ordinary share of food with the warriors, she required a portion of 60 cakes which she baked at one time on the fire.[1] Though only the child of a slave-girl and born in Conor's house, Levarcham was possessed of all the arts of druidism. She was that most dreaded being, a female satirist. Even the king stood in awe of her, for we read that he would like to have removed her from the vicinity of Deirdre, but he dare not, for he dreaded her incantations.
So radically dissimilar are the maiden Deirdre and her nurse Levarcham in the story of the 11th and that of the
- ↑ The same extraordinary description is given of Cúchulainn in moments of supreme action, and probably is meant, by some strange flight of the savage imagination which cannot be followed by the modern mind, to denote great strength or swiftness of body. The same is said of Domhnall, a terrible Amazon in Alba, whom Cúchulainn met when he went thither to learn championship; and also of the Devil, who when bidden by St. Moling to fast and pray, replies, that he cannot kneel, because his knees are behind him, see Stokes' Goidelica, 2nd edition 1872, p. 180. In a series of articles on Les Pieds et Genoux à rebours, published in Mélusine, vi. 172; vii. 39, 63; viii. 77, M. Henri Gaidoz shows that the idea, which is met with in various countries, generally represents an evil genius or redoubtable person. There is a tiny bronze statuette in the British Museum representing the grotesque figure of a youth or man with the lower portion of the body from the waist to the ankles turned in an opposite direction to the head and feet. M. Perdrozet mentions a similar statuette in the National Museum at Athens.
