the weakness which periodically afflicted the rest of the Ultonian warriors, the king included; and by dint of the most marvellous feats of valour, Cúchulainn kept the whole force of the enemy at bay for some time.
You will perhaps think it a strangely Irish treatment to make the gods languish en couvade while mortals went free; but it must be remembered that all Irish mythology, and Welsh also, reaches us through Christian channels, which usually make the gods into men liable to die like other men. Within the pagan period there was probably no lack of distinctions believed to exist between gods and men, and the idea of the former's deathlessness, or at any rate the millennial duration of their lives, must have been one of them. But it is remarkable that what in Irish is represented as merely an indisposition and inactivity on their part, amounts in the Norse Edda to nothing less than the actual death of the Anses at the hands of the powers of evil, followed though it be by their unexplained return to life when all ills are healed at the coming of Balder. Whether we call their inactivity death or mere indisposition, there was a mythological reason for it, as we shall presently see; but that reason may be regarded as having ceased to be intelligible at an early date, long probably before any Aryan wanderer had landed in these islands. So the persistence of the myth of which the Ultonian inactivity formed an integral part, would naturally come to be interpreted sooner or later in the light of the only custom that seemed to make it intelligible, namely, that of the couvade. The explanation was, it is needless to say, a mere expedient, but rather an ingenious one, though it proves, when you come to examine it a little more
