god Bodb, who lived in Loch Lein, making the bright vessels of Fand, daughter of Flidais. Every evening he threw his anvil eastward as far as a grave-mound at Indeoin na nDése and it in turn cast three showers toward the grave, of water, of fire, and of purple gems.19
Luchta the carpenter (saer) promised to supply all the shields and javelin-shafts required for the battle. These shafts he made with three chippings, the third completing them and setting them in the rings of the spears, or he threw them with marvellous accuracy at the sockets of the spear-heads stuck by Goibniu in the door-lintels, this being precisely paralleled by the art of Caoilte, the survivor of the Féinn.20
The mortally wounded were placed in a well over which Diancecht and his children sang spells, or into which he put healing herbs; and thus they became whole.21 The Fomorians sent Ruadan, son of Bres and of Brig, daughter of Dagda, to discover the reason of these things; and a second time he was sent to kill one of the divine craftsmen. He obtained one of the magic spears and wounded Goibniu, who slew Ruadan and then entered the healing well, while Brig bewailed her son with the first death-keen heard in Ireland. Here, as so often, the origin of mourning chants and runes is ascribed to divinities.22
Before the battle Lug escaped from his guards and heartened the host by circumambulating them on one foot with one eye closed, chanting a spell for their protection—the attitude of the savage medicine-man, probably signifying concentration. Then came the clash of battle, "gory, shivering, crowded, sanguineous, the river ran in corpses of foes." Nuada and Macha were slain by Balor, who possessed an evil eye, or was a personification of the evil eye, so much feared by the Celts. Once when his father's Druids were concocting magic potions, the fumes gave his eye poisonous power, and his eyelid was raised by four men, but only on the battle-field, where no army could resist it. When Lug appeared, Balor desired it to be
