In real life your best chance of disposing of a formidable fighting man
would be to surprise him in circumstances when he was especially vulnerable
and defenceless, for example in his bath. This must have been done for real on
occasion, and there are corresponding cases in legend. Agamemnon is hacked
to death in his bath by his wife and her lover. Con Roí’s wife disables him in
the bath by tying his hair to a post so that the Ulstermen can attack him; he
fells a hundred of them with his fists and feet, but is then killed with his own
sword. Saxo relates how the tyrannical king Olo was assassinated in his bath
by Starkather.^98
In fair fight the hero will hold his own against normal human opposition,
even if he is heavily outnumbered. When he engages a more than human
antagonist such as a dragon, he may meet an honourable death, provided that
he also dispatches the monster. Beowulf succeeds in killing the fire-breathing
dragon, but he is wounded in the fight and dies from the reptile’s venom
(Beowulf 2711–820). Thor at Ragnarøk will fight against the Miðgarð serpent
and vanquish it, but after taking just nine steps away he will fall dead from
the poison it has spat at him (Vo ̨luspá 56, Gylf. 51). Fergus mac Léite kills the
monster of the loch but dies of the wounds he sustains.^99 In a story from the
Circassian Nart corpus the hero Warzameg kills a snake but then passes
out from its poisonous breath, though he is subsequently revived by an
eagle (Colarusso (2002), 27). The Greek myth about the death of Heracles
represents a development of the motif. He is killed by what his wife
Deianeira intended as a love charm, mixed from the venom of the Hydra
and the blood of the Centaur Nessos, both creatures that Heracles had slain
in the past.
Invulnerability; the weak spotCertain heroes are especially difficult to kill because they have what every
warrior would like, an impenetrable skin, and are impervious to ordinary
weapons. But mythical difficulties are made to be overcome, and all these
hardies come to grief in one way or another. The Trojan Kyknos was invul-
nerable, according to some authors; he prevented the Achaeans from landing
and fought on, unmarked by spear or sword, until at last Achilles managed to
strangle him with his helmet-strap (Ov. Met. 12. 72–144).
(^98) Aided Con Roí II 6 f., ed. R. I. Best, Ériu 2 (1905), 24/25; Saxo 8. 6. 3 p. 221. Con Roí’s hair
must have been long; for this as a heroic motif cf. EIEC 253.
(^99) Imthechta Tuaithe Luchra 7 aided Fergusa, ed. S. H. O’Grady, Silva Gadelica (London 1892),
i. 251 f./ii. 284 f.; Thurneysen (1921), 546. Further examples are cited by Axel Olrik, Ragnarök
(Berlin–Leipzig 1922), 56 f.
444 11. King and Hero