stronghold of Emain Macha and threatens to kill everyone inside, they coun-
ter him by sending out naked women, so that he hides his face; they then seize
him and throw him into a tub of cold water, which at once turns to steam and
bursts. A second tub boils over; the third becomes warm and stabilizes his
temperature (Táin (I) 802–18). The Nart hero Sosruquo is scorching hot
when he is born and has to be cooled down with seven baths in cold water,
which leaves him as hard as tempered steel.^28
In several traditions we find the motif that a visible fire or light springs
from the hero’s body. When Athena confers on Diomedes a temporary
dominance in the battle, she causes a flame to burn from his helmet and
shield, from his head and shoulders (Il. 5. 4–7). Later she puts a golden
nimbus round Achilles’ head, with a flame burning from it up to the sky
(18. 205 f., 214, 225–7). Livy (1. 39. 1–4) relates that when Servius Tullius was
still a boy, a fire was seen to burn from his head as he slept. Someone came
running with water to put it out, but the boy’s mother stopped him. As Bhı ̄ma
raged with longing for battle, ‘flames of fire burst forth from all the orifices of
his body, as from the hollows of a tree that is on fire’; he ‘began to sweat with
his inner heat. From the ears and the other orifices of the raging man fire
issued forth, smoking and sparking’ (MBh. 2. 63. 15, 64. 13; cf. 3. 261. 50; 8.
- 7). Upon Cú Chulainn is seen the lúan láith, the ‘hero’s light’. At Táin (I)
69 it is said to be on his brow, at 433 to rise above his head. ‘The torches of the
war-goddess, virulent rain-clouds and sparks of blazing fire, were seen in
the air over his head with the seething of fierce rage that rose in him... The
hero’s light rose from his forehead, as long and as thick as a hero’sfist, and it
was as long as his nose’ (2265–73).^29 The motif occurs in an only slightly
different form in Serbo-Croat oral epic: ‘wherever I smote him, living fire
leaped from D–elos ́’.^30
The second of the passages quoted about Bhı ̄ma’s outburst of fire con-
tinues: ‘His face became fierce to behold, with its folds of knitted brows, as the
face of Yama himself when the end of the Aeon has come’ (MBh. 2. 64. 13).
This facial distortion is again paralleled by a habit of Cú Chulainn’s, though
in the Irish narration it is intensified to a fantastic degree and becomes just
one detail of a prodigious spasm that deforms his whole frame.
For it was usual with him that when his hero’sflame sprang forth his feet would turn
to the back and his hams turn to the front and the round muscles of his calves would
come on to his shins, while one eye sank into his head and the other protruded. A
(^28) Colarusso (2002), 53 (Circassian), 186 (Abaza), 388 (Ubykh). In the Ossetic version in
Sikojev (1985), 70–3, the tempering takes place later, the heat being produced artificially.
(^29) Cf. Aided Con Chulainn (Book of Leinster version), ed. W. Stokes, RC 3 (1876–8), 182;
Dictionary of the Irish Language s.v. lúan; Campanile (1990b), 20–4.
(^30) Salih Ugljanin, SCHS ii, no. 16. 111 f.
456 12. Arms and the Man