earth and stars in the sky and drops in the rain’. In the Armenian oral epic
armies are described as being as numerous as the stars in heaven, or as more
uncountable than the sand of the sea, the stars in the sky, and the grass on the
ground. In Irish saga it is related that the slain Fomori on the Mag Tuired
were as numerous as the stars of heaven, the sands of the sea, the snowflakes,
the dewdrops on a lawn, (etc.). When Cú Chulainn fought on the Mag
Muirthemne, ‘as many as the sands of the sea, and the stars of heaven, and the
dew of May, and snowflakes and hailstones... were their cloven heads and
cloven skulls and severed hands and their red bones’.^69
‘Swift as (or swifter than) thought’ appears to be a more distinctively Indo-
European idea.^70 It is common in the Rigveda: mánojava- or mánojavas- or
manojúv-‘thought-swift’ is a recurrent epithet of the gods’ cars or of the
animals that draw them (1. 85. 4, 117. 15, 119. 1, etc.); the As ́vins’ car is
‘swifter than a mortal’s thought’ (1. 118. 1, cf. 117. 2, 183. 1; 10. 39. 12).
Thought (mánas-) is called the swiftest among things that fly (6. 9. 5). In the
Iliad (15. 80–3) the speed of Hera’s journey from Ida to Olympus is con-
veyed by saying that it was ‘as when a much-travelled man darts about in
imagination from one place to another, thinking “I should like to be there, or
there”.’ The Phaeacian ships are ‘swift as a wing or a thought’ (Od. 7. 36), and
Apollo can travel ‘like a thought’.^71 An Irish warrior ‘made a direct run at
him... as an arrow from a bow, or as the swiftness of a man’s thought’.^72 In
the Welsh story of Culhwch and Olwen (330) there appear two servants of
Gwenhwyfar, Ysgyrdaf and Ysgudydd, whose ‘feet were as swift on their
errand as their thought’. In Snorri’sGylfaginning (46) Thor’s servant Thialfi,
the fastest of runners, challenges the inhabitants of Utgard in Giantland to a
race, and finds himself far outrun by a small person called Hugi, ‘Thought’;
the king, Utgarda-Loki, explains afterwards that it was his own thought,
which Thialfi had no hope of matching in fleetness.
Another simile for speed is ‘quick as/quicker than a blink’. In one Vedic
passage (RV 8. 73. 2) the As ́vins are invited nimís
̇
as ́ cij jávı ̄yasa ̄ ráthena ̄ ́ ya ̄tam,
‘come on your car that is swifter even than a blink’. Similarly in the
Ra ̄ma ̄yan
̇
a (4. 66. 21), ‘in no more time than it takes to wink an eye, I shall
rush swiftly across the self-supporting sky’. The expression was perhaps felt to
be too homely for Greek epic, but it appears in Sophocles’Inachus, fr. 269c. 24
πρ?ν μ3σαι, ‘before having time to blink’, and in Euripides’Bacchae, 746 f.
(^69) Sassountsy David 7, 101, 270, 314; Cath Maige Tuired 742–6 Gray; Aided Con Chulainn, trs.
J. Carey in Koch–Carey (2000), 137. Further examples in Togail bruidne Da Derga 860, 986, 1092
Knott; Aislinge Meic Con Glinne pp. 9 f. Meyer.
(^70) Cf. Durante (1976), 121, who, however, notes only the Vedic and Greek material.
(^71) Hymn. Ap. 186, 448. Cf. also Hymn. Herm. 43–6; [Hes.] Scut. 222; Theognidea 985.
(^72) Acallam na Senórach, trs. Dooley–Roe (1999), 170.
96 2. Phrase and Figure