Cethern mac Fintain
Cethern mac Fintain is the name of a legendary figure from the Táin Bó Cuailnge ("The cattle robbery of Cooley ") in the Ulster cycle of the Celtic mythology of Ireland .
In the Táin Bó Cuailnge it is said that the gray-haired hero Cethern tried unarmed to stop the army of the Connachters under Queen Medb when it marched into Ulster and Cú Chulainn was injured after the fight with Fer Diad . He is so badly wounded that his entrails hang out of the slit belly and the severed heart rolls around in his chest "like a ball in an empty sack" . He manages to get through to Cú Chulainn, whom he asks to fetch a doctor. 14 (according to other tradition 50) doctors determine that he must die, whereupon he kills them all with his fist in anger. First the healer Fingen (also called Fingín) promises to help him, but either he will have to lie motionless in bed for a year and then be healthy again, or he will choose intensive treatment. After this he would regain his old strength for the fight for three days and three nights, but would then have to die irrevocably.
The hero chooses the second way. Fingen then prepares a bucket of bone marrow ( smirom mair ), after which Cethern sleeps through the day and night. During this time, he was replaced by replacement ribs from the body of a chariot instead of the broken ones. Awakened again, he intervened in battle and, as prophesied, fell in a three-day battle after causing a massacre among the enemy.
It was also the healer Fingen who treated the head wound inflicted on King Conchobar mac Nessa by the stone throw of Cet mac Mágach .
literature
- Helmut Birkhan : Celts. Attempt at a complete representation of their culture. Publishing house of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-7001-2609-3 , p. 632 f.
Web links
- Harry Mountain: The Celtic Encyclopedia. Volume 3, Universal Publishers, 1998, ISBN 1-58112-892-4 , p. 672, Fingin paragraph. (books.google.ch , accessed on July 19, 2013)