FERDIA

Also Ferdiad, the son of Daman and Daire, was a warrior of Connacht in the Ulster Cycle of Irish Mytology.

Ferdia trained on the Isle of Skye at the same time as Cuchulainn, under the tutelage of the renowned warrior woman Scathach..

Ferdia was years ahead in his training and was therefore almost like an older brother to Cuchulainn. They became friends and ‘foster brothers’ to each other.

Many years later, when the Battle of the Brown Bull is being fought, they find themselves on opposite sides; Ferdia is aligned to Queen Medb and Cuchulainn is fighting on the side of Ulster.

When Ailill and Medb invade Ulster to steal the bull Donn Cuailnge, their progress is held up by Cuchulainn, who defeats a series of Connacht champions in single combats.
After Fergus, there was only one man left among Medb’s armies who had a change against Cuchulainn, Ferdia.
But he doesn’t want to fight his foster brother and friend; he even refuses Medb’s gifts of a chariot and the hand of her daughter in marriage. 

But he is forced by Medb, who threatens him with satires about himself and his family if he does not comply to her wishes.

The threat of being a figure of fun for all eternity proves too much for Ferdia and he consents to fight Cuchulainn. 

Both of them are equal in all martial feats, with two exceptions: 
   - the Gae Bulg, a barbed spear which only Cuchulainn knows how to use 
    -and Ferdia’s horny skin, which no weapon can pierce.

They fought in the ford for three days and neither gaining advantage over the other. 

The next day Cuchulainn used his magical weapon and slew his friend with a low cast of the spear. 
When he saw his friend dying, he took Ferdia in his arms and carried him across to die in the camp of the men of Ulster rather than with Medb. 

Ferdia’s death was a symbolic sacrifice for Connacht. When Cuchulainn fell down exhausted and heart-sick from the battle with Ferdia, the Connacht legions stormed the borders, overtaking Ulster.


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FIONN MAC CUMHAILL

His childhood name was Deimne .
Fionn or Finn is a nickname meaning " fair" and several legends tell  how he gained the nickname when his hair turned prematurely white.


Fionn was a king, a seer, a poet, a Druid and a knowledgeable man.
Everything he said was sweet-sounding to his people.
Of his justice it used to be said, that if his enemy and his own son  had come before him to be judged, it is a fair judgement he would have given between them.


The stories of Fionn and his followers, the Fianna, form the Fenian cycle, much of it purported to be narrated by Fionn's son, the poet Oisin.

As a seven-year old boy, he met on the banks of the Boyne with a seer called Finneigeas, who had dedicated the past seven years of his life to catching the Salmon of Knowledge, which swam in the river and would impart the knowledge of the world on the first person to taste it.

While Fionn was there, Finneigeas caught the salmon, and with much joy put it on the spit to cook, entrusting the cooking to Fionn but warning him not to taste it.

After a time, Fionn went to see if the fish was cooked, however he touched it with his thumb and burnt himself, leaving a blister.

To ease the pain, he put his thumb in his mouth, and thus became the first person to taste the salmon.

Ever after that, if Fionn needed to know something, he put his thumb into his mouth and the knowledge came to him.

Fionn met his famous wife, Sadhbh, when he was out hunting.

She had been turned into a deer by a druid, for she had refused to marry him.

Fionn's hounds, which were once human themselves, recognised she was human and Fionn spared her.

She transformed back into a beautiful woman the moment she set foot on Fionn's land.

One of Fionn's earliest achievements was the creation of Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland, which he scooped out with his two bare hands, and tossed into the Irish Sea where it became the Isle of Man.

He later destroyed all of Ireland's serpents, a story later appropriated by St. Patrick.

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MORIGNA

The Morrigan was the Irish Goddess of War, but also of fate, Life and Death, deciding who lives and who dies on the battlefield.


The Morrigan could change her shape at will, and she frequently appears in the ornithological guise of a hooded crow, (but also as a beautiful woman). She is one of the Tuatha De Danann (" Tribe of the goddess Danu") and she helped defeat the Firbolg at the First Battle of Mag Tuireadh and the Fomorians at the Second Battle of Mag Tuireadh.


The Celts believed as they engaged in battle, the Morrigan flew shrieking overhead, often in the form of a carrion crow or a raven, calling up a host of slain soldiers to a macabre spectral dance. When the battle ended, the soldiers would leave the field until dawn so that the Morrigan could claim their trophies of heads.


The Morrigan appears as both a single Goddess and a trio of Goddesses. The other deities who form the trio are Badb , and either Macha or Nemain .Their collective name means " the phantom queen".
As a triple goddess, Morrigan was the Crone aspect of the Great Mother.


For what it can be seen from different texts, "Morrigan" or"Morrigu" is a title applied to different women who for the most part seem to be sisters or related in some manner, or sometimes it is the same woman with slightly differing names in different manuscripts and redactions.
We see that Morrigan is identified with Badb, Macha, Anann and Danann. The first identified with the raven and battle, the second usually identified with the archetypal Celtic horse goddess, the third with the land goddess, and the fourth with a mother goddess.


She resided to the North, which was the realm of the dead, justice and the element of Earth.She often appeared to a hero on the day he was to die, thus she appeared to Cuchulainn before he went to the battle of Muirthemne as an apparicion of the three crones who were roasting a hound on a rowan pit.
There was a geas on Cuchulainn not to eat the meat of his namesake the hound or that would be the day he died. The crones shamed him into eating the taboo food and thus he was killed in battle later that day.


The function of the Goddess here, was not to attack Cuchulainn with weapons but to render him helpless at a crucial point in battle. And all  because  after she appeared to him for the first time and offered her to love him, he failed to recognize her and rejected her.


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