Preface
but in any case the prophecy that brod should be in the airidig is actually fulfilled when the man Brod, or rather Brod's spear was in it. It appears from Windisch that the Old Irish form of airidig is eridech, a cup or beaker; and that both the ballad version and the version in the Egerton manuscript took this view, so that the prophecy was fulfilled when Brod's spear pierced the cup in Gerg's hand; while the author of the Connaught version having the old word airidig or airigid before him failed to recognise it as meaning a cup, so invented a person called Airidech, the servant of Gerg, through whom the spear passed after killing his master. As the word brod is of doubtful meaning, and is plainly a sort of druidical pun, I have ventured to translate the line in verse 22 of the ballad version as "broth shall in the beaker be," with similar translations of "there's broth in the cup," and "broth in the bowl is found" in the poems marked IV and in the Egerton version. This keeps pretty close to one of the suggested meanings for brod—namely, "meat"—and preserves in English the play on the word brod, and the name of Conor's charioteer who really fulfilled the prophecy. Another apparent evidence of date, which Windisch notes in his preface, is the higher literary quality of the Connaught version. Both versions are apparently, at least, as old as the tenth century, but the Ulster or ballad version and the Egerton one, which in
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