l for you that your wife
didn't let you fall asleep on the grass, for if you had done that but
even for one instant, you'd be a lost man.'

It is possible that bristles were associated with fertility, as the tail
certainly was, for a pig's tail is stuck into the ground in Courland,
that the corn may grow abundantly, and the tails of pigs, and other
animal embodiments of the corn genius, are dragged over the ground to
make it fertile in different countries. Professor Rhys, who considers
the bristleless boar a symbol of darkness and cold, rather than of
winter and cold, thinks it was without bristles because the darkness is
shorn away by the sun. It may have had different meanings, just as the
scourging of the man-god has had different though not contradictory
meanings in different epochs of the world.

The Battle should, I believe, be compared with three other battles; a
battle the Sidhe are said to fight when a person is being taken away by
them; a battle they are said to fight in November for the harvest; the
great battle the Tribes of the goddess Danu fought, according to the
Gaelic chroniclers, with the Fomor at Moy Tura, or the Towery Plain.

I have heard of the battle over the dying both in County Galway and in
the Isles of Arann, an old Arann fisherman having told me that it was
fought over two of his children, and that he found blood in a box he had
for keeping fish, when it was over; and I have written about it, and
given examples elsewhere. A faery doctor, on the borders of Galway and
Clare, explained it as a battle between the friends and enemies of the
dying, the one party trying to take them, the other trying to save them
from being taken. It may once, when the land of the Sidhe was the only
other world, and when every man who died was carried thither, have
always accompanied death. I suggest that the battle between the Tribes
of the goddess Danu, the powers of light, and warmth, and fruitfulness,
and goodness, and the Fomor, the powers of darkness, and cold, and
barrenness, and badness upon the Towery Plain, was the establishment of
the habitable world, the rout of the ancestral darkness; that the battle
among the Sidhe for the harvest is the annual battle of summer and
winter; that the battle among the Sidhe at a man's death is the battle
of life and death; and that the battle of the Black Pig is the battle
between the manifest world and the ancestral darkness at the end of all
things; and that all these