Extraordinary Weapons, Heroic Ethics, and Royal Justice in Early Irish Literature

The synthesis of pagan and Christian cosmologies that informs medieval Irish letters incorporates prestigious and extraordinary weapons, and other such objects into an all-compassing Nature, in which they are preferentially associated with the themes of heroic ethics, legitimate and just royal rule, and the removal of errant rulers through a cosmic deployment of the "instruments of their fate." Yet only rhetorical effects of literary depiction raise such weapons to a status approximating the preternatural.