I’ve recently been working my way through the Irish epic, Tain Bo Cuailnge (The Cattle-Raid of Cooley).  One of the more interesting characters I’ve come across so far is Cúchulain. Cúchulain was a magnificent warrior, and was famous for his single-handed defense of Ulster against a formidable army.  In one passage, he lops the heads off of four charioteers in a single swipe, and proceeds to conspicuously affix their heads to poles in an effort to goad the invading army to pursue him to their doom.  Seven-fingered, seven-toed, and seven-pupil-ed, Cúchulain was a paragon of the human species, and is therefore lauded by the epic writer for his various and numerous virtues:

Now, many and divers were the magic virtues that were in Cúchulain that were in no one else in his day.  Excellence of form, excellence of shape, excellence of build, excellence in swimming, excellence in horsemanship, excellence in chess and in draughts, excellence in battle, excellence in contest, excellence in single combat, excellence in reckoning, excellence in speech, excellence in counsel, excellence in bearing, excellence in laying waste and in plundering from the neighboring border…

I imagine he was the envy of his high-school class, and probably was featured on the majority of the “most-likely-to” pages of his yearbook 🙂