Fedelm (sometimes spelled Feidelm; modern Fidelma) is a female prophet and fili, or learned poet, in the Ulster Cycle of Irish mythology. She appears in the great epic Táin Bó Cuailnge, in which she foretells the armies of Medb and Ailill mac Máta will face against the Ulaid and their greatest champion, Cú Chulainn. A prophetess of the same name appears in another tale, which associates her with Cú Chulainn.
Fedelm (sometimes spelled Feidelm; modern Fidelma) is a female prophet and fili, or learned poet, in the Ulster Cycle of Irish mythology. She appears in the great epic Táin Bó Cuailnge, in which she foretells the armies of Medb and Ailill mac Máta will face against the Ulaid and their greatest champion, Cú Chulainn. A prophetess of the same name appears in another tale, which associates her with Cú Chulainn.
==Táin Bó Cuailnge== Fedelm appears in the opening scene of the Táin Bó Cuailnge, preserved in Recension I. Intent on an invasion of Ulster, Queen Medb and Ailill mac Máta, the rulers of Connacht, have mustered a large army from all four provinces of Ireland. Just when they set out, they are met on the road by Fedelm, a young woman of blonde hair and beautiful appearance, who is armed, carries a weaver's beam and rides in a chariot. She identifies herself as a banfhili (female poet) from Connacht and claims to have come from Alba, where she had learnt the art of prophecy to the extent that she could now boast the skill of imbas forosnai, or all-encompassing illuminating knowledge. It has been suggested that Fedelm may have received her training from the warrior woman Scáthach, Cú Chulainn's martial arts teacher in Alba and herself a prophetess. Asked by Medb, who addresses her as prophetess (banfháith), to foretell the future of the army, Fedelm predicts carnage. Medb refuses to accept it, since the Ulstermen had been recently overcome by a mysterious condition which had debilitated them completely. However, Fedelm repeats her prophecy and in a poetic description of the bloody encounters to follow, named Cú Chulainn as their most terrifying opponent.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).