Warriors, Wizards & the World's Oldest Superheroes

From the reading: The Heroes Who Never Really Died

Long before Marvel invented superheroes, the Celts had their own. Cú Chulainn, the great warrior of Ulster, was said to transform in battle into something barely human — his muscles twisted, one eye sank into his skull, and a pillar of dark blood erupted from his head. This terrifying state, called the riastrad or 'warp spasm', made him unstoppable. He supposedly defended the whole of Ulster alone as a teenager, holding off an entire army at a river ford. The stories come from a collection called the Ulster Cycle, composed orally for centuries before monks wrote them down around 800 CE.