Virgil's Aeneid tells of one King Metabus, the exiled sovereign driven from his land by the bloodthirsty Volscii who, moments from death and invoking Diana, Roman goddess of the hunt, binds his baby girl Camilla to a spear and launches her across the river Amasenus to safety. Camilla grows up to be a great huntress, and in gratitude protects her quick-thinking dad into his dotage. 

The Irish legends of the Fianna have three generations of fatherly men at their heart. In one of the most beautiful and heart-wrenching scenes of the Fiannaíocht or Fenian cycle, mythical hunter-warrior Fionn mac Cumhaill finds his son Oisín in the woods five years after his pregnant wife was kidnapped.

But what do the tales of heroics in the canon of world folklore conceal? Male exceptionality comes at the price of expected suffering and of ‘noble’ sacrifice. Its reward is its own special, even extravagant, death, the ‘three-fold death,’ typically of wounding, suffocating and drowning all at once.

There are two separate tales of the threefold death of Lailoken, a semi-legendary prophet who lived in the Caledonian Forest in the 6th century and likely informed the conception of Merlin, a father-figure in Arthurian cycles.