Irene of Athens: the Christian Byzantine Empress who gouged her own son's eyes.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I don't think that big mo misunderstood his source material so much as he understood his audience very well, as did his successors.  Neither he nor they were judaizers or christianizers..and, obviously, none of them wished to grant or cede authority (let alone territory) to either tradition.

Respectfully disagree. I don’t think Mo was clever enough to grasp the subtlety of ‘an eye for an eye’. 

And Winter certainly isn’t.

Boru