Page:Folklore1919.djvu/486

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120
The Marriages of the Gods

would not yield to his solvent—the productive power of the Sun. The sports might be said to be the dutiful act of a loving foster-son to keep Tailltiu’s “grave and remembrance green,” but, when we examine the legends further, they clearly refer rather to reproduction than to death. The Lugnasad or Comarc Loga, in Cormac’s Glossary,[1] are “the nasad, or feast, of Lug mac Ethne,” celebrated at the beginning of autumn; thus it is a harvest festival, when the sun was in his greatest vigour, not a “lamentation” for “the fall of the over-ripe year,” as at Samhain, or Nov. 1st. The glossarist adds that the Óenach “was held with contests and races of swift horses.” Oengus of the Brug, like his father, Eochaid “the Great Father,” was called “the Dagda,”[2] and some said the Dagda was Lug’s father. Lug Scimaig was identical with the sun god, and perhaps “the Dagda” for “Sin maig was Bruig maig, i.e. Brug mac ind oc (the Dagda’s abode) on the Boyne.”[3] Oengus, after the so-called “first battle of Magh Tured,” made the Lugnasad feast for the marriage of Lug to (the kingdom of) Eríu, when Lug was made king after Nuada. One may recall the cryptic allusion in a Gaulish tablet found at Alesia,[4]—“May the marriage (?) rejoice the

  1. Sanas Chormaic, p. 99; Coir Anm. p. 326, p. 127.
  2. The Dagda was an “Earth god” (? mound god) of the Tuatha Dé,” Coir Anm. p. 331, Cormac’s Glossary, ed. Whitley Stokes; see also “First Battle of Magh Tured,” Eriu, viii. p. 17. He is “the god of wizardry of the Tuatha Dé,” Eriu, vii. p. 17, Coir Anm. p. 355. The “Dagda’s Stone” was a wonder of Ireland (Irish Triads, ed. Meyer Todd, Lect. Ser. xiii. p. 33). It was in Connacht; another “Dagda’s Stone” is still at Ardmore and was an object of “aphrodisiac rites.”
  3. Oengus mac ind oc was son of the Dagda and Boand, the sister of Elemair. They, like Lug, had mounds in Brugh. Rhys wavers, Hib. Lect. iv. p. 414, Brit. Acad. 1909, p. 238. I incline to his former view that Lug mac Ethlenn and Lug Scimaig are a “doublet.” He thinks from the stone Fál remaining at Tailltiu that Tara had lost power and that the Ultonians had retired to its rival; they lost Emania in A.D. 330. He regards Fál as a light-god (Hib. Lect. p. 201, also see pp. 123-5 and Coir Anm. p. 32).
  4. Brit. Acad. 1910, pp. 292.