term which, betrays the usual identification[1] of the fairy mound with the nether world to which it formed the entrance. Admirable, it says, is that land; there are three trees there always bearing fruit; there is one pig there always alive, and another pig always ready cooked; and there is a vessel there full of excellent ale.[2] Nobody who is familiar with the literature of ancient Erinn requires to be told that this description is an expression of the old Irish idea of the Land of the Blessed. So the myth placing the Dagda at the head of the departed, simply happy on fruit and pork and ale, is the counterpart, and a very ancient one, of the Greek story of Cronus, vanquished and driven from power, wandering to the Isles of the Blessed, there to reign over them and share the functions of Rhadamanthus. The Irish idea of the Dagda as a Goidelic Cronus, ruling over an Elysium with which a sepulchral mound was associated, nay even confounded, contributed possibly to the formation of the story that all the Tuatha Dé Danann, beaten in battle, withdrew into the hills and mounds of Erinn; but be that as it may, this latter belief in its turn put an end to the singularity of the Dagda's position by making that of the other gods much like his. Further, the transference to his new sphere in Erinn of the incident of his replacement by his son, had the mythologically strange effect of making into a king of the dead in nether dusk the Mac Óc, who should have been the youthful Zeus of
- ↑ It was here helped by confounding brug, as applied to the Mac Óc's 'house' (Bk. of the Dun, bib), with some form of bruig, for an earlier mruig (see Windisch, s. v.) of the same origin as the English Marches, Ger. mark, Welsh bro, 'a land or district,' Gaulish Allobroges (p. 5).
- ↑ Bk. of Leinster, 246a.
