history of Ireland, and to be told the length of his reign and the names of his successors for many centuries afterwards. This stone, of which something must now be said, was the so-called Lia Fáil, or Stone of Fál, and Irish legend speaks of it as one of the four precious things brought to Ireland by the Tuatha Dé Danaan: it was one of its properties that, wherever it was taken, a Goidel of Milesian descent, like Conn, would be sovereign there, and at Tara it gave a scream[1] under every king whom it recognized in the sovereignty. From the possession of the warlike descendants of Conn, it is supposed by some[2] to have been traced to Scone, the capital of the kingdom of Alban, where Edward I. found it in such esteem that he thought it worth his while to have it brought to the English capital;[3] and the stone from Scone is believed, as you know, to be now in the Coronation chair at Westminster Abbey. But its removal to England was not the end of the beliefs attached to it; in fact, Irish and Scotch historians saw them verified anew when the throne of England came to be occupied by the Stuarts, who were supposed to be descended from Goidelic ancestors of Milesian race. In the name of the Lia Fáil, sometimes called the Stone of Destiny, the word Fál is probably to be treated as in the case of Inis Fáil 'the Island of Fál,' where I take the word to have meant light, and to have referred to the god in his early identification with the sun. In other words, the Lia Fáil
- ↑ Irish Nennius (Dublin, 1848), pp. 200-1.
- ↑ O'Curry was not one of them: see his MS. Mat. p. 480.
- ↑ Keating's History of Ireland (Dublin, 1880), p. 7; Skene's Chron. of the Picts and Scots, pp. 196-7, 266, 280, 333, 335; O'Curry'a MS. Mat. pp. 618—621.
