gen's landing in Kerry, and his first battle near the mountains called Slieve Mis. The name Amorgen seems to have literally meant a wonder-child, and this would apply equally well to Eccet's ugly progeny and to Amorgen the White-kneed, whose pretensions resemble those of Taliessin, and whose birth and infancy may have formed the burden of a story like that of Taliessin. One may here compare Lug termed par excellence the child of victory,[1] which in its turn vividly recalls the career of the newly-born Apollo, master of the lyre as well as of unerring arrows.
The Stratification of Solar Myths.
This lecture would be incomplete without some allusion to the fact that, though Celts and Teutons appear to have originally had the same notion of a Sun-god, which was likewise Aryan, probably, in the widest sense of the word; they have also had a habit more or less general of treating the sun as a female. I have been searching in vain among the ever-growing mass of writings on Aryan mythology for any clear recognition of this two-fold treatment. The theory I have been forced to form is, that the myths about the sun under such
- ↑ It occurs in the British Museum MS. Harl. 5280, fol. 63a (52a), as gein mbuada, or child of victory; and Amorgen analysed may be explained as gein n-amra, 'wonderful child,' an attested description of another person: see Windisch, p. 590, s.v. gein, and Stokes' Three Irish Glossaries, p. lxxxiij. Gein maks gene in the genitive, and is a neuter of the same origin and formation as the Latin genus, generis; but the corresponding Irish declension being little used, some uncertainty prevailed as to the case-endings, and the nominative appears as Amorgene and Amorgin or Amairgin, as well as Amorgen: see Windisch, p. 870, s.v.
