the two mythic battles: scenes of real interment are calculated to attract imaginary battles.
When the Milesians first arrived in the island, the Tuatha Dé Danann were defeated in a great battle at Tailltin or Teltown in Meath, and those who escaped entered the hills of Erinn as a sort of fairies forming an invisible world of their own (p. 148); they never figured afterwards as a people in the history of the country. Their power, however, did not come to an end, for though they gave up their possession of the land, they still had means of making their influence felt; for they proceeded to ruin the corn and the milk of the Milesians, so that the latter were forced to seek the friendship of the Dagda, who thenceforth spared them the produce both of their fields and their dairies.[1] In fact, the Milesians went still further in their desire to conciliate the Tuatha Dé Danann; for the nobles of the former were wont at one time, we are told, to become the foster-parents of the children of the fairies who lived nearest to them, in order that neither corn nor milk nor bloom should be lost in Erinn.[2] Not so with the Fir Bolg and the Fomori; for we read of the Milesians every now and then having wars with them; and the stories about them not unfrequently associate with the Fir Bolg the remains of the non-Celtic inhabitants under the name Ernai, a late form of the more ancient one of Ivernji or Ἰούερνιοι.
Such is a somewhat intentionally consistent version of the legend of the early invasions of Erinn; a little more use of stories avoided by the historians, though no more
