I had become familiar with this plan of transforming pedigrees into regnal lists before I first read Buchanan's history of Scotland. In that book I found a list of forty-three kings who reigned over Scotland before Fergus of Dal Riada went over from Ireland. All the names seemed strange. They were apparently Latinised from some other language, the history being written in Latin. Were they invented, like the names in "Gulliver's Travels," or, if not, where were they found? Can it be, I asked myself, that the Scottish historians, like the Irish, filled the vacuum out of pedigrees? And if so, out of what pedigrees? Now it is a matter of historical record that, on the inauguration of a king of Scotland, a part of the ceremony consisted in the recitation of his pedigree, and this custom was kept up until the Dal Riada line died out with Alexander III in 1285. Therefore, I argued, the pedigree most familiar to an early Scottish historian was that of the kings of Dal Riada. I turned up this pedigree in the Irish genealogies and my conjecture was confirmed. Scotland and Ireland are all along agreed that Fergus MacEirc, an Irish prince, settled in Scotland and founded there a new kingdom and dynasty. But the forty-three kings of Scotland named before Fergus are nevertheless the forty-three ancestors of Fergus, from father to son, in the Irish genealogy. The list comprises names so well known in Irish story as Ederscél, that Munster king, whose death is said to account for the forfeiture of Leinster territory to Munster; his son Conaire Mór, whose tragic fate is told in the story of Da Derga's Hostel; and the younger Conaire, son of Mugh Lámha, who also figures in the Irish hero-lore. All these and their forefathers, up to the eponymous Iar, head of the Ivernian stock, figure one after another in the artificial history of the first Scottish dynasty beyond the sea. Let us get away then from such unprofitable material and let us see what comes to us in the guise of traditions of substance. We start off from the Pentarchy and the Ulster cycle. The Ulster stories have for their main basis the hostile relations between Ulster and Connacht. Being Ulster stories, they do not prolong their scope beyond a time in which Ulster has generally the best of it. Ulster's mishaps merely serve to heighten the effect, which is Ulster's heroism and victory. It was when this time of glory was but a memory, when Emain was a deserted site and the remnant of the Ulaidh occupied only a tiny fraction of their former territory, that these stories took their present shape and were committed to writing. We have to turn to another set of traditions, to those connected with the monarchical kindred of historical time, to learn how things developed from the stage depicted in the Ulster tales.