The opinion of more recent Celtic scholars, however, is opposed to this view. Finn’s pedigree, preserved in the Book of Leinster, may seem at first to give some support to the theory of his real existence, but, on more careful examination of it, his own name and that of his father equally bewray him. Finn or Fionn, meaning “fair”, is the name of one of the mythical ancestors of the Gaels, while his father’s name, Cumhal[230], signifies the “sky”, and is the same word as _Camulus_, the Gaulish heaven-god identified by the Romans with Mars. His followers are as doubtfully human as himself. One may compare them with Cuchulainn and the rest of the heroes of Emain Macha. Their deeds are not less marvellous. Like the Ultonian warriors, they move, too, on equal terms with the gods. “The Fianna of Erin”, says a tract called “The Dialogue of the Elders”,[231] contained in thirteenth and fourteenth century manuscripts, “had not more frequent and free intercourse with the men of settled habitation than with the Tuatha Dé Danann”.[232] Angus, Mider, Lêr, Manannán, and Bodb the Red, with their countless sons and daughters, loom as large in the Fenian, or so-called “Ossianic” stories as do the Fenians themselves. They fight for them, or against them; they marry them, and are given to them in marriage. A luminous suggestion of Professor Rhys also hints that the Fenians inherited the conduct of that ancient war formerly waged between the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Fomors. The most common antagonists of Finn and his heroes are tribes of invaders from oversea, called in the stories the _Lochlannach_. These “Men of Lochlann” are usually identified, by those who look for history in the stories of the Fenian cycle, with the invading bands of Norsemen who harried the Irish coasts in the ninth century. But the nucleus of the Fenian tales antedates these Scandinavian raids, and mortal foes have probably merely stepped into the place of those immortal enemies of the gods whose “Lochlann” was a country, not over the sea—but under it.[233]