Footnote 177: See chap. XIV—“Finn and the Fenians”. Footnote 178: An island off the coast of Mayo. Its lonely crane was one of the “Wonders of Ireland”, and is still an object of folk-belief. Footnote 179: Pronounced _Kemoc_. Footnote 180: This famous story of the _Fate of the Children of Lêr_ is not found in any MS. earlier than the beginning of the seventeenth century. A translation of it has been published by Eugene O’Curry in _Atlantis_, Vol. IV, from which the present abridgment is made. Footnote 181: Pronounced _Dara_. Footnote 182: A poetical name for Ireland. Footnote 183: Translated by O’Curry, _Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish_, Lecture IX, p. 192, 193. Footnote 184: _Iliad_, Book XX. Footnote 185: The story of Mider’s revenge and Conairé’s death is told in the romance _Bruidhen Dá Derga_, “The Destruction of Da Derga’s Fort”, translated by Dr. Whitley Stokes, Eugene O’Curry, and Professor Zimmer from the original text. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XII THE IRISH ILIAD With Eber and Eremon, sons of Milé, and conquerors of the gods, begins a fresh series of characters in Gaelic tradition—the early “Milesian” kings of Ireland. Though monkish chroniclers have striven to find history in the legends handed down concerning them, they are none the less almost as mythical as the Tuatha Dé Danann. The first of them who has the least appearance of reality is Tigernmas, who is recorded to have reigned a hundred years after the coming of the Milesians. He seems to have been what is sometimes called a “Culture-king”, bearing much the same kind of relation to Ireland as Theseus bore to Athens or Minos to Crete. During his reign, nine new lakes and three new rivers broke forth from beneath the earth to give their waters to Erin. Under his auspices, gold was first smelted, ornaments of gold and silver were first made, and clothes first dyed. He is said to have perished mysteriously[186] with three-fourths of the men of Erin while worshipping Cromm Cruaich on the field of Mag Slecht. In him Mr. Nutt sees, no doubt rightly, the great mythical king who, in almost all national histories, closes the strictly mythological age, and inaugurates a new era of less obviously divine, if hardly less apocryphal characters.[187]