It is towards the middle or close of the fourth century that we come into much closer historical contact with the Irish, and indeed we know with some certainty a good deal about their internal history, manners, laws, language, and institutions from that time to the present. Of course if we can trust Irish sources we know a great deal about them for even seven or eight hundred years before this. The early Irish annalist, Tighearnach,[15] who died in 1088, and who had of course the records of the earliest Irish writers—so far as they had escaped extinction by the Danes—before his eyes when he wrote, and who quotes frequently and judiciously from Josephus, St. Jerome, Bede, and other authors, was of opinion, after weighing evidence and comparing Irish with foreign writers, that the monumenta Scotorum, or records of the Irish prior to Cimbaeth (i.e., about 300 B.C.) were uncertain. This means that from that time forwards he at least considered that the substance of Irish history as handed down to us might, to say the least of it, be more or less relied upon. Cimbaeth was the founder of Emania, the capital of Ulster, the home of the Red Branch knights, which flourished for 600 years and which figures so conspicuously in the saga-cycle of Cuchulain.
What then—for we pass over for the present the colonies of Partholan, the Tuatha De Danann, and the Nemedians, leaving them to be dealt with among the myths—have our native bards and annalists to say of these six or seven centuries? As several of the best and greatest of Irish sagas deal with events within this period, we can—if bardic accounts, probably first committed to writing about the sixth or seventh century may at all be trusted—to some extent recall its leading features, or reconstruct them.
[1] Milesius is the ordinary Latinised form of the Irish Miledh; the real name of Milesius was Golamh, but he was surnamed Miledh Easpáin, or the Champion of Spain. He himself never landed in Ireland.
[2] 1016 according to O'Flaherty, in the eighth century B.C. according to Charles O'Conor of Belanagare, but as far back as 1700 B.C. according to the chronology of the "Four Masters." Nennius, the Briton who wrote in the time of Charlemagne, gives two different accounts of the landing of the Irish, one evidently representing the British tradition, and the other that of the Irish themselves, of which he says sic mihi peritissimi Scotorum nunciaverunt. Both these accounts make the Irish come from Spain, the first being that three sons of a certain Miles of Spain landed in Ireland from Spain at the third attempt. According to what the Irish told him they reached Ireland from Spain 1,002 years after flying from Egypt.
[3] Even Giraldus Cambrensis, that most bigoted of anti-Irishmen, could nevertheless write thus of the natives in the twelfth century. "In Ireland man retains all his majesty. Nature alone has moulded the Irish, and as if to show what she can do has given them countenances of exquisite colour, and bodies of great beauty, symmetry, and strength." This testimony agrees with what Cæsar says of the Celts of Gaul, whose large persons he compares with the short stature of the Romans, and admires their mirifica corpora. Strabo says of a Celtic tribe, the Coritavi, "to show how tall they are, I myself saw some of their young men at Rome, and they were taller by six inches than any one else in the city." The Belgic Gauls are uniformly described as tall, large-limbed, and fair, and Silius Italicus speaks of the huge limbs and golden locks of the Boii who gave their name to Bavaria (Boio-varia) and to Bohemia (Boio-haims). They were probably the ruling race in Gaul, but the type is now very rarely seen there, the aristocratic Celts having been largely wiped out by war, as in Ireland, and having when shorn of their power become amalgamated with the Ligurians and other pre-Celtic peoples.
[4] As the Brigantes, Menapii, and Cauci.
[5] Buchanan the Scotchman (1506–81), having urged some of these objections against the Irish tradition, is thus fairly answered by Keating, writing in Irish, about half a century after Buchanan's death: "The first of these reasons," says Keating (to prove that the Irish came from Gaul), "he deduces from the fact that Gaul was formerly so populous that the part of it called Gallia Lugdunensis would of itself furnish 300,000 fighting men, and that it was therefore likely that it had sent forth some such hordes to occupy Ireland, as were the tribes of the Gauls. My answer to that is that the author himself knew nothing of the specific time at which the Sons of Miledh arrived in Ireland, and that he was consequently perfectly ignorant as to whether France was populous or waste at that epoch. And even though the country were as populous as he states, when the Sons of Miledh came to Ireland, it does not follow that we must necessarily understand that it was the country whence they emigrated; for why should it be supposed to be more populous at that time than Spain, the country they really did come from?"
[6] Aristotle, too, mentions the discovery by the Phoenicians, of an island supposed to be Ireland, rich in forest and river and fruit, which, however, this account would make out to have been uninhabited: ἐν τῇ θαλάσσῃ τῇ ἔξω ῾Ηρακλείων στηλῶν φάσὶν ὑπό Καρχηδονίων νῆσον εὑρεθῆναι ἐρήμην, ἔχουσαν ὕλην τε παντοδαπῇ καὶ ποταμὸυς πλωτὸυσ, καὶ τοῖς λοιποῖς καρποῖς θαυμαστὴν, ἀπέχουσαν δὲ πλειόνων ἡμερῶν, etc. Ireland was splendidly wooded until after the Cromwellian wars, and not unfrequently we meet allusions in the old literature to the first clearances in different districts, associated with the names of those who cleared them.
[7] Sacra is apparently a translation of ῾Ιερα = Eiriu, old form of Eire now called Erin, which last is really an oblique case.
[8] νήσοισιν ᾿Ιερνἰσιν, and νήσον ᾿Ιερνἰδα. The names by which Ireland and its inhabitants were known to the writers of antiquity are very various, as ᾿Ιουέρνια, ᾿Ιουέρνοι, Juverna, Juberna, Iverna, Hibernia, Hibernici, Hibernienses, Jouvernia, Οὐερνία, ᾿Ιουρνία and even Vernia and Βερνια. St. Patrick in his confessions calls the land Hyberione and speaks of Hibernæ Gentes and "filii Scotorum." There can be little doubt that Aristotle's ᾿Ιέρνη, the νῆσον ᾿Ιερνίδα of the Argonautics and Diodorus' ῎Ιρις represent the same country. Here are Keating's remarks on it: "An t-aonmhadh hainm déag Juvernia do réir Ptolomeus, no Juverna do réir Sholinuis, no Ierna do réir Claudianus, no Vernia do réir Eustatius; measaim nach bhfuil do cheill san deifir atá idir na h-ughdaraibh sin do leith an fhocail-se Hibernia, acht nár thuigeadar