Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/165

Rh the deeds that had been done by it." Another of the rare allusions to Tethra is that found in the Dialogue of the Sages, in which the youthful bard Nede replies to the question put to him by the aged Ferchertne, "What is it that lies before thee?" (lit. "undertakes to"). "I go," he said, "into the mountain of youth, into the plain of age into an abode of clay, between candle and fire, between battle and its horrors, among Tethra's mighty men." Tethra is said, in the tale of the Wooing of Emer, to be uncle to Forgall the Wily of Lusk, and his sons are among the guardians of Emer, and in the Fonts Focail the word Tethra is glossed by badhbh, "a scarecrow"; it seems, like the Badhbh or goddess of battles and rapine, to mean a "raven" or "Royston-crow." It also bears the meaning of the " sea " or "ocean"; in O'Clery's glosses we find " teathra, that is, muir=the sea." It is clear from two passages in the tale called The Wooing of Emer, that this latter is the true meaning of Tethra's name. In relating to Emer the route he had taken, Cuchulain tells her that he had slept "in the house of the man who tends the cattle of the plain of Tethra," and when asked what he means by this, he replies "The man in whose house I slept, he is the fisherman of Conor. Ronen is his name. It is he who catches the fish on his line under the sea; for the fish are the cattle of the sea, and the sea is the plain of Tethra, a king of the kings of the Fomori" (K. Meyer in Arch. Rev. vol. i. pp. 72, 152).