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 “Mound of the Hostages” at Tara. Lug had two wives, Nas and Bui, who gave their names to the mounds of Nas (Lis Loga) and Cnocbaei (Cnogba, or Knowth). “The pure Gaedel came to lament the women from Fid m Broga (Brugh of the Boyne, near Knowth), from Tailltiu, where he raised a fire. Thence they came with Lug. . . that was the gathering of the accomplished Lug. . . the lamentation for the fair-skinned women of Fál,” note the last phrase. When the gods’ sacred mounds become their tombs we feel that we are dealing with the later euhemerism of the eleventh century, for, down to A.D. 1000, the gods were freely described as “gods,” and the mounds were their palaces. To this period the Senchas na Relec belongs, and it names the mound of Lug in the great bronze-age cemetery of Brugh. Alldai, from whom its chief tumulus (now called Newgrange) was called Achad Alldai, was ancestor of Lug, through Iondae. Net (the Gaulish war-god Neton) Esarg Brecc, Diancecht, and Cian)—“though we enumerate them we do not worship them,” adds the cautious scribe, well aware that he was perilously in touch with “the gods of the heathen.”

Nuada, who is also so closely connected with Tailltiu, was descended, in the more familiar sources, from Echtach, or Achi, or Eochaid (perhaps identical with the husband of