Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/328

312 to be drowned, and we did so and so with him.' 'All that is true,' said the smith. It is therefore the boy was called the son of Móen; and these are the three first sentences that Morann spoke immediately after his birth, namely, Rough is wave, Cold is wind, and Bright is candle. Morann afterwards took the office of chief judge of Erinn, and his father Cairbre died. And he sent his son to Feradach Finn Fechtnach, in the land of Alban, to invite him to the sovereignty of Erinn; for he had fled before Cairbre over the sea to escape death at his hands. He came at Morann's invitation and took the sovereignty of Erinn, while Morann occupied the office of chief brehon or judge.

Here the story abruptly ends, owing to the loss of a leaf in the manuscript. But elsewhere the Peasant Tribes are represented inviting all the nobles of Erinn to a great banquet, at which they murder them and make Cairbre their king: the scene is associated with Mag Cro, or the Field of Blood, near Knockmaa, in the county of Galway, and the whole is usually regarded as the echo of a great political revolution in Ireland during the first decades of the Christian era. Further, the attempt to convert the myth into history has long since been much aggravated by a notion that we have the Atecotti of the Roman history of Britain in the Peasant Tribes of Erinn, because the Irish which that term is meant to render was Aithech Tuatha. But the story admits of a very different interpretation: Cairbre, as we take it, was originally one of