Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 2 1884.djvu/186

178 children, two-thirds of their corn and milk, are exacted as tribute, payable on the 1st of November at the feast of Samain, the beginning of winter, the symbol of death. The stronghold of the Fomore is an island, Tor-inis, in the north-west of Ireland. They are described in an ancient tract preserved in the L. n. H. as gobor-chind, goat-headed; and they may be compared as personifications of darkness and death with the bull-headed Minotaur, who dwells likewise in an island, and to whom a tribute of youths and maidens is due each year by Athens. At length the race of Nemedh revolt, and under the leadership of Fergus attack Conann, chief of the Fomore, in his island stronghold, capture his tower-fortress, and slay him, but are in turn overcome by More, another Fomore chieftain. According to Nennius, who places the combat between the deities of life and light, and those of night and death after the arrival of the sons of Miledh, the tower was of glass, defended by quasi homines, who spake no word. This glass tower, with its silent indwelling shapes, is the impregnable fortress of the other world. After the destruction of the race of Nemedh, one would expect to find in the Irish annals the history of the third of the three legendary races which preceded, according to Irish belief, the actual ancestors of the Irish nation, namely, the Tuatha de Danann, corresponding to Hesiod's race of gold. But curiously enough there is intercalated the story of the colonisation of the country by one of the two antagonistic races we find dividing Ireland between them in historic times. This race, that of the Firbolg, or Fer Domnann, is found at a later period representing the short, dark-haired aborigines dispossessed by the fair tall sons of Miledh. To the invading Celts the natives were of demoniac nature, and the strife between Milesian and Firbolg is essentially the same as that between Partholan or Nemedh and the Fomore, a strife between light and darkness. The later annalists, in their zeal for euhemerising the ancient national mythology, transferred the historic struggle between Celt and pre-Celt into what was really the region of pure mythology. In the same way the conquering Aryan, descending upon the plains of India, applied the word Dasyu indifferently to demons and to the native races.