MACAi.ISTEit — Temair Br eg : Remains and Traditions of Tarn. 301 



where they were established. Tlachtga, Emain Macha, Tailltiu, Carman, 

 occur to the mind at once in this connexion, and form a body of cumulative 

 evidence that cannot be rejected on the ground that the tales, as they have 

 reached us, show marks of late manipulation for philological purposes. Taken 

 in connexion with the matrilinear law of succession among the Picts, well 

 attested by Bede and by other writers, as well as by the Pictish list of kings, 

 these tales must mean that the founders of the monarchies, or the establishes 

 of the rites, at the places referred to, did so by right of their wives or of their 

 mothers : in other words, that descent was reckoned in the female line. Such 

 a system did not exist in Ireland after the establishment of the Celtic regime t 

 at the beginning of the Iron Age ; the traditions must therefore in their 

 essence reach back to the Bronze Age, and therefore fall into line with the 

 archaeological evidence for a bronze-age origin for Temair, which we have 

 already found. 



A different story is told ill VD i, assigning the foundation of Temair to 

 one Crofind, daughter of Allod. For the present we content ourselves with 

 noting that this story also speaks of a foundress. Allod is a divine name ; 

 its owner, indeed, was the brother of The Dagda, and he appears as a tribal 

 ancestor on several Ogham stones. As we shall see later, this mention of 

 Crofind is of great importance : but meanwhile w r e must look a little more 

 closely at the princess Tea from another point of view. 



(vii). The author of VD ii has endeavoured vainly to slur over an incon- 

 sistency in Tea's matrimonial connexions: in one place she is called the wife 

 of Eremon, the leader of the Milesian, i.e. the Celtic expedition to Ireland; 

 in another place she appears as the wife of a certain Geide OU-gothach. If 

 we take the chronology of the Four Masters, which will serve as well as any 

 other, we learn that Eremon with his braves landed in Ireland Anno Mundi 

 3500, and that he died in 3516 ; while Geide Oll-gothach reigned from 3960 

 to 3971, about four and a-half centuries later. How are we to explain this 

 inconsistency ? 



To answer this question we must first inquire as briefly as possible into 

 the origin of what for convenience 1 may call the "official history," i.e. the 

 history of Ireland enshrined in the Books of Annals, Lebor Gabala, Keating, 

 and other writings, from which the dales just given and others like them 

 are to be extracted. That the "official history" is an artificial compilation, 

 based on Scriptural and Classical synchronisms, is obvious. But of what 

 elements is the compilation made up ? 



Prof. MacNeill, in his paper on Ogham inscriptions, published in vol. xxvii 

 of the Proceedings of the Eoyal Irish Academy, has shown clearly that these 

 inscriptions represent a totally different orthographical tradition from thy 



