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These two leaders gathered ships from all the harbors and settlements of the Fomorians, from the Hebrides, the Shetlands, and far-distant Norway, so that their fleet was thick as gulls above a shoal of fish along the north shores of Erin.
The second race of invaders, the Nemedians, were also given a war with the Fomorians, in the story of the seige of Conan's Tower.
The sea was gray as a gull's back, with dark shadows under the cliffs and white tresses of foam along the headlands. At evening a cold wind brought the rain beating in from the ocean. Thus the Fomorians landed at the Cataract of the Oaks, and marched inland to the plain now called Tirerril in Sligo.
Though her beauty was extraordinary, yet her mind was as beautiful as her form, so that the Lady Levarcam loved her exceedingly. One day when the first flush of early womanhood came upon the maiden, she said to her tutoress as they sat together and conversed "Are all men like those our guards who defend us against savage beasts and the merciless Fomorians, dear Levarcam?"
Then the Fomoroh sent a spy into the camp of the Gods, who achieved killing Goibniu with one of the latter's own spears; and by reason of that it was going ill with the Gods the next day in the battle. And it was going worse with them because of Balor of the Mighty Blows, and he taking the field at last for the Fomorians,
Beyond Erne, they fixed their first settlement at Mag Rein, the Plain of the Headland, within the bounds of what afterwards was Leitrim; and at this camp their legend takes up the tale. It would seem that the Fomorians were then gathered further to the west, as well as in the northern isles.
We are the more justified in seeing, in these dark cromlech-builders, the Fomorians of old Gaelic tradition, who came up out of the sea and subjugated the Firbolgs.
Thus was the might of the Fomorians broken, and the De Danaans ruled unopposed, their power and the works of their hands spreading throughout the length and breadth of the land. Many monuments are accredited to them by tradition, but greatest and most wonderful are the pyramids of stone at Brugh on the Boyne.
Even in his ideal heroic times, his gay and sensuous nature cannot carry him, in the appliances of his favourite life of sociability and pleasure, beyond the gross and creeping Saxon whom he despises; the regent Breas, we are told in the Battle of Moytura of the Fomorians, became unpopular because 'the knives of his people were not greased at his table, nor did their breath smell of ale at the banquet. In its grossness and barbarousness is not that Saxon, as Saxon as it can be? just what the Latinised Norman, sensuous and sociable like the Celt, but with the talent to make this bent of his serve to a practical embellishment of his mode of living, found so disgusting in the Saxon.
We are, therefore, led to identify our Atlantean race of hardy seamen with the Fomorians who came up out of the sea and found the furtive Firbolgs in possession of our island; and to this race, the Fomorians of the sea, we credit the building of cromlechs and standing stones, not only among ourselves, but in Norway, in Britain, in Brittany, in Spain, in Africa.
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