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Unless you will cling to the land, and sail southward and southward for ever, I shall wander beyond the Atlantic, to the ocean which has no shore. Then they blest the magic bough, and sailed southward along the land. But ere they could pass Ierne, the land of mists and storms, the wild wind came down, dark and roaring, and caught the sail, and strained the ropes.
Here we have the return or redescent of the Divine Dynasties who came to lead the men of the early Fifth Race against the Atlantean giants. I shall beg leave now to tell you the story of the Second Battle of Moytura. Perhaps it was in Ireland that the White Adepts of the Fifth made their first stand against the Atlanteans? Perhaps thence it first got its epithet, Sacred Ierne?
Then out spoke the magic bough, 'Ah, would that I had perished long ago, and been whelmed by the dread blue rocks, beneath the fierce swell of the Euxine! Better so, than to wander for ever, disgraced by the guilt of my princes; for the blood of Absyrtus still tracks me, and woe follows hard upon woe. And now some dark horror will clutch me, if I come near the Isle of Ierne.
But, in the first place, Himilco's report was certainly not written in Greek, but in Phoenician, and Avienus seems merely to have translated that report. Moreover, the word iepa begins with a very strong aspirate, equivalent to a consonant, while there are few vowels softer in any language than the first in Erin or Ierne.
The two bold headlands of Caledonia almost touch the shores of a spacious island, which obtained, from its luxuriant vegetation, the epithet of Green; and has preserved, with a slight alteration, the name of Erin, or Ierne, or Ireland.
'blackbird's singing in Letterlee, So here, in these fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh centuries, I find the forces 'going west, through Gaul, through Wales, through Ireland, to the Great Plain; there to recover themselves bathing in the magical Fountain of Youth which is so near to the island the Greeks called "Sacred Ierne of the Hibernians."
Lingard, evidently perplexed by this expression, asks himself, "What might its origin have been?" and suggests that the name of Ierne the same as Erin having been given to Ireland by the ancients, and the Greek iepa holy bearing a great resemblance to it, Avienus might have thus fallen into a very natural mistake of confounding the one with the other.
He rejected, however, the existence of Thule, and thus made the world narrower; while he recognised the existence of Ierne, or Ireland; which he regarded as the most northerly part of the habitable world, lying, as he thought, north of Britain.
Little wonder, then, that the first name of Ireland we get in the Greek writings is "Sacred Ierne, populous with the Hibernians." Well now, he found MacCuill, MacCecht, and MacGrene the Son of the Sun, arranging to divide the kingdom between them; and they called on him to settle how the division should be.
*Lord Byron. Ierne=Ireland sends Thomas Moore to mourn. He pictures himself, too, among the mourners "'Midst others of less note, came one frail Form, A phantom among men, companionless As the last cloud of an expiring storm, Whose thunder is its knell." Shelley mourned for Keats, little knowing that soon others would mourn for himself.
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