the Boyne:[1] the former was Connla's Well, of which the paragraph cited speaks, and a verse in the Book of Leinster describes the tree overshadowing it as 'a many-melodied hazel of knowledge;'[2] it also derives the name of the Shannon from a lady called Sinann, daughter of Lodon son of Lir, there being no river so called till she presumed to gaze into the sacred well, when the water suddenly burst forth at the insult in pursuit of her and drowned her: that is how the Shannon was formed and named. A similar story in the same manuscript[3] gives the like account of the calamity which happened to a lady called Boann (pp. 123, 144). She had been rash enough to visit the secret well, which nobody durst do except Nechtan and his three drink-bearers alone; the infuriated stream pursued her across the country as far as the sea and drowned her. So was formed and named the river Boann or Boyne, which fills a great place in Irish legend, and is identified by the writer of the story referred to, in some mysterious way, with other rivers known to literature, such as the Severn, the Tiber, the Jordan, the Euphrates and the Tigris, whereby he brings the Irish stream into connection with Paradise and satisfies his wish to blend the legends of his own country with those of other nations. Another form which the Boyne story took was to the effect that this most mystic of Irish rivers traversed the whole world in seven years.[4]
With the Irish source of knowledge, so jealously
- ↑ See O'Curry's Manners, &c. ij. 144, and compare the stories of the Shannon and the Boyne in the Bk. of Leinster, 156a and 191a.
- ↑ Bk. of Leinster, 156a, line 17: fail coll nécsi nilcheolach.
- ↑ Ib. 191a.
- ↑ Joyce, Old Celtic Romances, p. 188.
