to be, to say the least of it, very faintly drawn; and it is possible that we should rather recognize in Mac Samthainn the herdsman's dog; for the name seems to claim kinship with the Irish word samthach, 'a haft or hilt,' also 'an axe with a long handle;' so that one may probably translate it 'the Boy of the Haft,' and compare the name of the dog introduced to Erinn by Cairbre Musc's craft, which was Mug-éime, or 'the Slave of the Haft.' The story, as you will remember, explains how the dog came, in acquiring it, into Cairbre's possession (p. 247). The coincidence is so striking that I cannot help thinking that we have here traces of another version of the story of Cairbre Musc and the dog he imported into Erinn. The old one, somewhat perversely, makes the animal into a lapdog; while the modern story is probably more faithful to the original in that it suggests a dog useful to the herdsman.[1]
From the foregoing stories and those mentioned in
- ↑ The name Mac Samthainn explains how in time the story-tellers got into the way of interpreting it to mean a man, a brother in fact to Mac Kineely, as the somewhat indefinite signification of the word mac was favourable to the error. For though it is commonly rendered 'son' in pedigrees, it means no more than 'boy,' and the genitive following it need be no parent's name: thus a student was called Mac Legind, 'Boy of Reading;' and there was an old name, Mac Naue, which Adamnán (Vita S. Columbae, ed. Reeves, Præf. p. ij. 9) rendered Filius Navis, but it meant more nearly 'Boy of the Ship or Ship-boy.' Still more to the point is the name of Diarmait's favourite hound, Mac an Chuill, usually rendered 'Son of the Hazel,' but it would be more exactly 'Boy of the Hazel,' in spite of which the pronoun used for the name is sí, 'she' (Pursuit, ij. 43, § 41). The vocabulary of the Celtic languages will be searched in vain for a word for son or daughter as distinguished from boy or girl, a fact of no little negative importance when weighed along with Caesar's ugly account of the ménage of the ancient Britons (v. 14).
