of Erinn. There is no reason to suppose that the monsters in question were all of the same form; and the name Caitchenn or Cenn-Cait, 'Cat's Head,' has already been mentioned (p. 313), namely, in connection with the Aithech Tuatha, a term sometimes rendered Peasant Tribes and sometimes Rent-paying Tribes, not to add that they have been ere now imagined to be the Atecotti[1] of Roman Britain. They are in reality to be regarded as belonging to the same category as the Fomori, and the term aithech, sometimes meaning a peasant, was applied to any boorish, ill-natured, ill-clad fellow. In a tale related in the Book of the Dun, it is used of a hideous, brutal giant who caught his victims by enveloping them in a thick fog, and he is introduced attacking successively the three Solar Heroes, Loegaire, Conall and Cúchulainn, the last of whom overcomes him.[2] He is not called a Fomorian, but the term would apply to him in most respects, and among others in that of stature; for I ought to have said that the Fomori are normally represented as giants. In fact, the singular, pronounced foawr in the Isle of Man, and in Scotch Gaelic somewhat similarly, though written fomhair, famhair and even foghmhair, has in those dialects respectively become the ordinary word for a giant: it is the one which occurs throughout the Gaelic in the well-known volumes of Campbell's Popular Tales of the West Highlands. In a story already men-
- ↑ I have tried in my Celtic Britain, p. 279, to explain this name; but whatever scholars may think of the attempt, our charlatans, as I have seen more than once of late, repeat the absurd old notion which identifies the Atecotti with the Aithech Tuatha.
- ↑ Fol. 105a; Windisch, Irische Texte, pp. 272-3, 357. It is similarly used of Searbhan (pp. 356-7) in The Pursuit, ij. §§ 15, 17.
