[1] Nor is this mere conjecture; it is fully borne out by the annals themselves, which actually give us their sources of information. Thus under the year 439, we read that "Chronicon magnum (_i.e._, The Senchas Mór) scriptum est"; at 467 and 468, the compiler quotes "Sic in Libro Cuanach inveni"; at 482, "Ut Cuana scripsit"; in 507, "Secundum librum Mochod"; in 628, "Sicut in libro Dubhdaleithe narratur," &c.
[4] See Kuno Meyer's paper on the "Early Relations between the Gael and Brython," read before the Hon. Society of Cymmrodorion, May 28, 1896.
[5] To start with Cimbaeth as Tighearnach does "is just as uncritical as to take the whole tale of kings from the very beginning," says Dr. Atkinson, in his preface to the Contents of the facsimile Book of Leinster; and he adds, "if the kings who are supposed to have lived about fifteen centuries before Christ are mere figments, which is tolerably certain, there is little more reason for believing in the kings who reigned after Christ prior to the introduction of writing with Christianity (_sic_) into the island,"--an unconvincing _sorites!_ One hundred and thirty-six pagan and six Christian kings in all reigned at Tara according to the fictions of the Bards.
[6] Dr. Whitley Stokes' "Tripartite Life of St. Patrick," vol. i. p. cxxix. "That Tighearnach had access to some library or libraries furnished with books of every description is manifest from his numerous references; and the correctness of his citations from foreign authors, with whose works we are acquainted may be taken as a surety for the genuineness of his extracts from the writings of our own native authors now lost." For the non-Irish portions of his annals Tighearnach used, as Stokes has shown, St. Jerome's "Interpretatio Chronicæ Eusebii Pamphili," the seven books of the history of Paulus Orosius, "The Chronicon, or Account of the Six Ages of the World," in Bede's Works, "The Vulgate," "The Etymologarium," "Libri XX of Isodorus Hispalensis," Josephus' "Antiquities of the Jews," probably in a Latin translation, and perhaps the lost Chronicon of Julius Africanus.
THE PRE-MILESIAN FABLE AND EARLY PANTHEON
In investigating the very early history of Ireland we are met with a mass of pseudo-historic narrative and myth, woven together into an apparently homogeneous whole, and all now posing as real history. This is backed up, and eked out, by a most elaborate system of genealogy closely interwoven with it, which, together with a good share of the topographical nomenclature of the island, is there to add its entire influence to that of historian and annalist in apparently attesting the truth of what these latter have recorded.