Note 16 — Chapter XII · Race in Folklore and Myth

It is right to say that the story represents the fairies as living under the rule of a rí, a title usually rendered by ‘king’; but rí (genitive rig) was probably at one time applicable to either sex, just as we find Gaulish names like Biturix and Visurix borne by women. The wonder, however, is that such a line as that just quoted has not been edited out of the verses long ago, just as one misses any equivalent for it in Joyce’s English expansion of the story in his Old Celtic Romances, pp. 106–11. Compare, however, the Land of the Women in the Voyage of Maildun (Joyce, pp. 152–6), and in Meyer and Nutt’s Voyage of Bran, i. 30–3. ↑