Note 1027 — Chapter X · LEARNING AND LANGUAGE. (continued 2)

Polaires. The actual signification of the Irish word polaire is not quite clear. In some old Glossaries it is explained as a tiag lebar (‘book-satchel;’ tiag = theca). But in Lebor na hUidre it seems used in a different sense, as in the sentence sood a polaire ina etun isse comartha bias fair; ‘the change of his polaire in his forehead is the sign he (Antichrist) shall have’ (p. 18). Here the writer would seem to have in mind the signa mentioned in Apocal. chap. vii. In O’Clery’s Glossary, moreover, it is explained as comardha, ‘a sign.’ The word polaire is translated ‘cases’ in Reeves’s Adamnan, p. 115, note c. Colgan has rendered it in his edition of the Tripartite Life of St. Patrick, under the form pallaire, by tabulæ: ‘tabulis in quibus scribere solebat, vulgo pallaire appellatis.’—Tr. Thaum., pp. 123, 249. But the Irish Tripartite has no mention of this. Pollaire was apparently some kind of receptacle for books, perhaps a case for a copy of the Epistles of St. Paul, whose name is always written Pol in Irish.