Cessair's People (Muintir Cheasrach)

The first people in Ireland, who arrived before the Flood, and the frame story that put them there.

Everything in this sequence comes from Lebor Gabála Érenn, in modern Irish Leabhar Gabhála na hÉireann, the Book of the Taking of Ireland. It is worth knowing what that book is before taking any of it literally. It was compiled by Christian scholars in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and its purpose was to give Ireland a past that fitted into biblical world history, with the Irish descended from Noah and arriving in waves like the peoples of the Old Testament. Older native material is in there, but it has been fitted to a frame.

Ceasair is the first wave. She is given as a granddaughter of Noah, refused a place on the ark, and told by an idol to sail to the western edge of the world where sin had never been committed and the Flood would not reach. She came with fifty women and three men.

It did not work. One of the men died, then another. Fintan mac Bóchra, the last of them, fled rather than face what was being asked of him. Ceasair died of grief, the Flood arrived on schedule, and every one of them was drowned except Fintan.

Fintan is the reason the story is in the book at all. He survived, in the telling, by living for thousands of years in a succession of shapes, a salmon, an eagle, a hawk, and so witnessed everything that happened in Ireland afterwards. He is the device the compilers used to explain how anyone could know what follows.