The Milesians (Míl Espáine)

The last wave, the ancestors of the Irish, and the poem that won the country.

The sons of Míl Espáine came from Spain, having seen Ireland from a tower, and they are the wave the Irish are said to descend from. Míl himself never arrived. His uncle Íth did, was received by the Tuatha Dé, praised the country too warmly and was killed for it, and his body was sent back to Spain. The invasion is a revenge expedition.

They landed and marched inland, and on the way they met three queens of the Tuatha Dé in turn: Banba, Fódla and Ériu. Each asked that the island be named for her. Amergin, the poet of the Milesians, promised each that it would. Banba and Fódla survive as literary names for Ireland. Ériu is the one that stuck, and is the origin of Éire.

At Tara the Tuatha Dé kings asked for a judgment, and Amergin gave it against his own side: the Milesians should return to their ships, go out beyond the ninth wave, and take the country again by force if they could. It is presented as scrupulously fair. The Tuatha Dé then raised a storm to stop them coming back, which was not.

Amergin broke the storm with a poem, the one beginning I am the wind on the sea, in which he declares himself to be every element of the land at once. It is one of the oldest things in Irish literature and it is a claim of ownership by becoming the thing owned.

The Milesians landed, won, and divided Ireland with the defeated: the surface for them, the mounds for the Tuatha Dé.