Scott, It is too easy to conflate the Irish mythic prehistoric past with the European historical past, and then try to to shoehorn it in to make sense of it through an Euro-centric (read: Anglo-Saxon) world view—which is often in direct conflict with Celtic world view—as history is always written in the tongue of the victor. Besides, mythic timelines rarely jive with historic timelines. It is best to read them with two (open) minds.
For starters, the majority of the ancient Irish tales were written down in Irish (not Latin) in the 12 to 14th centuries (though dating back much farther in language and structure to the 6th to 9th centuries) because of the impending threat of invaders, including Norsemen, threatened to disrupt the lineage of their oral history. The Norse rarely learned Irish, nor were they literate, so those Irish MSS would not have been available to them. But that's fodder for another sidebar.
Few 6-8th C. MSS survived, but many of the later MSS were copies of the earlier texts. We know this because of the grammar. Keep in mind, the 7th Venerable Bede was copying Irish Annals for his Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. Who was Bede's translator, I wonder? Would have to be an Irishman.
Irish is one of the oldest living Indo-European (IE) languages, and Germanic, is among the newer additions to the IE tree.... Irish, a highly inflected language, has more in common with Tocharian A, than, say, Norse.
The ancient Irish tales themselves already existed long before there was any such thing as (Germanic) Norsemen (who are a much later cultural addition to the maps of Scotland and Ireland).
Of course, if my friend was gleaning from Seamus McManus, as source material, that might explain the oddball discrepancies...as he was a 19th c. Romantic"scholar" reshaping history as he saw fit. (By what information was archaeologically available at the time. Celtic studies has cone along way since McManus.) I read him (and Thomas Cahill) with several grains of salt. Make that a shaker full of salt!
It's a good idea to also read the actual medieval source material before making the assumption that the Firbolgs (Bag men Fir = man; bolg = bag) and Formorians (also spelled Fo-morians) were Norsemen. The Irish use an entirely different name for the Norsemen and they distinguish between them and the Danes. Can't remember the word. It was something like French Rat and Blue French Rat (Danes).
The Irish were already in Iceland BEFORE the Norsemen arrived there. And certainly many of the Norse Dubliners did settle Iceland, but by then they were more than half Irish to begin with, as their fathers took Irish wives. No need to take Irish and Pict slaves to Iceland to introduce Irish DNA... That would be coals to Newcastle. The Icelandic Genome project merely supports the Irish oral tradition that they too went to Iceland.
Read the Icelandic Laxdal Saga (written in medieval Icelandic ca. 1245 AD), and note that the young prince is half Irish, his mother having taught him Irish at the knee and when he sails back to Dublin, he speaks in Irish to his grandfather, the Dublin (Norse?) Irish king who thinks he wants to trade, not go to war. Note that he spoke Irish, not Norse.
Irish is one of the oldest living Indo-European (IE) languages, and Germanic, is among the newer additions to the IE tree.... Irish, a highly inflected language, has more in common with Tocharian A, than, say, Norse.
The ancient Irish tales themselves already existed long before there was any such thing as (Germanic) Norsemen (who are a much later cultural addition to the maps of Scotland and Ireland).
Of course, if my friend was gleaning from Seamus McManus, as source material, that might explain the oddball discrepancies...as he was a 19th c. Romantic"scholar" reshaping history as he saw fit. (By what information was archaeologically available at the time. Celtic studies has cone along way since McManus.) I read him (and Thomas Cahill) with several grains of salt. Make that a shaker full of salt!
It's a good idea to also read the actual medieval source material before making the assumption that the Firbolgs (Bag men Fir = man; bolg = bag) and Formorians (also spelled Fo-morians) were Norsemen. The Irish use an entirely different name for the Norsemen and they distinguish between them and the Danes. Can't remember the word. It was something like French Rat and Blue French Rat (Danes).
The Irish were already in Iceland BEFORE the Norsemen arrived there. And certainly many of the Norse Dubliners did settle Iceland, but by then they were more than half Irish to begin with, as their fathers took Irish wives. No need to take Irish and Pict slaves to Iceland to introduce Irish DNA... That would be coals to Newcastle. The Icelandic Genome project merely supports the Irish oral tradition that they too went to Iceland.
Read the Icelandic Laxdal Saga (written in medieval Icelandic ca. 1245 AD), and note that the young prince is half Irish, his mother having taught him Irish at the knee and when he sails back to Dublin, he speaks in Irish to his grandfather, the Dublin (Norse?) Irish king who thinks he wants to trade, not go to war. Note that he spoke Irish, not Norse.
As for the Lord of the Isles, that was its own separate wildcat kingdom, neither Norse nor, Scottish (nor Irish), and little known fact. Summerlin himself was either a quarter or half Irish (depending on the source) to boot.... So much for that Scottish Romantic idea of the pure old Norse strain existing in Scottish bloodlines...
It was never as simple as some armchair historians would make it out to be....and the dates of the actual Norse settlement in the West of Scotland are under four centuries... Couple that with the fact that they rarely brought Norse women with them, that leaves us with a very resiliant surviving Celtic population in the Isles with Norse political overlordship and structure. Same Celtic substratum paradigm holds true for the Isle of Man....
For example, Norse place names did not replace all the original Celtic place names. A significant fact: if the original Celts were all assassinated or run off, then Norse names would prevail. Place names are curiously persistent as long as there are surviving native speakers to say them. This strongly implies that the native speakers and Norse lived side by side long enough to learn each other's languages. Gaelic was spoken throughout the Isles until at least the 17-19th century.
Defining the word "Formorian" is a bit of a challenge. Note there is conflation/ confusion of the word mór—variously defined as terror/ phantom ( or it could mean big/large/great/high—mor) or the word for sea (muir; genitive mora) or it could even be moor. Besides, the word farraige is more often used for sea than muir.
Now as to spelling: we don't know if it's For-mor-ians or Fo-mor-ians. Or Fomoire, Fomóiri, Fomoraig, Fomhóraigh, Fomhoire, Fomorii, Fomor, Fomors, Fomoré, Fo-Muir, Foawr [Manx].
Fo- vs for-? Is this faoi? If it's a preposition, it's at the wrong end of the word. But I've seen this conjugation in Old Irish poems fo-. But Ro- also is used as a prefix. Then, shouldn't mór be (genitive) móir or (pl.) móra? Where is a linguist when I need him?
Note also how the much later the modern spate of historical confusion conflates the idea of Formorians with North sea folk... Now, if Formorians are from the North Sea as my friend suggests, remember the relative date when they were supposed to exist (read: during the Ice Age) so the idea of Northern lands (or Lochlainn) is a relative term.
Adjust your sights a bit farther south of the grand ice cap for the pre-Christian idea of north! In other words, Torey Island (Oileán Thúr Rí (King's Tower) Donegal) Dún Bhaloir (Balor's Fort) was considered to be the far North. A far cry from where we tend to place the current idea of Lochlainn (or the even later idea of Scnadanavia, for that matter).
Note also the Formorian uber-baddie, Balor is the (Zeus-ian) Lugh's grandfather. Now as a god, Lugh is the primo god of all Celtic nations from Ireland to Anatolia as is attested in principal place names of many European cities dedicated to Lugh: Lug(u)-dunum, Leiden, Lyon, Laon, Liegnitz, Loudon, Liegnitz, Léon, Dinlleu, and Luguvalium, aka Carlisle, etc.
The scattering of Formorian names are Celtic words... As is the word, Formorian. So linguistically, they're looking pretty danged Celtic to me. Lugh was supposed to have driven the Fomorians under the sea... or under something.
Now faoi (fo- in Old Irish) works here: faoi, preposition, meaning under, about. Faoi-mór-ians. Those (terrors) under the great/many (either really big or a lot of them)....or under (the sea—but remember. we're not so sure this word mór is the word for sea to begin with—it could also be transcribed as moor). Fomoorians sound more Cthulhonic, terrors driven underground vs the idea of North Sea men.
There is also an odd bit of historical conjecture that the (real) Formorians were among the original inhabitants of Ireland (probably Meso-Neolithic—in which case, if they were Old European, then they were probably not Celtic.)
Then you have to (un)read/unravel all the Biblical stuff out of the equation as that influence definitely was a medieval cultural bent, a band-aid slapped onto the archaic legends and myths to Christianize them.
Luckily the Irish monk scribes who transcribed the 11th c. Lebor Gabála were pretty transparent commentators when they cobbled on the Bible bits (and they were also pretty irritated that there was no mention of themselves in the Bible/Babel bits—so they fixed that slip-up as we all know that Irish itself was created out of the best bits of all the languages left over at the fall of the Tower of Babel! So they slapped that stuff right onto the old stories!) Luckily, it's relatively easy to remove the Noah-Ham-Japhet lineage accretions from the equation.
Remember also that during the 18th-19th cs. it was still a "scholarly" pastime (or cultural bias) to recreate and shoehorn in Biblical timelines with time present. Archaeology was becoming the rage but it wasn't yet a science. They bungled a lot of finds: Schliemann's pillage of classical Troy...
So a lot of modern historical "interpretation" and bad 19th c. archaeology needs to be weeded out from the prima materia as well. (PS Schliemann founded the Bank of Sacramento in 1851).
I tend to read the mythological cycle with a couple of timelines on hand, 1) when they were transcribed (current world views tend to taint the texts) and 2) when they were supposed to take place.
Hope this sheds some light, or gives you a jumping off place for further research.
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