¹ Ml. 93 c 1.

² Ed. J. Strachan and J. G. O'Keeffe 44. On p. 40 dia·tonda is repeated, but the remainder of the clause is somewhat different.

³ The nd of 'tonda is a Middle Irish spelling for older nn.

⁴ For references, see H. Lewis and H. Pedersen, A Concise Comparative Celtic Grammar 397.

⁵ Ed. W. Stokes, Ériu 2.114, §39.

⁶ In Middle Irish, ai is often written for final unstressed a, as for example in Tenga Bithnua §41, where marai would be mora in Old Irish, the gen. sg. of muir ‘sea’.

⁷ From tocid; cf. Lewis and Pedersen 401, §642.

⁸ See K. Meyer and A. Nutt, The Voyage of Bran Son of Febal 1.5.

⁹ Read imme-, as in H, which is the more archaic form of imma'.

¹⁰ Op.cit. 4.

¹¹ Ibid. 4, n. 5.

¹² Ibid. 96.

¹³ In a recent letter Professor Osborn Bergin was kind enough to communicate Strachan's interpretation to me.

¹⁴ The α of -sa develops into an i before the verbal ending.

¹⁵ Compare, for instance, the heptasyllabic verse ni fris·tarddam ar n-áthius ‘something against which we may be able to apply our acuteness’, Thes. Pal. 2.293, where fris‘ in prose would be frisa’.

¹⁶ Ériu 12.197 f.

¹⁷ ZfCP 18.411.

¹⁸ The shore is obviously meant. Compare tóeb na indse ‘the (opposite) shore of the island’, Irische Texte 1.210, §15.

¹⁹ No alliteration exists in this verse, because fris' is an íarmbérla, that is, an unaccented word which cannot alliterate with find.

²⁰ Namely, those numbered 27, 28, 30, 37, and 49; cf. K. Meyer, A Primer of Irish Metrics 10, §21.

²¹ It is conceivable that rith find fris' toíb gel tonnat should be rendered ‘against the white side of which they swim up a fair course’. In that case, the apocopated a of fris' would represent the possessive relative pronoun. But the usual practice is to attach the relative particle -(s)a to the preposition which is then separated by the verb from the noun that it governs. In this instance, one would, therefore, expect fris·tonnat toíb gel. So far, at all events, no exceptions to this syntactical arrangement have been observed, not even in poetry; cf. E. Gwynn, The Metrical Dindshenchas 4.398, n. 6.

²² Since snám ‘the act of swimming’ is the verbal noun of snaïd, the corresponding abstract of do·sná should be tonnam from to-snām. This apparently has survived in Modern Irish in the spelling tonnamh, for which see P. S. Dinneen, An Irish-English Dictionary 1232 s.v. tonnadh.