fleet are descended the Irish.  Another version makes the Nemedians the assailants.  Thirty of them survived their defeat, some of them going to Scotland or Man (the Britons), some to Greece (to return as the Firbolgs), some to the north, where they learned magic and returned as the Tuatha De Danann.[163] The Firbolgs, “men of bags,” resenting their ignominious treatment by the Greeks, escaped to Ireland.  They included the Firbolgs proper, the Fir-Domnann, and the Galioin.[164] The Fomorians are called their gods, and this, with the contemptuous epithets bestowed on them, may point to the fact that the Firbolgs were the pre-Celtic folk of Ireland and the Fomorians their divinities, hostile to the gods of the Celts or regarded as dark deities.  The Firbolgs are vassals of Ailill and Medb, and with the Fir Domnann and Galioin are hostile to Cuchulainn and his men,[165] just as Fomorians were to the Tuatha De Danann.  The strifes of races and of their gods are inextricably confused.

The Tuatha De Danann arrived from heaven—­an idea in keeping with their character as beneficent gods, but later legend told how they came from the north.  They reached Ireland on Beltane, shrouded in a magic mist, and finally, after one or, in other accounts, two battles, defeated the Firbolgs and Fomorians at Magtured.  The older story of one battle may be regarded as a euhemerised account of the seeming conflict of nature powers.[166] The first battle is described in a fifteenth to sixteenth century MS.,[167] and is referred to in a fifteenth century account of the second battle, full of archaic reminiscences, and composed from various earlier documents.[168] The Firbolgs, defeated in the first battle, join the Fomorians, after great losses.  Meanwhile Nuada, leader of the Tuatha De Danann, lost his hand, and as no king with a blemish could sit on the throne, the crown was given to Bres, son of the Fomorian Elatha and his sister Eri, a woman of the Tuatha De Danann.  One day Eri espied a silver boat speeding to her across the sea.  From it stepped forth a magnificent hero, and without delay the pair, like the lovers in Theocritus, “rejoiced in their wedlock.”  The hero, Elatha, foretold the birth of Eri’s son, so beautiful that he would be a standard by which to try all beautiful things.  He gave her his ring, but she was to part with it only to one whose finger it should fit.  This was her child Bres, and by this token he was later, as an exile, recognised by his father, and obtained his help against the Tuatha De Danann.  Like other wonderful children, Bres grew twice as quickly as any other child until he was seven.[169] Though Elatha and Eri are brother and sister, she is among the Tuatha De Danann.[170] There is the usual inconsistency of myth here and in other accounts of Fomorian and Tuatha De Danann unions.  The latter had just landed, but already had united in marriage with the Fomorians.  This inconsistency escaped the chroniclers, but it points to the fact that both were divine not human, and that, though in conflict, they united in marriage as members of hostile tribes often do.