Irish royal sites

Fenian

Fenian is an English form of Irish fianaigecht / Fianna. In the early literature a fían is a war-band; a fénnid is a man of that band. The stories gathered around Fionn mac Cumhaill and the Fianna Éireann — hunting, fosterage, the otherworld, the defence of the coast — are the Fenian Cycle (an Fhiannaíocht), one of the four cycles of medieval Irish narrative. The name is older than any nineteenth-century party.

When Irishmen in America in 1858 styled themselves the Fenian Brotherhood, they took that literary name, not a new coinage. The Irish Republican Brotherhood used the same root. This site’s title sits in that American usage: a research shelf, not the 1858 organisation and not Pennsylvania corporation 808740.

The four classic “royal sites” of the late prehistoric / early medieval landscape are Tara (Temair), Navan Fort (Emain Macha), Rathcroghan (Cruachain), and Knockaulin (Dún Ailinne). The papers below are a working library of excavation reports, place-name notes, and myth-and-landscape essays gathered because they are hard to find in one place. Rights remain with the authors and publishers.

Knockaulin  - Dun Ailinne of the Laighin
Navan Fort  - Emhain Macha of the Ulaidh
Rathcroghan - Cruachain of the Connachta
Tara        - The most sacred to all