Milesians (Irish) - Legacy

Legacy

In the historical scheme proposed by T. F. O'Rahilly the descent of the kings of Ireland from the sons of Míl is a fiction intended to provide legitimacy for the Goidels, who invaded Ireland in the 1st or 2nd century BC, giving them the same ancient origin as the indigenous peoples they dominated. However, it has been argued that the story is a much later invention of mediæval Irish historians, inspired by their knowledge of the Seven Books of History Against the Pagans, written by the early 5th century Gallaecian cleric, Paulus Orosius. See also Early history of Ireland.

The Dal Riadan clans who moved from Ulster to western Scotland about 500AD succeeded in acquiring the kingship, and Malcolm Canmore, a descendant, used the Milesian insignia of a rampant lion. It is still on the Royal Standard of Scotland today.

For centuries, the myth of the Míl Éspaine and the Milesians was used in Ireland to win and secure dynastic and political legitimacy. For example, in his Two bokes of the histories of Ireland (1571), Edmund Campion tried to use the myth to establish an ancient right of the British monarch to rule Ireland. In A View of the Present State of Ireland, Edmund Spenser accepted and rejected various parts of the myth both to denigrate the Irish of his day and to justify English colonisation of Ireland in the 1590s (at the height of the Anglo-Spanish war).

Probably the last major outing for the myth was during the Contention of the bards, which appears to have rumbled on from 1616 to 1624. During this period poets from the north and south of the island extolled the merits of their respective peoples (Eremonians and Eberians), at the expense of the other side, and often descended to a pettiness that some contemporaries thought foolish.

Finally, Geoffrey Keating's Foras Feasa ar Eirinn (written c.1634) used the myth to promote the legitimacy of the Stuart claim to royal authority in Ireland (related to the origin of the Lia Fáil), demonstrating that Charles I was descended, through Brian Bóroimhe, Éber and Galamh, from Noah and, ultimately, from Adam. The lion-rampant motif seen in the Royal Standard of Scotland was used by other clans claiming a Milesian ancestry.

There is a legend that Queen Scota's grave is in the Slieve Mish mountains just outside Tralee in County Kerry. The legend tells that Scota was the daughter of a pharaoh and was to marry the Irish king, but she fell from her horse and died. A large rock marks the spot where she fell.