with that of darkness, as suggested more than once already. Further, the identification here suggested of Corc with darkness has in its favour the important evidence of the story how his brother deprived him of one of his ears. That seems in some way to typify the action of the sun on the dark shades of night, and it is impossible to avoid seeing that it refers to the same attribute of the dark being as that which gave Ailill Aulom, or A. Bare-ear, his surname (p. 391). Further, Corc Duibne may be shown, in a round-about way, to have had another name, Donn, 'brown or dark.' For Corc had a famous son called Diarmait O'Duibne, or D. grandson of Duben. But the accounts given of his parentage vary, some calling his father Corc, and some others, not to say most others, being wont to give him the name Donn;[1] but there was probably no contradiction between them, as his name may be inferred to have been in full Corc Donn, or the Brown Cropped One. This would exactly explain why Bói's Isle, where Corc was reared for the first year of his life, appears in the same story under the more usual name of Donn's House behind Ireland. Of course Donn
- ↑ The story of The Pursuit always calls Diarmait's father Donn; but the editor quotes at some length, ij. 84—92, a poem which he thinks the production of some Munster poet of the thirteenth or the following century, and in this the father is called Corc and the grandfather Cairbre (ij. 85, 89). This can hardly be a late invention, as the modern tendency seems to have boon to ignore the Corc and Duben legend in favour of a pedigree such as that quoted by the editor of The Pursuit, ij. 93, from O'Flaherty's Ogygia, iij. 69, making Diarmait son of Donn, son of Duibne, son of Fothad, &c. But the value of a pedigree which treats Duibne as a man's name is not very great. Donn, however, is Diarmait's father throughout The Pursuit: the word means dark or brown, and is possibly to be regarded as a surname or another name of both Corc and Diarmait.
