Partholón

Partholón, Parthalón. Leader of the second mythic invasion of early Ireland, according to the medieval pseudo-history Lebor Gabála [Book of Invasions]. As the letter P was unknown in the earliest Irish, Partholón is a borrowed name, probably from Bartholomaeus, which St Jerome and Isidore of Seville gloss as ‘son of him who stays the waters’, i.e. a survivor of the biblical Flood; another possibility is Parthia, ancient name for northern Iran. Partholón's biblical pedigree makes him a descendant of Magog, who lived in the twenty-first year of the Patriarch Abraham. None the less, he is a prince of Greece who murders his father, Sera, and mother, hoping to inherit the kingdom for himself; the episode costs Partholón his left eye and marks him with bad fortune. He was, despite this, the ‘chief of every craft’. After seven years' wandering he landed in Ireland with his wife, Dealgnaid, three sons, and their wives; the complete list of Partholón's sons is more extensive: Er (1), Ferann [land, domain], Fergna, Laiglinni, Orba [patrimony of land], Rudraige, and Sláine [health] (1). His druids, three brothers, are Eólas [knowledge], Fios [intelligence], and Fochmarc [enquiring]. While Partholón is hunting one day, his wife Dealgnaid seduces the servant Todga, the first instance of adultery in Irish literature. Texts differ on Partholón's reaction, describing him either as flying into a rage or as being placated by her verse protest that she should not have been left alone with great temptation. After thirty years in Ireland Partholón dies near the modern town of Tallaght where, 120 years later, the remainder of his people perish in a plague. His name is not cited in later genealogies or pedigrees. A shard of his persona lives on as Parthanán, the agricultural demon who comes at harvest time to thresh all the grain left standing.

Bibliography

See Kuno Meyer , ‘Partholón mac Sera’, Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie, 13 (1919), 141–2;
Anton G. van Hamel , ‘Partholón’, Revue Celtique, 50 (1933), 217–37;
Henry Morris , ‘The Partholon Legend’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries, 67 (1937), 57–71.