The Irish renaissance Book

Quite good - managed to hold my attention, and some parts of the language analysis especially were ingenious, however, I couldn't ignore that this is ultimately a play with literary themes - "literature for the sake of literature" we might say, and so it was in other ways a sort of futile book, despite the author. Three quotes:

(The most important thing the author stresses)
Manannán is not named in the stone inscriptions of either insular or continental celtdom, so we cannot assume he is any older than his first literary mention.

(Perhaps the final, indecisive word on the matter of Mannanan and Manawydan)
Another point of considerable interest is that it is said of Manannan the both the Gaels and the Britons called him the god of the sea. Although we do not know the authority for the claim and cannot be certain of the intent the sentence suggests that Manannan mac Lir was known by both the medieval Irish and the Welsh and accordingly implies that Manannan mac Lir and Manawydan fab Llyr and homologous (the latter name simply being a Welsh version of the former). Nevertheless the entry may not be speaking either of Manawydan of the Mabinogi nor of the literary Manannán we have encountered heretofore. On the face of it this century refers to a famous Sea trader who would have played his goods across the Irish Sea and hence would have been well known in the Ireland and Britain.

(And a good pointer for next weeks reading, although I didn't enjoy my last book by this author)
It is curious to find Manannán as the senior partner in this paradigm, since Lug, as Miranda Green observes, is one of the oldest of “Celtic” deities; unlike Manánnan who is not named in the continental inscriptions, Lug’s name can be traced to the Romano-Celtic record, and appears in place names such as Luguvalium (Carlisle) and Lugudunum (Lyon) (Green, 1986, 16)