Is laa ⁊ adaig in bith uile.

(is * day * and * night * the * world * all)

Day and night are the whole world.

With these words, the Macc Óc wins possession forever of Síd in Broga, now known as Brugh na Bóinne or Newgrange. This is how it happpened, in Patrick Brown’s telling of “De Gabáil in t-Sída”:

The Macc Óc, foster-son of Midir of Brí Léith and Nindid the seer, came to the Dagda to petition him for land after it had all been shared out.
‘I have no land for you,’ said the Dagda. ‘I’ve shared it all out.’
‘In that case,’ said the Macc Óc, ‘grant me a day and a night in your own home.’ And that was granted to him.
‘Go home,’ said the Dagda. ‘Your time is all used up.’
‘It is obvious,’ he replied, ‘that night and day are the whole world (is laa ⁊ adaig in bith uile), and that’s what you have given to me.’
And at that, the Dagda left, and the Macc Óc remained in the síd.

In a rather different telling of this event in “Tochmarc Étaíne”, the clinching phrase is “is laib & aidchib dochaiter an doman” (it is in days and nights that the world is spent).

In “Audacht Morainn” (ZCP xi 86.46), an early treatise in the “mirrors for princes” genre, the phrase is used in a way that seems to praise the steady, regular rule of a good prince:

Ráid a ré laaib ocus aidchib, ar is laaib ocus aidchib ráithir in bith huile.
He passes his reign by days and nights, for it is by days and nights that all the world passes.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus (late 1st cent. B.C.E.) recorded a remarkably similar use of this ruse from the Mediterranean world in Book 19 (17.4) of his “Roman Antiquities”:

When Leucippus the Lacedaemonian inquired where it was fated for him and his followers to settle, the god [Apollo, via the Pythia at Delphi] commanded them to sail to Italy and settle that part of the land where they should stay a day and a night after landing. The expedition made land near Callipolis, a seaport of the Tarentines; and Leucippus, pleased with the nature of the place, persuaded the Tarentines to permit them to encamp there for a day and a night. When several days had passed and the Tarentines asked them to depart, Leucippus paid no heed for them, claiming that he had received the land from them under a compact for day and night; and so long as there should be either of these he would not give up the land. So the Tarentines, realizing that they had been tricked, permitted them to remain.

Topics: Similes, Metaphors & Kennings