The tradition was brought into Manx print by R. R. Brash, in his chapter on Mananan Mac Lir in the Manx Society's Antiquitates Manniae of 1868. Mananan, the supposed coloniser and first ruler of Man, from which he took his name, was in Brash's account identical with the merchant or navigator Orbsen, so celebrated in Irish bardic history, from whom Lough Orbsen, now Lough Corrib in Galway, was named. Brash quoted O'Flaherty's Ogygia: the merchant Orbsen was remarkable for carrying on a commercial intercourse between Ireland and Britain, and was commonly called Mananan Mac Lir, Mananan on account of his intercourse with the Isle of Man, and Mac Lir, sprung from the sea, because he was an expert diver who understood the dangerous parts of harbours and from his prescience of the weather always avoided tempests. He gave Keating's genealogy, Mananan the son of Alladh, the son of Elathan, son of Dalboeth, an immediate descendant of Nemedius, progenitor of the Tuatha De Danann, that weird and mystic colony still believed to rule the spirit or fairy land of Erin, to reign paramount in the lis, the cave and the mine, and to occupy genii palaces in the deepest recesses of mountains and under the deep waters of the lakes. Keating further stated, Brash wrote, that the proper name of Orbsen was Mananan, and that the lake was called from him because when his grave was digging the lake broke forth, a myth common to almost every large sheet of water in Ireland.

In O'Flaherty's own time, the middle of the seventeenth century, Lough Corrib was still called Lough Orbsen, and in his West Connaught he described the field of Magh Ullin, now Moycullin, where Mananan was slain: there Uillin, grandchild of Nuadh of the Silver Hand, King of Ireland, overthrew in battle and had the killing of Orbsen Mac Alloid, commonly called Mananan, the Mankish man, Mac Lir, son of the sea, for his skill in seafaring. A. W. Moore took the whole of this into the first chapter of his Folk-lore of the Isle of Man in 1891, where Manannan is otherwise called Orbsen, whence Loch Orbsen, now Lough Corrib, is still vividly remembered in Derry and Donegal with an enchanted castle in Lough Foyle, and, by the traditions of the Isle of Man and the eastern counties of Leinster, rolled on three legs like a wheel through the mist. Moore traced the corruption of the name through O'Flaherty, Orbsen to Oreb to Orib to Corrib, and attributed the grave story to O'Flaherty's West Connaught where Brash had given it to Keating.

W. Walter Gill, in 1929, set the lake among the waters that were thresholds. Both the Kingdom of the Dead and the Fairy Kingdom, he wrote, were reached in very old and widely diffused belief by a water transit, a sea strait, a lake or river, and sometimes a well, and he noted in the same place that Lough Corrib was said to have issued from the burial place of Manannan MacLir. The god of the Manx sea has a grave, then, in Irish tradition, and the grave is under a lake that came out of it, which is the shape the Island's own tradition gives to Manannan's departure, into the sea and out of sight.