Manannan mac Lir, the sea god who gave the Island its name and hid it under a mist.

The oldest notice of him is a Glossary. Cormac MacCullenain, king and bishop of Cashel, describes Manannan mac Lir as a famous merchant who dwelt in the Isle of Man, the greatest navigator of this western part of the world, who used to presage good or bad weather from his observations of the heavens and from the changes of the moon. It was for that, Cormac says, that the Irish and the Britons called him god of the sea and said he was son of the sea, Mac Lir, and from his name the Isle of Mann is called.

The Irish chronicles give him a human pedigree. They make his true name Orbsenius, son of Alladius, a prince of their island, surnamed Mannanan from his having entered the Island of Man, and Mac Lir, the offspring of the sea, from his great skill in navigation. He was son of Allot, one of the chieftains of the Tuatha De Danann, and Lough Corrib carries a corruption of his other name, Orbsen through Oreb and Orib to Corrib. He is still remembered in the mountains of Derry and Donegal.

The Manx remember him for the mist. He kept the Island under a mist by his necromancy, so that people of other places could never find it, and if he feared an enemy he could make one man seem a hundred by magic art. Stories went on gathering round him: he was the Manx wizard, magician and sea god, and he held the highest place in the Island's fairy lore long after Christianity came.

His end is told two ways. One account has him receiving St Patrick well, and promoting commerce, and the natives converted afterwards. Another has St Patrick disturb him, put Christian folk into the land and leave a bishop to govern it. A. W. Moore's version is blunter: the priests, with Manannan at their head, were destroyed by St Patrick, who then taught the Celts to be Christians.

The comparative scholars of the nineteenth century made something of his shape. In him, one of them wrote, is personified the splendour and swiftness of the sun, the god rushing over the waves like a wheel of fire, and his three-legged shape recalls the three giant strides of Vishnu. He was the patron of traffic and merchandise.