How Midir was rebuilt, mark by mark
Bench notes, Midir: what we found, what we rejected, and what we finally set down. Kept in the open, because a restoration you cannot audit is just a spelling with confidence.
What We Found
The attestation runs through the tradition's own sources: —. Meaning: "Judge".
The figure behind the name: Midir's mythology is a single long courtship told in two lifetimes — the fullest Otherworld dossier in the Irish corpus, preserved entire in Tochmarc Étaíne.
What the Name Carried In
The Sloe and the Bride-Price. Midir of Brí Léith was the foster-father of Óengus, and he came to Brú na Bóinne to visit his fosterling. While the boys of the Brug were at their hurling, a sloe-thorn sprang from the play and put out Midir's eye; he stayed a year in the mound while Dían Cécht, the physician of the Túatha Dé Danann, made him whole.
The Fly in the Crystal Bower. Midir already had a wife: Fuamnach, foster-daughter of Bresal the druid, and versed in her foster-father's arts. When Étaín came home to Brí Léith, Fuamnach's jealousy found its instrument — a rod of scarlet quicken-tree — and one stroke made her rival a pool of water, then a worm, then a purple fly of wondrous size and sweetness.
A spelling that has to carry stories like these is not a label. It is equipment.
Where It Stood Before Us
Midir is a textual god — no ogham stone names him and no votive inscription invokes him — but both halves of his mythic geography are real and visitable. Brí Léith is a hill by Ardagh in County Longford, the mound the Dindsenchas names as his síd, and the surrounding Longford bogland preserves one of the showpiece monuments of the Irish Iron Age: the Corlea Trackway, a massive oak togher across the bog a few miles south of Ardagh, excavated under Barry Raftery and fixed by dendrochronology to 148–147 BCE — a road of the very centuries in which the síd-lord's landscape was being imagined. The tale's other stage is Tara in County Meath, where the earthworks of Ráith na Rí, the Forrad, and the long banquet-hall trench called Tech Midchúarta still ridge the hill on which Eochaid Airem kept his court and lost his wager. The manuscript witnesses are exact: Tochmarc Étaíne is preserved, incompletely, in the twelfth-century Lebor na hUidre (RIA MS 23 E 25) and completed in the fifteenth-century Yellow Book of Lecan, the twin bases of Bergin and Best's edition; the companion Aislinge Óenguso survives in the fifteenth-century British Library MS Egerton 1782, the basis of Shaw's. The bench inherits all of it — the web temple is the newest site, not the first.
What We Rejected
Any form invented for availability. The rule on the bench: if the evidence does not carry it, the domain does not get it — whatever the registrar has in stock.
What We Set Down
Midir — One decisive feature survives — a single, honest mark — which places the restoration in Tier-2: exact, and exactly labeled.
For the voice: 'MEE-thir' — a long 'ee', the soft 'th' of 'this' for the d, and a whispered palatal r at the end. The modern Irish Mídír keeps essentially this sound.
The temple stands at /sites/midir/ — the notes above are public in its Scholarly Edition, sources and all.
At a Glance
- Restored name: Midir
- ASCII form: midir
- Meaning: "Judge"
- Domain of influence: Underworld, Fairy King
- Pantheon: Celtic
- Classification: Tier 2
- Original script: —
- Series: The Restoration Files, No. 230 of 397
The File Continues
The temple's founding dispatch tells the name's story; its Resonance File reads the myths into the industries; the blog index holds the whole archive.
Continue the series — previous file: Miðgarðr (read it here) · next file: Mixcōātl (read it here).
The Restoration Files are written from the same canonical record as the temples themselves: the lexicon, the lore catalog, the pattern atlas, and the cited scholarly sources. If a file ever disagrees with its temple, the temple is right — tell us, and the file will be corrected.