In County Kerry, Ireland, particularly the peninsula of Dingle, there have been several stones found standing along the shoreline, such as the Coumeenoole Ogham Stone, on the bay at Dunmore Head. These stones are inscribed with Ogham writing in Archaic Irish, commemorating someone named Dovinia, whom various of these inscriptions imply are the writers' ancestress, goddess, or both - whether a land sovereignty goddess like Eriu, Fotla, and Banba, or an ancestral goddess associated with a human bloodline. The name Dovinia was represented in Medieval Irish as Duibne or Duben, and the Dingle peninsula carries this version as part of its pre-Anglicised name, Corca Dhuibhne (the seed or tribe of Duibne), or Corcaguiney. The name Duibne itself appears to render in Irish as "dark / black + Suibne" or "opposed to Suibne," that is, Sweeney, itself meaning "well-disposed" or "pleasant" or "going well." This would suggest that Duibne might have been understood as "ill-disposed, unpleasant, going poorly, surly," as the darkening of a good disposition. The neighbouring peninsula of Beara is associated with the Irish hag-goddess, the Cailleach Béara, herself sometimes referred to as "The Old Woman of Dingle," so if Dovinia in fact was a goddess to the early people of Dingle, with a name actually meaning "unpleasant," then it is entirely possible that she and the Cailleach refer to the same mythic figure, known under multiple names and euphemistic epithets intended to avoid drawing her negative attention (rather like calling the Greek Furies the "Kindly Ones," and calling the Faeries the "Good Neighbours Underhill").
According to Stemmata Craufurdeania: of the Annals of the Noble Family of Crawford, a genealogy featuring several Irish and Scottish clans with intermarriages to the Crawford family, the legendary Fenian demigod knight and clan leader, Diarmuid Ua Duibhne, is the progenitor of Clan Campbell, and that the original name worn by the clan was O'Duibhne or Síl Diarmuid (Slioch na Diarmuid, in Scotland's own Gàidhlig). The texts states that Diarmuid departed from Ireland to Scotland around 512 CE, and there married a daughter of King Goranus (Gabrán mac Domangairt), from which marriage issued a son bearing the theophoric name Duibhne, from whose descent, separated by many generations, Cailean Mór (Great Colin) allegedly issued, himself being the earliest ancestor of Clan Campbell that might be considered historically definitive in both time and place. The coat of arms of Clan Campbell depicts a boar's head, thought to represent the giant boar which killed and was slain at the same time by Diarmuid, so whether or not the precise count of generations between Diarmuid and Great Colin is widely agreed, Clan Campbell certainly embraces Diarmuid as their mythical ancestor, within their own iconography.
It is notable that Diarmuid's own family name is given according to his status as the grandson of Duibne, not as a patronymic (e.g. "son of Donn," for the Fenian myths attest Donn, regarded in some myths as a god of the dead, as Diarmuid's biological father, or else "son of Aengus," for the same myths attest Aengus, god of youth and poetry, as Diarmuid's foster-father). Aengus in these myths is a deity of considerable presence and activity, and certainly one would also expect a death-god to bear mention in one's naming, if he is one's own father. Filial naming conventions in the Fenian cycle are not simply ways of identifying an individual from other individuals who might bear the same first name; Diarmuid not only emphatically names himself "grandson of Dovinia," but names his own firstborn son "Of Dovinia," and the Stemmata Craufurdeania lists the next eight generations after that son, more than half of them also naming their sons "Of Dovinia" in the same manner, and only appending an identifying feature to the name to tell them apart, usually a hair colour: Duibhne Dearg (the Red), Duibhne Doun (the Brown), and so on. This is far beyond simple retention of a name within the family, like "junior" naming in English, or the conservation of cyclically recurring praenomina within a Roman gens. What we are seeing here is true theophorism, an insistent repeated inclusion and invocation of Dovinia throughout the population attributed as her descendants. We may suppose, therefore, that to whatever extent the genealogical connection between these figures is real (and of course we have no strong evidence to support the idea that any of the Fianna were real people who actually existed, much less who had deities for fathers and grandmothers), the progenitors of Clan Campbell might have regarded Dovinia not as a land sovereignty goddess, but as a hereditary goddess, one with a proprietary relationship to Diarmuid's bloodline (and so to the Campbell bloodline), rather than to the Dingle peninsula and surrounding area.
Irish Pedigrees, or the Origin and Stem of the Irish Nation (1892) by John O'Hart, throws a monkey wrench into this mythological reckoning of Diarmuid's ancestry, by suggesting a strictly human ancestry for Diarmuid:
Fedhlimidh Rachtmar, 108th Monarch of Ireland, whose third son was Fiacha Suidhe, father of Fiacha Riadhe, father of Fithadh, father of Duibhne, father of Donn, father of Diarmuid.
Note that this rendering lists Duibhne as plainly a man, perhaps the first theophoric use of Dovinia's name in this family line, if so (for there is no earlier occurrence to be found among that ancestry). It is far likelier, however, that someone named Duibhne, in a line with no prior mention of Dovinia at all among their naming conventions, is simply someone whose parents named him "unpleasant, surly," and not someone named after a goddess. While this would certainly bring us closer to plausibility for Diarmuid's own existence as a real person, and lends a scrap of credibility to the Clan Campbell foundation myth, it also confuses the matter of how and why Diarmuid came to be regarded as a demigod, and what connection - if any - he had to the Corcu Duibhne. We can at least be reasonably certain that a great many of the Dál Riata and other early migrants from Ireland to Scotland were from Dingle, for Cairpre Músc (ancestor of the Corcu Duibhne) and Cairpre Riata (ancestor of the kings of Dál Riata) are documented as brothers, sons of either Conaire Cóem or Conaire Mór of the Érainn (Iverni) ethnic tribe of Munster; the Dál Riata in Scotland dwelled at Argyll, which is the seat of Campbell to this day.
Regarding Cairpre Músc in particular, Dovinia also appears as a woman by the name Duihind, in the eighth century Irish saga The Expulsion of the Déisi. In The Expulsion, Duihind and Cairpre Músc are siblings, the children of Conaire II, and as a result of incest between the two siblings, Duihind gave birth to twins named Corc Duibhne and Cormac. The saga states that the incest put the realm of Munster under a curse, and the people under Cairpre Músc's rule wanted to have Corc and Cormac sacrificed to end the curse. Cormac was slain, but a druid carried Corc Duibhne to Inis Boí, an island off the coast of County Kerry, in order to ritually purify him through the assistance of Boí, a hag of perhaps divine nature. Corc was then brought to his grandmother Sárait, who nursed him as a political hostage in the court of Sárait's nephew, Cormac mac Airt, High-King of Ireland, and there he later became a foster-son to Óengus Gaíbúaibthech. This version of the tale makes no mention of any Cairpre Riata, and the genealogies descending from Corc himself vary drastically between accounts.
In any case, Clan Campbell currently claims Diarmuid, and Diarmuid's name claims the status of grandson to someone named (or named for) Duibne, in preference over naming his own father, and the Campbell motto is Ne obliviscaris, "Forget Not." If I were a deity nearly lost to obscurity, I might not object to being retroactively adopted by people who - mistakenly or not - consider themselves to be my grandkids, and who consider it virtuous to avoid forgetting things. But then, who knows, with a deity whose name is Surly?
Iron Noder 2023, 29/30