The canonical register: Medb
Evidence dossier 229 — Medb. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.
At a Glance
- Canonical form: Medb
- Original script: —
- Pantheon: Celtic
- Convention: the tradition’s own scholarly transliteration standard
- False forms on record: 0
- Contested forms: none attested
- Series: The Canonical Register, No. 229 of 406
The Evidence
Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The tradition's record preserves this name in its romanized scholarly form: Medb — no older script survives to transcribe, so the canonical content is the exactness of the spelling itself.
Exhibit 2 — the flattened form. The plain form medb differs from the canonical Medb only by convention of display — case, not content. It is acceptable everywhere: in legacy systems, in plain-text citation, in the DNS itself. What is not acceptable is what follows in the register: respellings that change the letters, not just their case.
Exhibit 3 — the physical record. Medb's mythic address is the best-documented royal landscape in Ireland: Crúachan Aí, the Rathcroghan complex in County Roscommon, a five-kilometre spread of more than two hundred and forty recorded monuments — ring-barrows, mounds, and enclosures — dominated by the great flat-topped Rathcroghan Mound itself. Beneath the complex opens Oweynagat, the Cave of the Cats, the souterrain-fed natural cave the medieval tales call a gate of the Otherworld; within it stand two ogham stones, one reading VRAICCI MAQI MEDVVI, '(the stone of) Fráech, son of Medb' — the name-type's only epigraphic attestation, at the site the tradition assigns to the queen herself. Her death-place, Inis Cloithrinn (Inchcleraun), survives as the largest island of Lough Ree on the Shannon, crowned by the early monastic ruins of Templemurray; her reputed grave is the great unexcavated Neolithic cairn (c. 3200 BCE) on the summit of Knocknarea above Sligo — Miosgán Meadhbha, 'Medb's heap', which local tradition insists she fills standing upright, spear in hand, facing Ulster. The textual witnesses are exact: the oldest substantially complete Táin (Recension I) is in Lebor na hUidre, the Book of the Dun Cow, written at Clonmacnoise around 1106, and the fullest recension in the twelfth-century Book of Leinster; O'Rahilly's editions are the modern bases. J. P. Mallory's In Search of the Irish Dreamtime (2016) is the standard archaeological cross-examination of the whole epic.
Exhibit 4 — the continuing record. The Táin's modern reception made Medb the most argued-over woman in Irish literature. Lady Gregory's Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902) carried the epic into English; Thomas Kinsella's translation (1969), with Louis le Brocquy's ink drawings, fixed the Táin as the Irish national epic for the modern reader — and Medb at its centre as its engine, not its ornament.
The Convention's Own History
Every tradition in this register has its own scholarly transliteration standard, built by its own specialists over decades or centuries, and the register follows each on its own terms: the tradition’s own standard. The principle that unifies them is the one the whole project stands on: a name is evidence, and evidence is not negotiable — not for keyboards, not for convenience, not for anyone.
The Protocol's Position
Can the canonical form live in the address bar? Almost always, yes. IDNA 2008 admits every mark this register defends — the DNS stores them as `xn--` punycode and modern browsers render them natively. The real frictions are practical, not legal: some registrars stock only part of the IDN space, so a theoretically valid name can be temporarily unbuyable; and stacked combinations (an acute riding a macron) remain awkward to type on mobile keyboards even where the protocol accepts them.
The project's answer is a ranked ladder, not a compromise: the full restoration first, then attested fallbacks in descending order of completeness. The ladder's lowest rung, plain ASCII, is a vehicle for legacy systems — sanctioned, but never presented as the scholarly form.
The Verdict
Case closed on Medb: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form medb is the same name in another register of display — always acceptable. The register's files remain open: if a source surfaces that changes any line of this entry, the entry changes. Until then, the temple at /medb/ holds the canonical form.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 12 cited sources — Táin Bó Cúailnge, Recension I, ed. and trans. Cecile O'Rahilly — the pillow-talk, the bride-gift speech, the raid, the battle of the bulls, Táin Bó Cúailnge from the Book of Leinster, ed. and trans. Cecile O'Rahilly, Aided Meidbe (The Death of Medb) — Furbaide Ferbend's vengeance at Inis Cloithrinn.
The Register Continues
Entry 229 of 406 in the Canonical Register. Around it: the temple's founding dispatch, the Restoration File on the marks themselves, the Resonance File on the archetype at work, and the Rulebook behind all of it.
Continue the register — previous entry: Māzǔ (read it) · next entry: Médousa (read it).
The Canonical Register is written from the same canonical record as the lexicon itself. If a false form is missing from this page, it is because the evidence does not support calling it false — or because we have not seen it yet. Show us, with a citation, and the register will answer.