White immediately detected, quite plausibly, a remnant pagan fertility God. In this he greatly offended the locals who were of course ostentatiously catholic. The struggle was complicated by the fact that among the last outsiders to take an interest was one Fr. O'Reilly, who had in the waning 19th century compelled the locals to throw the stone into the sea.
In response to White's queries, the locals set about denying, contradicting, and obscuring all of the hard facts, if any, that they knew, and while the story also features a smashing cameo by some pirates and a thrice-annual reclothing ceremony for the stone, these are the bulk of his findings. If you need to know more, the whole saga is in White's book The Godstone and the Blackymor.
~~
But the above was all prefatory. I was moved to post by this passage from White's notes in which he tries, futilely, to work out a derivation from the stone's Irish name.
The Godstone's name was the Naomhóg, so far as I can catch it by ear. But naomhóg means canoe - or cot. Naom = saint or holy (adj.) and (oge = youth). Og (adj.) = young. Taking naomh as a noun (saint or holy one) and óg as a dim. suffix (young, little) you could call him The Holy Little One. On the other hand there is something interesting about the same canoe or cot. Cot? Crib?
Then there is neamh = heaven (the Little Heaven) and Néam = brightness (the Little Brightness). Again, neamh (neg. prefix) gives a contrary sense, so that neamh-óg might mean the Not-Young. Finally neamh-ad = ill-luck.
*Referred to in an earlier post to the whistle board.
**North and/or South Inishkea. Both were then uninhabited, the south abandoned as recently as 1927 after a terrible storm killed ten islanders, but they'd had a long history of habitation, having been among the monastic crags to which European civilization famously clung by the skin of its teeth, in Kenneth Clarke's lurid phrase. This was also St Brendan's home monastery. At one point in the tale, the inhabitants of South I. stole the stone from North Inishkea.
