Throat-Warbler Mangrove mac Roth

One of the riddles of the ages has finally been solved! …well, maybe. When I were a lad I grew up on comics like 2000AD, none of this Marvel or DC nonsense, so one of the strips I grew up with was Pat Mills’ Slaine. The latter was my first, somewhat roundabout acquaintance with Celtic myth, a sort of Conanesque heroic fantasy with occasional SF elements…

…getting off to a marvellous start with our eponymous hero facing off with some sort of dinosaur-like monstrosity. Couldn’t not get drawn in by that sort of thing when I was 8. But how to pronounce the name of said hero? Cos we’re dealing with something old Irish here so I remember some befuddlement in the letters page about the “correct” pronunciation of an admittedly fictional name (I particularly recall one who explained at some length that it was actually “Dennis”)… which would probably have been something like Slawn-ye or Shlawn-ye. Wikipedia accepts the former but how did Pat Mills intend it to be said?

Well, somewhat randomly, I got recommended Pat Mills’ Youtube channel, where he handily has a video about a book he’s written on the subject of Slaine. And he pronounces “Slaine” as… well… “slain”, as if it were an English rather than Irish name. So there it finally is, straight from the author’s mouth… weirdly anticlimactic after 40 years somehow and a wee bit racist towards my Irish ancestors (like *I* know bugger all about Irish?), but there you go.