Erinn's 23 Place Names: Which Ones Are Real Irish Words

✍️ Alice・愛麗沙

Update 9/14: the two “unnamed” regions below now have official Taiwan names — the Chapter 2 wasteland is 雲海曠野, with 班克爾 (Bangor) and 萊爾特丘陵 (Gairech Hill) alongside it and 巴里1礦區／巴里2礦區 as its dungeons, all live since the 9/9 update (log 3541097). 창백한 산 (“Pale Mountain”) remains unnamed and absent on Taiwan. There’s a stretch of grassland most players barely register while passing through — poor soil, flat scenery, nothing that asks you to stop walking. It has a name, though, and the name wasn’t picked at random: Sen Mag Plains. In PC lore this was once beautiful grassland, worn down to the barren ground it is today by a war fought over it — the Second Battle of Mag Tuired, the decisive clash between the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Fomorians. Every step across that poor soil crosses the buried remains of a mythic-scale battle.

Not every place name on the map carries that kind of weight, and this piece doesn’t pretend they do. It checks all 14 regions and all 8 dungeons in one pass and sorts the results honestly into four kinds: names that borrow a full mythological narrative like Sen Mag Plains does, names that borrow a single real word and nothing more, names that were never the right question to ask in the first place, and names that simply turn up no source no matter how far the search goes. All four kinds earn a place in this table — not just the ones with a good answer.

Two bloodlines of place names, sorted before anything gets searched

The most common mistake in place-name research is treating every exotic-sounding name as a mythological puzzle waiting to be solved. Worth saying plainly first: in-game place names split into two lineages, and only one is worth this kind of research.

One kind borrows a real-world proper noun outright: Tir Chonaill, Dunbarton, Emain Macha — names this site’s companion articles have already checked, that lift a genuinely existing place, person, or myth narrative straight onto the game map. This is the kind worth asking “what did it borrow?”

The other kind is a literal translation of a descriptive compound: “Wolf Forest” is just “wolf’s forest” translated directly; “Ice Gorge” is “ice’s gorge.” These names never intended to point at any specific real place from the moment they were coined — they’re adjective-plus-noun combinations, not proper nouns like Tir Chonaill. Asking “what’s the mythological origin” of a name like this is asking the wrong question — the answer will always be “not applicable,” and not because the research wasn’t thorough enough. The question’s own premise doesn’t hold.

The one with real bloodline, taken first because it’s the heaviest

The single heaviest find in this batch is Sen Mag Plains. In the PC game’s own lore this grassland isn’t a coincidental name match — the game’s own reference material states outright that it’s the historical battleground of the Second Battle of Mag Tuired, the most famous engagement in the long war between the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Fomorians. Once beautiful grassland, it was left barren by repeated fighting, and the soil is still poor today. This is the same battle covered in this site’s companion piece on Erinn’s core worldview — in PC lore, this is the very battle where Morrighan spends the last of her power sealing herself away. A place name, tied to a character’s story in another article — that kind of cross-confirmation is the strongest form of name match this table has to offer.

Eight dungeons, three modes of borrowing

The eight dungeons are more scattered than the regions, splitting into three patterns.

Word borrowing: a real Irish or Gaelic word lifted directly as a dungeon’s name. Ciar Dungeon’s “ciar” is Irish for “dark/black”; Peaca Dungeon’s “peaca” is “sin”; Rundal Dungeon’s “rúnda” is “secret”; Fiodh Dungeon’s “fiodh” is Scottish Gaelic for “trees” — and wiki.mabinogiworld.com itself notes the dungeon (also called Fiodh Forest) sits in dense woodland northwest of Gairech. All four dungeons match a real word, but none matches a specific mythological narrative — word borrowing, not narrative borrowing, so this table marks them one tier below a “strong” name match.

Possibly looping back to the title itself: Math Dungeon is the special case. wiki.mabinogiworld.com gives two possibilities: one, that “math” is simply Irish for “good”; two, that the name comes from Math fab Mathonwy, the Welsh king from the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion — the same king discussed in this site’s piece on what Mabinogi actually borrowed from its own title’s source. If the second is right, this would be the one dungeon in the whole table that loops back to the title itself rather than to Irish mythology — and the geography of the etymology shifts too, since most of this table points to Ireland and this one row alone points to Wales. The PC game’s own source material never settles between the two, and this article has no better basis to choose one, so both stay on the record.

This table is 23 of the series' 55-row research table, verified 2026-09-02. “Evidence tier” is this table's key column, not decoration — name match / real-world place / inferred / unconfirmed are kept separate, and no row claims “the dev team designed it this way” unless a developer's own statement backs it up. Full sourcing lives in each row's original dataset.

What has no source, and what has no name at all — recorded exactly as found

Bari Dungeon ends up the same way as Dugald Aisle: no source turns up no matter how far the search goes — even wiki.mabinogiworld.com describes it only as a mine at the center of Bangor (originally designed as a dungeon, converted to a mine when a real vein was struck during construction), with no account of the name’s origin.

Colhen is a different kind of “no source”: it isn’t a PC Mabinogi place name at all. It’s the starting town from Vindictus, a different game by the same developer. This article checked the spelling itself (Colhen) and found no matching Irish word-root or myth story — its bloodline is a different game, not a mythological original, and the two shouldn’t be conflated.

Two regions don’t even have an official name in any language yet: the wasteland that serves as the setting for Goddess’s Descent Chapter 2 (“Witch of the Wilds”), and the Korean server’s Season 2 hunting ground (a literal rendering of its Korean name would be “Pale Mountain” — not live on Taiwan at all). This article deliberately gives neither row a romanization or transliteration — the official name itself hasn’t been settled, and research shouldn’t jump ahead of that.

Conclusion

23 place names and dungeons, checked in one pass: one region borrows a complete mythological narrative (Sen Mag Plains), four dungeons borrow a single real word, one dungeon may loop back to the title itself, two dungeons’ etymology isn’t even settled by the PC game’s own source material, six regions are descriptive compounds that were never valid research targets to begin with, three turn up no source at all, and two don’t have an official name in any language yet. Not one name on this table was guessed by this site — every row states its own reasoning, and where no reasoning could be found, the row says so plainly rather than filling the gap with a better-sounding answer.

Two claims here are falsifiable:

First: Sen Mag Plains corresponding to the Second Battle of Mag Tuired is this table’s highest-confidence regional match. This rests on the PC game’s own official page, not this site’s inference. If an earlier record turns up showing this link was added later by the community rather than being part of the original text, this row needs to be revised downward.

Second: Colhen has no confirmed Irish or Gaelic word-root. This article only checked the spelling itself (Colhen); if it turns out to be a variant transliteration of a real place name, this sentence needs rewriting.

Bring a counterexample, and this table gets more accurate.