But ua can mean any descendant, not just a grandson. It could equally refer to a son, particularly in the context of a son who is due or expecting an inheritance.

I'm still thrown by it being a masculine noun. Then again, any noun spelled the same way I would expect to also be masculine so I'm leaning towards there being some grammatical exception at play rather than this being some other feminine noun.

I also don't see how it can possibly follow Bhí ina dheoidh go mór ..., unless "ina dheoidh" here has some alternative meaning, like "who was very much at his end". But I'm not convinced by this either. The whole line seems a bit odd to me, even without "an ua".

Do you think it means something else?



"ar uathadh lóin" wasn't a problem for me as a phrase in isolation. The issue I was having was that "muicí muc" wasn't in my vocabulary. I thought it referred to the pigs themselves, so it was difficult to connect it to not having much food.

It certainly makes more sense to translate:

as a swineherd with (little food)
only the amount the red pigs didn't take

but I think "an méid" is often better translated as "what" or "that which". It can be like "ce que" in French in its fundamental meaning. Of course, this relates to the tidying up of the final translation and not to the original parsing...

I looked at the original text in the King James Bible and looked at the page where the audio and texts in Irish and English are provided. Could "anuas" be what he is saying there, viz. "an ua"? It seems to make some sense that way and follows the meaning in that part, provided "anuas" is grammatcially and sematically correct.