Page:Beside the Fire - Douglas Hyde.djvu/239

Rh [The incident of the king's court being destroyed at night is in the fourteenth-fifteenth century Agallamh na Senorach, where it is Finn who guards Tara against the wizard enemies.

I know nothing like the way in which the hero deals with the animals he meets, and cannot help thinking that the narrator forgot or mistold his story. Folk-tales are, as a rule, perfectly logical and sensible if their conditions be once accepted; but here the conduct of the hero is inexplicable, or at all events unexplained.—A.N.]

Page 15. This stanza on Bran's colour is given by O'Flaherty, in 1808, in the "Gaelic Miscellany." The first two lines correspond with those of my shanachie, and the last two correspond in sound, if not in sense. O'Flaherty gave them thus—

"Speckled back over the loins, Two ears scarlet, equal-red."

How the change came about is obvious. The old Irish, "speckled," is not understood now in Connacht; so the word , "green," which exactly rhymes with it, took its place. Though generally means greenish, it evidently did not do so to the mind of my reciter, for, pointing to a mangy-looking cub of nondescript greyish colour in a corner of his cabin, he said,, "that's the colour oonya." The words, "over the loins," have, for the same reason—namely, that , "a loin," is obselete now—been changed to words of the same sound. , "of the colour of hunting," i.e., the colour of the deer hunted. This, too, the reciter explained briefly by saying,, "hunting, that's a deer." From the vivid colouring of Bran it would appear that she could have borne no resemblance whatever to the modern so-called Irish wolf-hound, and that she must in all probability have been short-haired, and not shaggy like them. Most of the Fenian poems contain words not in general use. I remember an old woman reciting me two lines of one of these old poems, and having to explain in current Irish the meaning of no less than five words in the two lines which were

which she thus explained conversationally,.