Page:Beside the Fire - Douglas Hyde.djvu/243

 Rh ," which answers the same purpose as the pole, only not so conveniently, since the hero has to give it several hauls before he can "take a turn out of it." We find allusion to the same thing in the tale of . Illan, the hero, comes to a castle in a solitude, and surprises a woman going to the well, and she points out to him the chain, and says, "," i.e., "every time that you will shake yon chain (suspended) out of the tree, you will get (call forth) a hundred champions battle-*armed, and they will only ask of thee the combat thou likest thyself, that is (combat with) two, or three, or four, or a hundred." Chains are continually mentioned in Irish stories. In the "Little Fort of Allan," a Fenian story, we read,, i.e., "then there arose a herald with active readiness, and they shook the fort's chain of listening, and they all listened attentively;" and in the tale of "Illan, the Red-armed," there are three chains in the palace, one of gold, one of silver, and one of findrinny (a kind of metal, perhaps bronze), which are shaken to seat the people at the banquet, and to secure their silence; but whoever spake after the gold chain had been shaken did it on pain of his head.

[In the story of Cuchullain's youthful feats it is related that, on his first expedition, he came to the court of the three Mac Nechtain, and, according to O'Curry's Summary ("Manners and Customs," II., p. 366), "sounded a challenge." The mode of this sounding is thus described by Prof. Zimmer, in his excellent summary of the Tain bo Cualgne (Zeit, f. vgl., Sprachforschung, 1887, p. 448): "On the lawn before the court stood a stone pillar, around which was a closed chain (or ring), upon which was written in Ogham, that every knight who passed thereby was bound, upon his knightly honour, to issue a challenge. Cuchullain took the stone pillar and threw it into a brook hard by." This is the nearest analogue I have been able to find to our passage in the old Irish literature (the Tain, it should be mentioned, goes back in its present form certainly to the tenth, and, probably, to the seventh century). As many of the Fenian romances assumed a fresh and quasi-definite shape in the twelfth-fourteenth centuries, it is natural to turn for a parallel to the mediæval romances of chivalry. In a twelfth century French romance, the Conte de Graal, which is in some way connected with the body of Gaelic Märchen (whether the connection be, as I think, due to the fact that the French poet worked up lays derived from Celtic sources, or, as Professor Zimmer thinks, that the French romances are the origin of much in current Gaelic folk-tales), when Perceval comes to the Castle of Maidens and enters therein, he finds a table of brass, and hanging from it by a chain of silver, a steel