Page:Beside the Fire - Douglas Hyde.djvu/34

xxx of it may be much older—on Irish ground, not earlier than the end of the fourteenth or the beginning of the fifteenth century, and was carried by some Irish bard or professional story-teller to the Gaeldom of Scotland, where it is told to this day without any great variations, but in a form very much stunted and shortened. As to the Irish copy, I imagine that it was not written down for a couple of centuries later, and only after it had become a stock piece all over the Scotch and Irish Gaeldom; that then some scribe got hold of a story-teller (one of those professionals who, according to the Book of Leinster, were obliged to know seven times fifty stories), and stereotyped in writing the current Irish variation of the tale, just as Campbell, two, three, or four centuries afterwards, did with the Scotch Gaelic version.

It may, of course, be alleged that the bombastic and inflated language of many of the MS. stories is due not to the oral reciter, but to the scribe, who, in his pride of learning, thought to himself, nihil quod tango non orno; but though it is possible that some scribes threw in extraneous embellishments, I think the story-teller was the chief transgressor. Here, for instance, is a verbally collected specimen from a Connemara story, which contains all the marks of the MS. stories, and yet it is almost certain that it has been transmitted purely vivâ voce:—"They journeyed to the harbour where there was a vessel waiting to take them across the sea. They