Page:Celtic Stories by Edward Thomas.djvu/131

 So in Ireland, the tale of Deirdre was one which the poets had to know, and the Irish told their tales over and over again, age after age, adding to them and taking away, as the Welsh did. They were still more clear about their heroes, though the stories as we have them are very little earlier than the Welsh, and were therefore written down long after the events were supposed to have taken place. Consequently, the kind of life described, when it is not in our eyes impossible, is the life of the storyteller's own age in Christian Ireland. As in 'Kilhugh', so in one of the Irish tales, 'There is scarcely a hill, valley, river, rock, mound, or cave in the line of country from Emania in the present county of Armagh to Lusk in that of Dublin, of which the ancient and often varying names and history are not to be found' in it. So also the stories of Cohoolin are said to be invaluable for their details of mediaeval Irish life. Cohoolin and the King Conachoor were supposed to have lived at about the time of Christ: one story relates that Conachoor died of rage on hearing of the death of Christ. After that heroic age followed the Ossianic. The date of Finn's death is given in an old Irish book, called The Annals of the Four Masters, as A.D. 283. The Irish have long believed in the followers of Finn as an order of Knighthood under the Kings of Ireland, which came to an end with the battle of Gabhra in A.D. 283, in the reign of Cairbre, the son of King Cormac: a modern scholar was certain that Finn was as real as Julius Caesar. Probably Finn did exist, or some one of the same name; he is as real as Agamemnon; and as for Arthur, is it not told that he did not die, but passed away? The tales of this Ossianic age were supposed to have been the work of Ossian himself, one of the Fenians, and he was connected with historic times by his meeting with St. Patrick, who belonged to the fourth and fifth centuries. We cannot tell how near to that age lived the first tellers of the tales. Many early manuscripts in Ireland were destroyed by the Norse invaders, and not only did the Norsemen probably destroy old versions of the tales, but they unconsciously changed the tales by figuring in them afterwards. The Norsemen were the storytellers' 'Lochlanners', and their presence shows that the stories took their present form after the invasions. But they were not made then. These Irish and Welsh tales were handed down from generation to generation, like the games of children. They were only in part consciously 'made up'. 'Out of nothing is nothing made' is true of airiest fiction. It is one of the charms under the surface of these stories that we can feel, even if we can never trace, a pedigree of dimmest antiquity