Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/264

258 out in Mr. Curtin’s volume afresh, but certain differences make themselves felt. It might seem as if the unrivalled picturesqueness and body of the Scotch Gaelic tales were due to a mingling of Celtic and Teutonic tradition. Or it may be that the closer communion of the Western Highlanders with a wilder and more varied nature than that of Ireland has fostered and preserved in them a keener sense of kinship with the tone and temper of the traditional heroic age.

In this field of research the publication of documents has only gone far enough to enable three or four solutions of the complicated problem before us to be distinguished. We are not as yet in a position to decide in favour of this or that solution. The chief desideratum is the publication of the rich stores of Irish MS. tales belonging to the last two centuries. We shall then be able to judge whether the current folk-tale is, as some hold, a mere derivate of the mediæval or pre-mediæval sagas. through the medium of these MS. versions, or whether it does not rather represent the basis of the sagas. I incline at present to this latter view, in favour of which I have adduced some evidence in my notes to Mr. McInnes’s tales. The Folk-Lore Society has drawn the attention of the Royal Irish Academy to the necessity and importance of this work. What is wanted is a revival, with wider scope and more scholarly aim, of the old Ossianic Society, to comprise among its ranks Gaels of Ireland and of Scotland as well as all who have at heart the preservation and the study of Celtic thought and Celtic fancy.

The new material offered to the student of Celtic folk-lore, valuable though it be, presents no great novelty, and favours no revolutionary theorising. Now, apart from the discussion of the traditional literature with which I have already dealt, the only serious contribution that has been made recently to the interpretation of the popular lore of both Scotland and Ireland may well be styled revolutionary, though it is not entirely novel. I allude to Mr. MacRitchie’s