Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/256

 2 1 8 Reviews.

of the poem of The Heads and of other parts of the Vengeance for Cuchullin merit inclusion in such a book. But these are counsels of perfection in view of a second edition. In the meantime one is glad to have so much about Cuchullin in so comely and cheap a form.

Miss Hull touches on the interpretation of the legend in her introduction, and she leans frankly to the " solar theory." For her CuchuUin is the sun fighting mists and darkness, suffering eclipse ; the Bulls are compared to the dawn-cows and storm-cows of Indian fancy ; Meave's army stands for the " forces of darkness and destruction " coming from the West, the land of Death during the winter ; the debility of the Ulstermen is the " decay and sleep of nature during the winter season," &:c. ; the Hound of Ulster fighting the " three gloomy, black, and ever-grumbHng crazy things " is a description of " the sun's efforts to dispel a heavy vapour," and Beowulf fighting the " dragon of the Marsh-lands " is its Anglo-Saxon parallel. This does not appear conclusive. For instance, Beowulf does not fight the dragon of the marsh- lands, but a dragon of a hot spring on a high cliff by the sea ; there are sea-meres, demons, fires, walruses, and the like in the I^ay of Beowulf, but no marshes. There may have gathered about Cuchullin some of the poetry that may once have been the rightful appanage of a sun-god, but it does not seem safe to suggest more. To me Queen Mab certainly looks like a real person looming gigantic through the mist of tradition, an " Irish Boadicea," and here Miss Hull would be inclined to agree, though she would not allow Conchobar to be as real as Agamemnon, or Cuchullin as Roland.

Wholly incredible to me is such a statement as that on p. i. " Cuchullin and Emer, like Sigurd and Brynhild, are the offspring of poetic imagination." The discrepancies of the annals and their chronologic difficulties, and the variations of genealogies, are not enough reason to discredit the existence of Ailell or Fergus Mac Roich or even Cairpre niafer. The notable peculiarities of the Red Branch cycle, the rule of and descent from' women, the chariot- fighting, the pagan customs, the whole epic colour, are not due to imagination, but to memory and observations, and witness to the early state of society and culture in which those traditions that circle round Conchobar and Mab and the Hound of Culann and the Dun Bull of Cuailgne first took shape. That a cattle-raid