Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/236

 2 20 Reviews.

CoNTES ET Legendes d'Irlande, traduits du Gaelique. Par G. DoTTiN. 8vo. 2i8 pp. 1701. Le Havre (f. 3, 50).

M. DoTTiN, to whom Gaelic storyology owes so much, has in this volume translated thirty-eight tales which have been issued in the Gaelic Journal (Dublin) during the last twenty years, and has thus furnished students of Celtic folktales who are ignorant of Irish with what is in some respects the most valuable collection of Irish- Gaelic material yet published (and in saying this I neither forget, nor do I in any way wish to depreciate, the volumes of Kennedy, Curtin, Larminie, and Hyde). It is specially interesting and valu- able because it contains nine tales (Nos. 7-16) which as regards style and mode of narration are closer to the Scotch Gaelic tales than even the best tales of Curtin or Larminie. In particular the " runs " are almost exactly the same. Some of these are Con- naught stories, but others from Munster.

When I began to study Celtic folktales twenty-three years ago, I was at once struck by the fact that the Scotch Gaelic tales had a far more primitive aspect than those collected in Ireland. At that time there was nothing Irish to compare with Campbell save Carleton and Kennedy. Then, as the Irish storytellers came to be more faithfully reproduced by Curtin, Hyde, and Larminie, I noticed a closer approximation alike in subject matter and form between the tales of the two divisions of Gaeldom. But still I could find no exact parallels to a number of " runs " in the Scotch tales — " runs " which, as pointed out by my friend Dr. Hyde in Beside the Fire, stand in some as yet undetermined rela- tion to similar passages in Irish MSS. of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. As to what that relation was, I differed from Dr. Hyde. He looked upon the "runs" of the hving Scotch Gaelic tales as derived from those found in Irish Gaelic MSS. of from 150 to 200 years old: to my mind, the Scotch "runs" were, although noted so much later, in reality older. I now find in these Munster and Connaught tales collected within the last twenty years exactly the same "runs" (as far as one can judge by com- paring translations) as in the Scotch tales which Campbell collected forty or more years ago, instead of, as might more naturally be expected, derivations more or less degraded of such "runs" as Dr. Hyde has printed. The conclusion which I draw is that the oral " run " represents the basis upon which Irish scribes, as far