Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/344

 326 Reviews.

of continuing its custody and attending to its accretions ; but they were dis- established and disendowed, and the pen was torn from their grasp by the propagators of the new faith. If, on the other hand, Hterature and writing were only introduced into the kingdom along with Christianity, it must be at once admitted that the monks were the true and only custodians of literature. The admission, however, dissolves the basis on which rest the alleged glories of ancient Erin. Let us bring simple common sense into play, and not acquiesce in statements solely because they appear in Irish MSS. of by no means ancient date — records such as that of the peopling of Ireland before the flood, of the total extinction of this race, who yet left behind them a record of the event, and the thousand and one other absurdities which it is considered unpatriotic not to believe."

The author seems here to be confusing between the Hterary material and the means of its preservation, between Hterature proper, or the body of romance, poetry, and other material which forms the matter to be preserved, and the writing in which it was handed down. Writing on parchment was probably introduced into Ireland with Christianity, though, the date of the first in- troduction of Christianity being probably much earlier than is usually supposed, this still brings us back to a very early period. We have no direct evidence of its existence in Pagan times, though writing of some sort on sticks, stones, and wooden tablets was certainly used, and the latter was continued as a common form of writing far into Christian times. But the author must surely be aware that the Pagan literature that has come down to us was handed on, like the genealogies and tribal records, by word of mouth, by a specially trained body of reciters, until it was rescued from possible destruction by the monks, who collected and wrote it down in large books, which are thus repositories of a pre-existent literature. The monks did not create either the romance or the annalistic records, though they altered and added to them to suit their own conceptions of things. But, fortunately, their alterations in the tales can, in most cases, easily be discerned ; the spirit and breath of Paganism abides in them still, and it is the survival of a literature pre-Christian in spirit, though some- what modified in form, that gives its special value to Irish romance. When Colonel Wood-Martin says that the story of Cuchulainn has been re-modelled on that of Christ, he is carried away by an imaginative exaggeration of a few incidents in the hero's career. Both in outline and in detail, as in spirit, the story is essentially Pagan.