Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/39

 The Story of Deirdre. 25

Perhaps the most familiar of all the stories of heroic Ireland is the Tale of Deirdre, or the " Tragical Death of the Sons of Usnach." When the legends of the heroic period of Irish literary production fell into disuse, when even the popular " Wooing of Emer," the " Tain Bo Cuailgne," and the " Feast of Bricriu " grew hazy in the people's tradition, the Sorrowful Tale of Usnach's Sons seemed endowed with perennial vitality. It is still at the present day the best known of all the large stock of Irish romances, and on it the art of living musicians, poets, and story-tellers has exercised itself with the result, at all events, of keeping its memory alive.

One consequence of its long-continued popularity we wish to point out in this paper. While many of the great cycle of tales to which this romance belongs have come down to us without essential change, save the introduction of Christian ideas here and there, this story has undergone a continuous series of alterations, not only in details but even in the character of the principal personages, especially those of the heroine and her nurse, Levarcham.

The Deirdre of the ancient tale, forceful of purpose, fiercely determined at all hazards to gain her ends, and, spite of the steadfastness and strength of her devotion, showing in her conduct the savagery of an untamed nature, becomes softened in a later surviving form of the tale pre- served in a 17th or i8th century manuscript into the tearful, sentimental maiden of a century ago. It is curious to find the wild woman of the 12th century Book of Leinster ver- sion transformed into the Lydia Languish of a later age.

Levarcham, too, has in this late version lost her repellent qualities ; the terrible magician of the early tales has changed into a fond and foolish old nurse who cannot resist the wil- ful pleadings of her charge.

The change is very marked and curious, and it represents the vast revolution in social manners and modes of thought in Ireland between the time of the first creation of the story