Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/161

Rh If in Gaul we have monuments and no literature, we have in Wales and Ireland a copious literature and no monuments beyond a few inscribed ogham stones, probably all belonging to the Christian period.

In Welsh we have a more ancient Cumbrian or North of England and a later Welsh literature, both in song and prose, the song taking a more important place historically than it does in ancient Irish literature, as it is in many instances the only surviving record of events otherwise forgotten or only confusedly remembered in history; while in Ireland we have in most cases prose narratives founded on the earlier poetry, and formed out of it. But all this Welsh literature, whether older or later, has the disadvantage of a very decided Christian flavour. It is almost as though it had been purposely edited and improved for the use of Christian readers in later times.

In Ireland we have an output of pure romance which is extraordinarily copious. We have also a pseudo-historic period to which we owe the accounts of the imaginary incursions of five races into Ireland as successive tribes of settlers; and we have a large mixed literature of all kinds, prose and poetry, history, legend, and ecclesiastical material belonging to all ages, from perhaps the first to the seventeenth century, embodying signs of many changes of thought and variations in the point of view. A Welshman has, at all events, the satisfaction of knowing what he has to deal with: no lapse of time or advance of knowledge is likely greatly to increase his resources of native lore; but the Irish student is perpetually haunted by the feeling that whatever theory he advances, whatever line of thought he takes up, there may yet turn up on some unlucky day, in some hitherto uninvestigated manuscript at home or abroad, a passage which shall put to flight all his preconceived theories by showing him that in the old days, as in the new, a whole race did not