Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/263

 Reviews. 227

I warmly commend the volume, the price of which is only 2S. 6d., to the attention of all folk-lorists.

Professor Gwynn's Metrical Dindschenchas, part ii., is, in reality, his third publication devoted to these poems, the import- ance of which, for Irish myth and saga, is so great. As will be remembered, it was in the pages of Folk-Lore that any considerable mass of the prose Dindschenchas was first made public by Dr. Whitley Stokes. Until all the metrical forms have been published, it would be unsafe to dogmatise concern- ing the relations between verse and prose, but I may say that so far as the materials for comparison are available, they negative, in my opinion, the hypothesis that the existing prose collection is based upon or represents a verse one of equal extent, of which the Book of Leinster poems are the surviving fragments. Of the eighteen poems contained in the present volume, three are ascribed to the well-known tenth-century poet, Cinaed lia Hartacan. I would direct the special attention of students interested in the Etain story to a poem of Cinaed's (LL 209, 625), referred to by Professor Gwynn, p. 95, and a translation of which I owe to his kindness, in view of its bearing upon the remarkable fragments of the missing opening of the legend printed by Dr. Stern {Zeitschrift fiir Celt. Philologie vol. v., pp. 522-534), and commented upon by myself {Revue Celtiqite, vol. xxvii., pp. 325-339).

It is, however, the third of the above-mentioned three volumes that brings out most prominently the interest of Irish material for folk-lorists and the complexity of the problems it raises. Among the five tales edited and translated by Professor Meyer, I would single out those of the deaths of Conchobor and Celtchar. The former has been the best known hitherto of these stories, but the printing of all available versions throws new light upon the problems involved. As is well known, the death of the famous Ulster king is brought into connection with that of Christ, thus affording, perhaps, the most marked example of the wide prevailing Irish tendency to save the kings and heroes who were so dear to the native heart, by associating them in some way with the new faith. The texts, which have transmitted the story to us, contam at least three, if not more, varying