Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/265

 Reviews. 229

bigger, one would think, than a golf or tennis ball, serve as "Bute's pillow," to use the poet's words? Well, the very text which has preserved Cinaed's poem, has also preserved a short poem by the eleventh-century Flann Manistrech, in which gigantic stature is attributed to the old saga heroes ; the length of Conchobor was seventy-three feet, of Tadg mac Cein (a famous third-century Munster chief), fifty feet. To my know- ledge this is the earliest precise allusion in Irish literature to the giant size of the men of the heroic age, a conception widely spread throughout the Ossianic literature of the thirteenth and following centuries, but quite absent, at least stated in express terms, from the Ulster heroic sagas themselves. I conceive that it may possibly be the outcome of traditional connection between the racial heroes and the Megalithic monuments ; the euhemerising antiquaries, of whom Flann is an excellent type, argued from the size of the quoits, wash-pots, whetstones, etc., which folk-fancy assigned to the heroes, that the latter must have been giants.

Still more interesting is the Celtchar death story. We learn that Blai of Ulster, a keeper of one of the guest-houses famous in Irish saga, was under geis to exercise the droit du seigneur on every woman who came to his guest-house unless her husband were in her company. Celtchar's wife, who seems to have been a mischief-maker, went alone to Blai. Celtchar, incensed at the wrong done him, pursued Blai even to the royal house, where Conchobor and Cuchullin were playing at fidchell, and speared him, so that a drop of the blood fell on the fidchell board. The drop being nearer Conchobor, it fell to the king to take vengeance. Meanwhile, Celtchar escaped to the Munster Deisi. The Ulster warriors were greatly troubled ; it was bad enough losing Blai without having strife with the Deisi. The king suggests that Celtchar's son should go for his father, and be his safeguard, "for at that time, with the men of Ulster, a father's crime was not laid upon his son, nor a son's crime upon his father." Celtchar is very indignant at this move ; his son ought to be kept out of the affair altogether, and in any case cannot, he feels, be a satisfactory safeguard for him. However, he returns, and has it laid upon him to free Ulster