Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/417

 Reviews. 363

dwelling is the Red Hall, unknown to genuine Arthurian tradition. It seems probable that in both these tales Arthur and Sir Galahad have replaced earlier Irish heroes.

On the merits of the translation as representing the original text I am not qualified to pronounce an opinion. The stories read awkwardly, and the translator seems to possess little feeling for style, the version being that of a " crib " rather than of a series making claim to be literature. More information of a philological character might also well have been given. It would have been interesting to know the exact form in which the Arthurian proper names are preserved in the Irish ; do they testify to direct use of the French, or to a Celtic, (Welsh?), original? This, at least, is a point which should have been made clear. Altogether, this is a disappointing book.

Jessie L. Weston.

Royal Irish Academy Todd Lecture Series, Vol. xv. The Instructions of King Cormac Mac Airt. K. Meyer. Dublin, 1909. 8vo, pp. xii + 64.

This is a specimen of a literary genre — the Mirror of Princes — which is, as the editor points out, well represented in mediaeval Irish literature. As is so largely the case with that literature, much of its interest depends upon its early date, the text being assigned by the editor to the ninth century. In common with similar texts, e.g. the Tecosc Morainn which Professor Meyer would date a hundred years earlier, and the Briathartecosc Conculaind, it thus forms the oldest body of gnomic wisdom in any European vernacular, its sole possible rivals being the old Norse Ilavd-mal, and the early English gnomic matter preserved in the Exeter Book. These Teutonic examples are, in point of record, probably later than the Irish ones, but it is a question well worth investiga- tion whether, essentially, they are not more archaic. It is a suggestive fact that, in two MSS. to which Professor Meyer assigns the first place, a share in the production of this literature is attributed to Aldfrid, son of Oswry, the seventh-century Northum-