Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/378

 COLLECTANEA.

(continued).

a preceding article I have dealt with place names and legends of names, banshees, the death coach, and fairies, and in the present one I propose to deal mainly with other appearances of a spectral or spiritual character. In doing this it is necessary carefully to avoid attributing to older writers beliefs which they never held. It is more than probable that the writer of the Wars of the Gaedhil with the Gaill, and Seean MacCraith, the author of the Triumphs of Torlough, were no more under a delusion when they personified the spirits of Valour, Bloodshed, Terror, and Sovereignty than the modern journalist who writes of "Public Opinion sitting in judgment," or the "Spirit of Loyalty attending King George." The first ancient writer, describing the terrors of the deadly combat of the Irish and the Norse in 1014, tells us that there was "a bird of valour and championship fluttering over Murchad's head and flying on his breath." He also tells how there flew a dark, merciless, (and many more adjective-endowed) bodbh, screaming and fluttering over the combatants, while "the satyrs (bannanaig), the idiots, the maniacs of the glens, the witches, the goblins, the ancient birds, the destroying demons of the air and sky, and the feeble demonic phantom host" arose to accompany the warriors in the combat. He probably meant little more than "Amazement in the van and Flight combined with Sorrow's faded form and Solitude behind," though possibly the various uncanny "creatures of the wild" were real to him in their proper places in the hills and glens, but not in daylight on the fields beside Dublin. The second writer (circa