Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/438

 396 Reviews.

difficulty, we feel disappointed of our due. However that may

be, all will yield their tribute of admiration and thanks for the

splendid corpus of material brought together by the author's

unwearied industry.

N. W. Thomas.

Irish Texts Society. Vol. VII. Duanaire Finn. The Book of the Lays of Fionn. Part I. Irish Text, with Translation into EngHsh by Eoin MacNeill. Nutt, 1908. 8vo, pp. lxv + 208.

This volume contains part of the oldest extant Ms. written in Ireland, consisting solely of pieces belonging to the Ossianic cycle of which Finn mac Cumhail, his son Oisin, his grandson Oscar, his nephews Diarmaid and Caoilte, and his rival GoU are the chief personages. It dates from the first quarter of the seventeenth century. A certain number of the pieces are known from much earlier Mss., e.g. No. XIII (The Headless Phantoms) is found in the twelfth century Book of Leinster, and the chief prose text of the cycle, the Agallamh na Senorach, found in the Ms. in an imperfect form, is extant in Mss. older by one hundred and fifty to two hundred years. But Captain Sorley Macdonnell, for whom the collection was transcribed, and his scribes seem to have been the first compilers of a Corpus Ossianicum. For the well-known Scotch Gaelic Ms., the Book of the Dean of Lismore, which antedates the Macdonnell collec- tion by about a century, is only partially made up of Ossianic pieces.

The fashion set by the Macdonnell Ms. in bringing together a number of metrical pieces, — (it is these alone which Mr. John MacNeill has edited and translated), — representing more or less all the phases of the cycle, was to be eagerly followed. From thence onward the number of Irish Mss. containing narrative Ossianic poetry steadily grows throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But in the majority of these the poems are in the new and freer metrical system which first made its appearance in the Scotch section of Gaeldom in the sixteenth