Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/440

 39^ Reviews.

son, fall at each other's hand in the battle of Gabhra, the Camlan of the Ossianic legend.

This traditional account is open to grave objections. A distinguishing feature of the cycle is the position assigned to the Fenian bands ; these have the status of a semi-professional army, and are continually engaged in repelling the attacks of foreign invaders. No such state of things is known to have existed, or indeed, as far as foreign invasions are concerned, could have existed in third-century Ireland. This discrepancy between his- toric fact and the donnees of the cycle induced Professor Zimmer to assign the latter to the ninth century, the period of the Viking invasions. Mr. MacNeill's theory is different. He accepts as genuine the standing-army character of the Fenian bands ; what he rejects as the fiction of a later age is the traditional history of the second-third century kings, Conn, Art, Cormac in the North, Eoghan, Ailill Olum in the South. According to him the saga of these chiefs is not that of settled dynasties with a background of regal status and descent cover- ing centuries, as the chiefs of the seventh and eighth centuries fondly imagined, but of a period of conquest during which the major part of Ireland was subjected to the sway of Milesian kings ruling at Tara in the North and at Cashel in the South. The Milesian tribesmen were free men, and could only be called upon for short spells of military service, — a fort- night and a month, says one text. But amongst the peoples subjugated by the Milesian chiefs were fighting races. Upon these the chiefs laid the burden of permanent liability to military service ; thanks to the standing armies thus evolved they were able to dominate all Ireland, and establish the political system known to us from texts of the seventh century onward. Early in the fourth century Milesian supremacy crystallised round the two centres of Tara and Cashel; the institution of yfawship, the standing army organisation of the subject races, died away with the conquest period which had given rise to it ; the history of the second-third centuries was transformed in order to warrant the claims of long descent and settled rule put forward for the chiefs of the conquest.

For Mr. MacNeill the Ossianic cycle consists of the hero