Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/441

 Reviews. 399

legends of one of these subject races, more or less transformed when they were taken up by the Milesian story-tellers in order to fit them into the framework of pseudo-history elaborated by the Milesian bards and ollamhs with the object of glorifying the second-third century Milesian chiefs of the conquest. This admission into what may be styled the official corpus of story-telling took place, and could only take place, long after the first formation of the legends. So long as any trace of the subject status of the Fenian races subsisted, so long were their legends disdained by the free kinsmen of the Milesian kings. Moreover, the latter had learnt and eagerly appro- priated the older heroic legends of Ulidia, the legends which centred round Conchobor and Cuchulainn, and it was a main object of the Milesian bards to forge genealogical links in a serried chain uniting the chiefs of Tara and Cashel with the mighty sons of Rudraighe who had held sway at Emain Macha.

It was not until, in the course of centuries, the distinction between the free and subject races of Ireland had become effaced in practice, — (it survived in theory until the final dis- appearance of the Irish school of genealogist antiquaries in the eighteenth century), — that Finn and Oscar could take their place by the side of Conchobor and Cuchulainn ; and, to do so, their story must suffer a change. Originally the blood-feuds which supply a backbone to the cycle ran their tragic course wholly within the circle of the subject races ; this would never do, and so the high-kings of Tara came to figure as protagonists in the story, which thus became worthy the recitation of courtly ollamhs.

Another set of historical circumstances helped to determine the final evolution of the cycle. For centuries there was strife between the Milesian chiefs of the North and the South, between the race of Conn and the race of Eoghan. For centuries the North held the advantage, though it was illusory rather than real. At length a time came when the chiefs of the South wrested the high kingship from those of the North. But Finn and his band had always belonged to the South rather than to the North, and the historical exigencies which, in their transformed saga, gave them the high kings of Tara as opponents could