Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/444

 402 Reviews.

same traditions and system of things, and clinging with all the strength of hereditary custom to the ancient ways in which they had grown up. The native traditions were as intimate a part of the texture of thought of the Celtic " Saints " or teachers as they were of the people whom they sought to instruct. Hence a transition that might, in the hands of foreign missionaries, have been attended with sharp collisions between the outlook of the teachers and that of the taught, went forward in Ireland with as little uprooting of native habits as possible. The liberal incor- poration of old beliefs with the new was not a dangerous experiment, doubtfully acquiesced in by the religious leaders ; it was an unconscious but universal result of their own native habits of life. The feeling of opposition between the old order and the new, such as we see symbolized in the hostility of the Druids to St. Patrick or in the parable of King Murtough and the Witch- Woman, though it was no doubt aroused occasionally, was rare and unusual. The worship of stream and well and fire and stone continued much as of old, only that it became associated with the name of some local hermit or abbot who had supplanted the original pagan deity of whose special cult it formed a part.

All this is fairly well understood, but the recent edition of the Latin Lives of the Irish Saints, the Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae, by the Rev. Charles Plummer, presses the matter a step further. In reading these Lives it is impossible to resist the conclusion that he has himself come to, that several of the individual saints have incorporated into their actual life-story large elements derived from the traditions concerning some earlier pagan god or hero belonging to the district in which they settled. This may have happened frequently, but it is not always possible to trace the direct connection between the Christian saint and his pagan forerunner. This can, however, be done in the case of St. Moiling of Ferns in Leinster. He is named Moiling of Luachair on account, as his Irish pedigree tells us, of his three swift leaps which he took in clearing Luachair of Dega " when the spectres were after him."^

Now we find in two Irish secular tracts, — the " Colloquy of

^ Irish Life, ed. by Whitley Stokes, pp. 14-16 (1906); Silva Gadelica, ed. by Standish H. O'Grady, vol. ii., Extracts III. (viii.).