Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/449

 Revieivs. 407

with an evident hesitation both as to its propriety as a too mundane explanation, and as to how the conflicting accounts can be made to tally.

A further point in which the author of the Rawlinson text has "improved" on his predecessors is in his omission of the touch- ing and evidently historic reminiscence of Ciaran's death found both in the Marsh's Library text and in the Irish version. No doubt he considered that the monk's very human shrinking from the "dread upward path" into the unknown was unbecoming in a saint. Probably also the dying man's impatient and con- temptuous dismissal of his disciples' proposal to stay by his " relics," i.e. his dead bones, was unpleasing to the sentiment of a later age. On the other hand we find an addition made to the mention of the "hallowed fire" kept always burning at the monastery of St. Ciaran of Saighir which is instructive. In the Latin form it is developed into a Pascal fire, " et sanctus senex Kiaranus nolebat ignem alium in suo monasterio, nisi consecratum ignem a pascha usque ad pascha sine extinccione." It is likely that this ever-burning fire had, like St. Brigit's fire at Kildare, a more ancient origin than that of the monks of St. Ciaran's monastery. The transformiation into a pascal fire has probably a parallel in the pascal fire at Tara (or Taillte) so confusedly spoken of in the Lives of St. Patrick.

To the general student the most important new matter in these volumes will probably be the two hitherto unpublished Lives of St. Brendan. The second of these lives, taken from a Bodleian Ms. (e. Musaeo iii.), sometime belonging to the Abbey of Valle Crucis in Denbighshire, shows many peculiarities, and is of special interest as being in the Editor's view the original from which was derived the Anglo-Norman poem published by F. Michel in 1878, and by Suchier three years previously. Taken along with the Latin and German texts published by Jubinal, Schroder, and Card. Moran, the Early English versions printed by Thomas Wright, the Irish Life from the Book of Lismore edited by Dr. Stokes, and the Anglo-Norman poems, students have now before them the larger part of the material available for the study of the Brendan legend. To Irish readers its chief interest will always lie in the meeting in it of an Eastern and a Western