Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/147

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tunities of collecting original material, and, if we have any fault to find with a book from which we have ourselves derived so much delight, it is that he has not given us so much as we could wish of his own observations. The book is, however, a real con- tribution towards the study of comparative Celtic folklore, for he derives his examples from Irish, Gaulish, and Breton, as well as from Scottish tradition. Readers of Anatole le Braz or Sebillot will find constant similarities between Scottish beliefs with regard to the soul and death, and those of Brittany ; no doubt this resemblance will be still more strongly accentuated when the author gives us his promised volume especially devoted to death-beliefs. The idea of the escape of the soul from the dead body in the form of a butterfly or moth, a fly or a gnat, (pp. 77-81), is common in Brittany, while the bird-soul is a familiar belief in Irish legend, both in secular tales and lives of the saints.

It is of great interest to trace the transference into Christian belief of jjagan ascriptions ; we believe that Dr. Henderson has here for the first time pointed out that St. Michael replaces, in present-day charms, a pagan deity or divine power called " Brian," a sort of Gaelic Neptune, called at least in one poem " Brian Michael." In Ireland he has been forgotten, though the name Brian occurs as one of the original triad of Tuatha De Danann gods; but in nearly all Irish charms the persons invoked are "St. Brigit with her mantle, St. Michael with his shield," though St. Columcille often, both in Ireland and Scotland, replaces St. Michael or is added to the two others. We know that St. Brigit had a pagan representative of the same name, and now St. Michael can be identified as replacing an ancient deity called Brian ; possibly we may yet recover Columcille's pagan ancestor, the third of the triad of protective powers.

To the author's examples of " the apple-tree from Emain " as the sacred tree of the unseen world, we would add the fine poem to Ragnall of the Isles, published from an Irish manuscript belonging to Hennessy in Skene's Celtic Scotland, vol. iii (App. I.). It is a much later example of the survival of this tradition than those cited by Dr. Henderson. The late examples of human sacrifice in Scotland are interesting (pp. 261, 270). We are not