Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/260

 2^8 Reviews.

■v)

on a great variety of subjects of world-wide interest. If it is first of all to the original investigators, the linguists and translators, that this change is due, we owe hardly less to those scholars, among whom Mr. Nutt held a distinguished place, who laboured to co-ordinate and elucidate the available material and bring it into its natural connection with the great stream of European culture. In this, as the members of the Folk-Lore Society will always remember, by word and pen, by encouragement to younger workers, and often by actual pecuniary sacrifice, he wrought unceasingly and successfully. The obscure questions of the sources and date of the Ossianic prose tales and poetry, so little understood when he began to write, attracted him hardly less than the origins of the legend of the Holy Grail and other portions of the Arthurian cycle. His series of introductions attached to the volumes of Waifs and Strays of Celtic Tradition^ of which the substance was re-published in his little "Popular Study " on Ossian and the Ossiatiic Literature, set the whole subject upon a new basis. Here Mr. Nutt entered the lists with Professor Zimmer, who had sustained the thesis that the whole Fian cycle of legends was the outcome of the Norse contact with Ireland, and who asserted that the historical (?) Finn was .the ninth-century chief of a mercenary band, half Norse, half Irish. Against this idea, Mr. Nutt contended that the development of the Finn legend owed its origin to the successes of Munster under Brian Boru in the eleventh century, and that the south of Ireland, from which it chiefly hails, discarding the Northern cycle of Cuchulainn tales, which had hitherto been the favourite entertain- ment of the chiefs, evolved in their own honour the tales of the Ossianic cycle. While admitting that there is probably much in this theory to account for the rapid multiplication about this period of the tales of the Fians, we are not disposed to rely upon it so entirely as its originator would do. Indeed, it is probable that he would himself have added new considerations to his theory, had he rewritten his essays at a later period, — the sug- gestions advanced by Mr. John MacNeill, in particular, having brought into view some fresh facts by which he was not un- influenced. But his methodical study of the subject remains the most thorough and scientific treatment that the question