Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/398

 390 Celtic Myth and Saga.

M. D'Arbois de Jubainville's works, cited at the head of this article under Nos. 2 and 3, lie outside the scope of these reports, but must be mentioned as indispensable to any serious student of Celtic antiquity.

Turning to Ireland, we find that great activity has been shown in that first requisite of scholarly progress — the publication and translation of texts. Mr. Whitley Stokes has issued, in the Transactions of the Philological Society (for 1891-92), the Bodleian fragment of Cormac's Glossary, Irish text and English version. Although a modern tran- script (1440 A.D.), it was made, as the editor points out> from an older text than that represented by any other MS. save the nth century fragment in the BooJ^: of Leinster. According to Mr. Whitley Stokes, the Glossary in its oldest form was written (the italics are mine) not much before the nth century, i.e., at the end, instead of at the beginning, of the loth century, the traditional date. It is noteworthy that all the articles (" inibas forosna'\ " lethecJi\ " nmgh-e'me", " Manannan mac lir'', " nescoif\ ^^ ore \ ^' pru It") -which, make Cormac's Glossary so invalu- able to the student of Celtic myth and saga are to be found in this fragment.

Mr. Whitley Stokes has also published in the Revue Cel- tique the most important text of the so-called mythological cycle (cf Folk-Lore Journal, ii, 175), the "Second Battle of Moytura". In this story we see what are presumably the personages of the ancient Irish pantheon masquerading in the guise of prehistoric kings and chiefs, yet retaining the magic attributes and capacities which distinguish the actors in the god- and hero-tales of nearly every race that has produced such tales. The MS. tradition of the tale as a whole is late, and it is open to the sceptic to urge that these magic supernatural traits do not come down from a primitive pre-Christian stage, but are simply part of a story- telling machinery common throughout the Middle Ages, and mainly derived from blurred reminiscences of classic fable. This is a theory that must be re-faced in respect of