Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/399

 Celtic Myth and Saga. 391

each separate tale or cycle of tales, that cannot be re- jected or accepted on a priori grounds, but must in each case be judged mainly by the internal evidence furnished by the tale itself If we examine the Moytura story we find, apart from the fact that a portion of it occurs in Cormac's Glossary, strong evidence of its archaic character in the almost entire absence of any Christian colouring, in the comic nature of certain of the supernatural personages (the role of the Dagda, the assumed head of the Irish pantheon, recalls that of Herakles in Aristophanes, or, with less dignity, that of Thor in some of the Norse legends), and in the lack of either incident or characterisa- tion that seems referable to classic sources. Our present text, which is obviously late and much interpolated, presents an interesting literary problem in the parallelism of the final passage with certain portions of the Vol7ispa.

The impression of genuine and archaic origin which this text produces, when read by itself, is much strengthened by comparison with another important tale translated by Mr. Whitley Stokes, the story of the Boroma tribute exacted from Leinster by Tuathal Techtmar, High King of Ireland in the second century, and levied for a space of 500 years, until Saint Moiling procured its remission by a piece of verbal trickery. The two stories may well have assumed substantially their present shape at about the same period, viz., from the 9th to the nth century, and probably owe that shape to the same class of men, the monkish scholars and transcribers who have preserved for us the legends elaborated by the Ollamhs. Yet the character of the two tales is entirely different — the one obviously mythic, the other professedly historic, non-historic accretions being of a legendary or romantic but not of a mythic nature ; the one free from any traces of Christianity save the most superficial and such as betray at once their late and inter- polated origin, the other, in consonance with its historical framework, relying wholly upon Christianity for its super- natural element. If, as some would claim, the originating