Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/400

 392 Celtic Myth and Saga.

cause of both story-cycles is to be found in an alien and purely literary culture, is such consistent adaptation of treatment to subject-matter conceivable for one moment ? Must not rather the unprejudiced observer recognise that the mediaeval story-teller is relating something much older than himself ; something derived, substantially, from that stage of culture to which it professes to belong ? To judge otherwise were to look upon these tales as historical novels. This genre was not entirely unknown in the Middle Ages, but we know by a famous example, Geoffrey of Mon- mouth's pseudo-history of Britain, how it was conceived and elaborated. Nothing more alien in spirit and execu- tion to the Irish tales we are considering can be imagined.

We further owe to Mr. Whitley Stokes text and trans- lation of the oldest version of Cormac's Adventure in the Land of Promise^ (a modern recension of which had been published by Mr. Standish Hayes O'Grady in vol. iii of the Ossianic Society's Transactions), one of the most interesting early Irish descriptions of the Otherworld, and remarkable in its present, relatively late form, from having received some slight Christian touches, which can, however, be easily separated from the main body of the tale.

The same volume of the Irische Texte contains the text and German version by Professor Windisch of perhaps the most curious and, to folk-lorists, most interesting of the remscela, or introductory stories prefixed to the Tain bo Cuailgne. The greatest of Irish epics is traced back to the quarrel of two swineherds who war against each other for years in different shapes, both human and animal, and finally reincarnate themselves in two bulls, the rivalry between which it is that leads to the invasion of Ulster by the allied forces of the remainder of Ireland. As I pointed out in my paper on Heroic Legend, read before the Second International Folk-lore Congress, this is practically the oldest known example of the Transformation fight-incident, which, as is well known, occurs, though in different form, ^ Irische Texte, vol. iii, i.