Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/402

394 if correct, have an important bearing upon the study of ancient Celtic literature. M. D'Arbois cites the institution of marriage as exemplifying that archaic side of early Irish civilisation upon which he rightly lays so much stress. The household chief, he says, with perhaps unnecessary realism, held his women in little more estimation than he did the females of his flocks and herds, and was as indifferent to the paternity of the offspring in the one as in the other case. M. D'Arbois is better acquainted with Irish law than any man living, and I doubt not his having good ground for such an extreme assertion. But I must point out that it is not warranted by the testimony of the very sagas which he prints. True, the droit du seigneur is prominent in the oldest tales, and seems to have been as widely spread an institution in ancient Ireland as it still is in certain parts of Africa. But the Tochmarc Emer (Arch. Review, vol. i) turns in part upon Cuchulainn's reluctance to submit to this custom. A similar reluctance is shown by one of the personages in the Boroma tribute story (Rev. Celt., xiii, p. 59). The story of Curoi mac Daire's death is partly a sermon against female fickleness; the stories of Mesgegra's death, and of the Sons of Uisnech, are partly examples of woman's faithfulness. These instances might easily be multiplied, but they suffice to prove either that M. D'Arbois, generalising too widely, has drawn an over-black picture of the marriage relation in ancient Ireland, or else that the romantic sagas are the outcome of a much later stage of national development than that testified to by the customals. If this is so, one can hardly doubt that the active principle in this development must have been Christianity. On the other hand, if Christianity affected the spirit of these stories in so vital a particular, would its influence have stopped there? But on the whole M. D'Arbois' opinion of the marriage-tie in early Ireland would seem, if justified, to prove the relative lateness of the heroic tales. Now one of these tales, the Tochmarc Emer, contains the incident of the father and son combat, found