Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/406

398 persons, therefore he must be right in all, and they forthwith choose his most questionable theory upon which to build further hypotheses.

This is the explanation of an article by M. Pflugk-Hartung in the Revue Celtique. The writer's object is praiseworthy. Struck by the difficulty of dating the earliest Irish stories by purely literary tests, he turned to archæology for more trustworthy evidence. The material life pictured in these stories seemed to him inconsistent with the testimony of the peat-moss and the chambered barrow. In this perplexity, Prof Zimmer's contention for the marked influence exercised upon Irish heroic literature by Viking creed and fancy was a ray of light. As is the way of disciples, he went one better, and for him the great mass of Irish sagas are post-Viking compositions of the tenth century, the material and moral civilisation of which (and not that of pre-Christian Ireland) it is they reflect.

This is a bold contention, and it is worth a moment's inquiry whether archaeological evidence alone is capable of proving it. That archæology can throw valuable light upon the origin and nature of a text is certain, but the light is apt to be very dim unless we have a previously formed idea of how the text came into being. Now with regard to the older stratum of Irish heroic legend (that of which Cuchulainn is the chief hero), the doctrine which holds the field, and which is based chiefly upon Prof. Zimmer's admirable researches into the composition of the texts contained in the Leabhar na h'Uidhre, is briefly this. Reduced to writing for the first time in the seventh century, when Christianity had at once introduced a new culture, established new ideals, and forced the older world it dispossessed to manifest itself in permanent form on forfeit of disappearing altogether, the after history of these tales belongs to written literature rather than to oral tradition. But they were not slavishly transcribed; each age modernised and revised them, put new words in the place of obsolete ones, glossed archaisms, transformed or eliminated