Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/475

 ________ HE Dinnshenchas is a collection of legends, in Middle-Irish prose and verse, about the names of noteworthy places in Ireland — plains, mountains, ridges, cairns, lakes, rivers, rapids, fords, estuaries, islands, and so forth. And the Bodleian Dinnshenchas is an unfinished copy of this collection preserved in the Bodleian library, in ff. 11-15 of the manuscript marked Rawlinson B. 506. This codex, once the property of Sir James Ware, is on parchment, and may have been written at the end of the fourteenth or the beginning of the fifteenth century. It contains, so far as one can judge by comparison with other copies, about one-third of the prose part of the work. Five other copies of the Dinnshenchas are known, viz. :

LL., the copy in the Lebar Laignech, or the Book of Leinster, a MS. of the middle of the twelfth century, of which a facsimile, in which many of the leaves are misplaced, has been published by the Royal Irish Academy. Here most of the tales are told both in prose and in verse. But the prose versions, as found in the facsimile, are scattered through pp. 159, 160, and 165-170, and the so-called poems are in pp. 151-158, 161 -164, and 191-216 ;

BB., the copy in the Book of Ballymote (a vellum of the end of the fourteenth century, in the library of the Royal Irish Academy), pp. 349-410 of the facsimile ; H., H. 3. 3, a double-columned vellum, in quarto, ff. 36, of (I should say) the beginning of the fifteenth century. For a loan of this copy, which belongs to the library of Trinity College, Dublin, I am indebted to the Board of that College ;