Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/53

 Rh means successful; first a lamb, and then a silver trout were born, but finally Aed Slane, and he was the chief man of his day in Ireland.

The story has come down to us in two forms: (a) a prose text, which I have abridged above; (b) a poem by Flann Manistrech, who died in 1056; this merely gives the birth-story, omitting the rivalry between the two queens. The prose story as we have it mentions the poem, and would thus seem to be later than it; but Mr. Whitley Stokes tells me that its language is, if anything, somewhat older, although it cannot be dated much before the beginning of the 11th century. Prose and verse would thus seem to be independent versions connected in LU. by the paragraph concerning Flann's poem. The polygamy and the intervention of the two saints certainly picture manners and feeling as old, to say the least, as the alleged date of the personages. In the poem the animal births are interpreted in a Christian sense, both lamb and fish being symbols of Christ. Seeing, however, that we have to do with a story of rivalry and jealousy, it is allowable to compare the incident with the one, so frequent in folk-tales, in which the queen is accused by an enemy of giving birth to an animal, and is in consequence driven away by her husband. It is even allowable to speculate whether this form, the normal one, of the incident is not secondary, whether originally the enemy did not actually by the power of magic cause the offspring of the heroine to be animal instead of human. But such speculations would, I admit, at present be rather en l'air.

The miraculous growth of hair recalls at once the Godiva legend. Here, there can be little doubt, the present form of the story is not the original one. The point must have been that the countess rode naked, and that the covering of hair was a miraculous protection against unholy curiosity. A similar conception is almost a commonplace in early Christian legend. The most familiar, as well as the oldest form known, is that found in the Acts of St. Agnes.