Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/351

TRANSACTIONS OF THE FOLK-LORE SOCIETY.

BY LELAND L. DUNCAN, F.S.A.

(Read at Meeting of 17th March, 1896.)

been successful beyond my expectation in the collection of folktales in co. Leitrim, and have written down verbatim from the reciters about sixty or seventy. I do not know that there is anything very new about any of them, but many do not exist in any Irish collection, although we may have Scottish variants. I hope the whole may be in print some day.

Amongst my peasant friends—I can cordially call them so—is one young man from whom I wrote down a group of tales which differ considerably from those told by anyone else in the district. He is an English-speaker only; but his tales bear a certain resemblance to the inflated bardic style of the eighteenth century, and it is not at all improbable that he obtained them from men who either possessed or had access to some of those manuscripts of that and the previous century, the dispersal and destruction of which is so justly deplored by Dr. Douglas Hyde; for in some cases they have preserved to us portions of the older literature, such as the Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne, and Oisin  VOL. VII.