Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/352

322  in Tir na-n-og, which we should otherwise have entirely lost.

I may confess that on first hearing these tales I was very suspicious as to their origin. The language used and terms employed led me to think that they had a literary foundation; and it has only been by a process of exhausting all possible sources that I have come to another opinion. Mr. Nutt, with his ever-ready help in things Celtic, suggested that I should lay one of the most suspicious specimens before the Society, and so, by appealing to a wider circle, seek to confirm or upset the conclusions arrived at. I need hardly say I shall be very grateful for any suggestion as to the source, if literary, of the tales. The specimen selected is one which deals with the Quicken-tree of Dubhros and its guardian the Searvan Lochlannach. So far as I know, there is but one version of this tale, viz. that in the story of Diarmuid and Grainne; and I propose firstly to read you the description of the tree and its guardian as there detailed; observing that this version was printed by the Ossianic Society in 1857 from texts of 1780 and 1842 (Ossianic Soc, vol. iii.).

The Pursuit after Diarmuid and Grainne.

"There arose a dispute between two women of the Tuatha Dé Danann, that is, Aoife, the daughter of Mananan, and Aine, the other daughter of Mananan, the son of Lear, viz. Aoife had become enamoured of the son of Lughaidh, that is, sister's son to Fionn MacCumhail, and Aine had become enamoured of Lear of Sith Fhionnchaidh, so that each woman of them said that her own man was a better hurler than the other; and the fruit of that dispute was that a great goaling match was set in order between the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Fenians of Erin, and the place where the goal was played was upon a fair plain by Loch Lein of the rough pools.

"The provision that the Tuatha Dé Danann had brought