Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 8, 1897.djvu/64

 42 peasant after our survey of the mediaeval romantic literature we are seemingly at fault. The fairies are the lineal descendants of the Tuatha de Danann; name and attributes and story can be traced, and yet the outcome is so different. The Irish peasant belief of to-day is agricultural in its scope and intent, as is the English—the Irish fairies are bestowers of increase in flock and herd, protectors and fosterers of vegetation, jealous guardians of ancient country rites. In spite of identity of name and attribute, can these beings be really the same as the courtly, amorous wizard-knights and princesses of the romances? The difference is as great as between Oberon and Puck. And yet, as we have seen, the historical connection is undeniable; in Ireland the unity of the fairy world has never been lost sight of as it has in England.

Hitherto I have brouorht before vou stories in which the Tuatha de Danann play a subordinate part because the mortal hero or heroine has to be glorified. But there exists also a group of stories in which these beings are the sole actors, which are wholly concerned with their fortunes. We are in a position to demonstrate that these stories belong to a very early stratum of Irish mythic literature. After the introduction of Christianity into Ireland the tales told of the Tuatha de Danann, the old gods, seem to have considerably exercised the minds of the literary and priestly classes. They were too widely popular to be discarded — how then should they be dealt with? One way was to minimise the fantastic supernatural element and to present the residuum as the sober history of kings and heroes who had lived in the dim ages before Christ. This way was taken, and a large body of resulting literature has come down to us. But a certain number of fragmentary stories, and one long one, to which this minimising, rationalising process has been applied scarcely, if at all, have also been preserved; and these must obviously be older than the rationalised versions. And as the latter can be traced back to the eighth