Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/81

Rh speaking immigrants, to be translated on arrival into the Gaedhelic tongue."

Before discussing Mr. Borlase's evidence, and method of proof, the one of which I find inadequate, the other faulty, I may say that, even if both satisfied me, I should still feel constrained to reject the theory upon grounds drawn from consideration of Irish mythic romance as a whole. The chronology of this, although so uncertain as to deprive it of historical character, is yet, as far as it goes, consistent and in accord with facts. To a dim past are relegated traditions which I cannot but regard as mythology, but mythology anxiously doctored to bring it into line with biblical and classic records. The topography of these legends, so far as Ireland is concerned, is precise and definite; but the admixture of biblical and classic matter has produced a fantastic historico-geography of the wildest description. I hold that all this portion of the tradition has as little origin in actual facts (whether of the fifth century or the fifth century ) as might have the attempt of some Spanish Mexican to remodel the emigration legend of the Aztecs upon the Trojan story as found in Virgil and later writers. Later than these mythical events Irish tradition places a group of heroic legends, the so-called Ultonian cycle. Here the topography is entirely Irish, with, save in the latest and most worked-over texts, no traces of contact with any country but the neighbouring Britain. Following the traditional chronology, we meet a number of historical legends in which the historic horizon of the Irish peoples gradually enlarges, as we know in fact it did, until in the fourth and fifth centuries we have accounts of Irish chiefs not only harrying the coasts of Britain, but crossing the sea to the French and German coasts, and penetrating inland in one case as far as the Alps. Irish historic legend gives us in fact in its proper chronological sequence the counterpart of the Roman and Romano-British accounts of the incursions of Picts and Scots. Now, save as regards the mythological traditions, there is no hint of any foreign settlement being effected in Ireland during the entire period covered by the traditional annals. Once the immigration period is over, topography, genealogy, sociology, are all purely Irish, with simply such evolution as corresponds to known historic facts. I insist in particular upon the sociological correctness of the traditional chronology; the Ulster heroes, assigned to the beginning of the Christian era, are described as possessing modes of fighting, &c., which we know from the