Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/85

 Reviews. 6i

one hundred years older than his time, so that the process of redupHcating Germanic topography in Ireland must have begun in the first century. If so, what warrant have we that the influence ascribed to Continental events of the third and following centuries is not really at least two hundred years older ?

A yet more striking example of that of the Cotriguri-Cotraigi. The sixth-century Greek historian Procopius mentions a Hunnish people, the Cuturguri, dweUing on the further side of the Palus Maeotis {i.e. the modern Sea of Azov). His continuator, Agathias, styles them Cotriguri. Leo Diaconus in the tenth century has the form Cotragi, and associates them with the Bulgares. But in Irish legend we have a people called the Cothraighe, who are sometimes associated with the Firbolgs. Obviously, says Mr. Borlase, the Cotriguri and Bulgares of the fifth century and later Greek historians. Now mark ; the Irish Cothraighe left their name to, among other places, the Cathrigia regio in Northern Ireland, mentioned in one of the oldest lives of St. Patrick. A later form is Catherich, which seems to be con- nected with Ptolemy's Caturactonion, in which case the name is as old as the first century. But even if this connection be put aside, we have the more important fact that a tribal name, Caturiges, was well known in Gaul, where it is vouched for by Caesar and Strabo. Surely it is infinitely simpler and more scientific to connect the Cothraighe of Celtic-speaking Ireland with the Caturiges of Celtic- speaking Gaul than with the Hunnish Cuturguri. Mr. Borlase cites all these facts ; but they induce no suspicion of his main thesis, they merely lead him to elaborate a scheme of the wander- ings of his Caturiges between Gaul and Southern Russia in the centuries immediately preceding and following the Christian era, in order to account for their presence in the Black Sea, whence they started forth again in the sixth century to sprinkle their name over a large part of Ireland.

The author's main reliance is upon the likeness between certain Irish sagas and events which took place on the Continent, and his chief instance is the parallel between Procopius' account of the Heruli and the Irish story of the revolting Aithech Tuatha. The Greek historian relates how at the end of the fifth century the Herulian King Rodolf attacked the Langobardi, was defeated, slain, and his tribes utterly dispersed. One section settled among the Gepidas, to whom they paid rent, but later submitted themselves