Page:The Celtic Review volume 3.djvu/82

Rh dealing with a poem or epic written long after the event, as we are even in the Homeric tales; these are no stories written from a distance by trained interpreters, or chastened and rounded by the poet’s reflections; we seem to be in the thick of the actual combat; the events these stories relate come to us piecemeal, prodigious, just as they appeared to their contemporaries; and they evidently relate to a condition of things not yet passed out of recollection, but remaining as a natural part of the daily life. The chariot-riding, the ‘Creaghs’ or ‘Táins,’ for the purpose of cattle-lifting, the combats at the ford, the great feasts, all are part of a condition of things still familiar to the recollection and traditions of the makers of these tales.

And these contemporary records, if for this purpose we may call them so, are the more valuable for the special object of our study here, because they profess to be the records of an age contemporary also with, or closely trenching on, that of the Roman writers whose observations so markedly confirm their truth. The series of semi-romantic episodes which these tales describe are supposed by the Irish shanachies themselves to have taken place in the North of Ireland (for the greatest cycle of Irish romance hails, curiously enough, from Ulster), at the beginning of the first century of our era. The birth and death of King Conor, who is the official chief of the cycle, though not its most remarkable representative, is said, evidently by later Christian synchronisers, to have occurred at the same time as that of our Lord; and though this is a later detail, added to give a Christian flavour and dignity to the story, the general character of the tales seems to fit in well with this period, or an even earlier epoch. They cannot, in any case, be much later, for from internal evidence they seem to have been formed before the creation of the province of Meath, or the rise of Tara as a monarchy. The destruction of Emain Macha, the ancient capital of Ulster, the geographical centre of these stories, is said to have occurred about the middle of the fourth century (i.e. before the establishment of Christianity), and this corresponds very