Page:The mythology of ancient Britain and Ireland (IA mythologyofancie00squiiala).pdf/74

 It may be well here to remove a few possible misconceptions concerning these sagas and their heroes. The word ' Fenian' in popular parlance is applied to certain political agitators of recent notoriety. But those 'Fenians' merely assumed their title from the tradition that the original Fianna (Fēna) were a band of patriots sworn to the defence of Ireland. With regard, too, to the second title of 'Ossianic' which the romances and poems which make up the cycle bear, it must not be taken that the Fenian hero Ossian was their author, an idea perhaps suggested by the prosepoem of James MacPherson, which, though doubtless founded upon genuine Gaelic material, was almost certainly that writer's own composition. Some of the poetical pieces are, indeed, rightly or wrongly attributed to Ossian, as some are to Finn himself, but the bulk of the poems and all the prose tales are, like the sagas of the Ulster cycle, by unknown authors. A few of them are found in the earliest Irish manuscripts, but there has been a continuous stream of literary treatment of them, and they have also been handed down as folk-tales by oral tradition.

The cycle as a whole deals with the history and adventures of a band of warriors who are described as having formed a standing force, in the pay of