Beauties and Antiquities of Ireland: Being a Tourist's Guide to Its Most Beautiful Scenery & an Archæologist's Manual for Its Most Interesting RuinsRussell, Thomas O'Neill
History
Beauties and Antiquities of Ireland: Being a Tourist's Guide to Its Most Beautiful Scenery & an Archæologist's Manual for Its Most Interesting Ruins
Russell, Thomas O'Neill
Ireland -- Antiquities; Ireland -- Description and travel
Here is a passage from the "Dinnseanchus"
at page 162 of the "Book of Leinster." Treating of Knock Aillinn, these
lines occur:--
"Faichthi ruamand ruamnad rinn
Co failgib flatha for Fhind."
Irish scholars may interpret these lines as they like, but it would seem
that the last word is a proper name, and that it relates to Finn.
But whether Finn lived in Knock Aillinn or in Allen, or whether he lived
in both places off and on, is a matter of minor importance. The real
wonder about him is the way he impressed himself not only on the age in
which he lived but on every age since then. No other man in any age or
country seems to have so fastened himself in the memories of the people of
his own race and lineage. It may be safely said that neither Julius Caesar
nor Charlemagne have impressed themselves on popular imagination so much
as Finn and those associated with him have. Those who have not studied the
Celtic folk-lore of Ireland and Scotland can form but an incomplete idea
of the overwhelming immensity of the folk-lore about Finn and his cycle
that exists even yet. But with the decay of Gaelic speech it is rapidly
fading away. It is hardly too much to say that when Gaelic was the
language of the fireside all through Ireland and a large part of
Scotland, and that is only a few centuries ago, there was not a parish
from Kerry to Caithness in which dozens of different stories about Finn
and his contemporaries did not exist; and it is equally safe to say that
not the tenth, probably not the twentieth, part of them was ever committed
to writing. Finn, Ossian, and Caoilte were the _dramatis personæ_ of the
most extensive, if not the choicest, popular, unwritten folk-lore that
probably ever existed in any country. But one of the strangest things
connected with the cycle of Finn and Ossian is that its folk-lore hardly
appears at all in really ancient Gaelic literature. The Gaelic scribes of
the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries took but little notice of it;
it was to the events of the Cuchulainn cycle that they gave almost their
entire attention. In the "Book of Leinster," the greatest repertory of
Gaelic literature that exists in one volume, there is only one story that
can be called an Ossianic or Finnian one, while nearly half the book is
taken up with tracts and stories relating to the cycle of Cuchulainn,
which was nearly three centuries earlier than that of Ossian and Finn. But
the Cuchulainn cycle, from whatever cause will probably be never known,
seems to have entirely failed to take hold of the popular imagination.
Folk-lore relating to the Cuchulainn cycle is rare. There are a few in
which Cuchulainn is mentioned, and M'Pherson in his Ossian mixes the
Ossianic and Cuchulainn cycles together, although they were three
centuries apart. Of all the prominent names belonging to the Cuchulainn
cycle, Queen Medb or Meave was one of the most prominent, but not a single
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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