THE LITERATURE OF THE CELTS BY MAGNUS MACLEAN M.A., D.Sc., LL.D. _NEW EDITION_ BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED 50 OLD BAILEY, LONDON; GLASGOW, BOMBAY 1926 PREFACE Celtic studies have grown apace within recent years. The old scorn, the old apathy and neglect are visibly giving way to a lively wonder and interest as the public gradually realise that scholars have lighted upon a literary treasure hid for ages. This new enthusiasm, generated in great part on the Continent—in Germany, France, and Italy, as well as in Britain and Ireland, has already spread to the northern nations—to Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, and is now beginning to take root in America. A remarkable change it certainly presents from the days when Dr. Johnson affirmed that there was not in all the world a Gaelic MS. one hundred years old; and the documents were so derelict and forgotten, so little known and studied, that though this prince of letters travelled in the Highlands expressly to satisfy himself, Celtic knowledge of the existing materials and Celtic studies were so deficient that they proved wholly inadequate to the task of disproving his bold statement. It was left to the scholarship of the nineteenth century to unearth the ancient treasures and to show that Gaelic was a literary language long before English literature came into existence, and that there are still extant Celtic-Latin MSS. almost as old as the very oldest codexes of the Bible. There is undoubtedly a charm in the thought that all over the Continent of Europe, in the libraries of many of its romantic cities and towns, there are scores of MSS., some of them upwards of a thousand years old, fugitives in the early times from these much harassed islands; and that European scholars of the highest erudition, such as Zeuss, Ebel, Nigra, Ascoli, Windisch, Zimmer, and Whitley Stokes, have been profoundly interested in these literary relics, and have devoted much of their time to the work of studying, translating, elucidating, and editing the Gaelic texts or glosses found in them. To-day the number of those engaged in similar research at home and abroad is vastly on the increase, and augurs well for the future of this department of knowledge. Professor Kuno Meyer, Ph.D., himself a distinguished German Celticist, in reviewing the present state of Celtic studies last year at Dublin, made the following significant statement:— “I cannot conclude without casting a glance into the future. I am convinced that the present is but the beginning of an era of still greater activity in all departments of Celtic studies. Everything points to that.