The stories of his own exploits and of those of his warrior band are Gaelic variants of tales common to all Celtic, indeed to all Aryan races. In his essay on the “Development of the Ossianic or Fenian Saga,” printed in vol. ii. of _Waifs and Strays of Celtic Tradition_, Mr. Alfred Nutt says that “in the redactions which substantially reach back to the twelfth century, these tales are profoundly modified in two ways: firstly, the euhemerising process begun in the ninth to tenth centuries has fully developed, and the saga has been fitted into a framework of tribal and personal conditions, which necessarily determine the growth along certain lines; secondly, mythic features and incidents have been translated, as it were, into historic terms, borrowed from the comparatively recent history of the race, and the saga has in consequence been enriched by a new series of personages, and by a wider geographic horizon. At this stage it is taken up by the literary class of the day, the professional story-tellers, and metrically fixed. It is literary in so far as the form is artificial, that is, due to a given man who did not hesitate to embellish and amplify out of his acquired stock of knowledge; popular in so far as it is kept in close touch with tradition. This semi-literary form continued to develop until the eighteenth century in both divisions of Gael-land, but the guiding impulse ever came from Ireland. During the last hundred years and more, large fragments of it have been preserved in Scotland orally, and offer the most instructive object lesson with which I am acquainted to the student of traditional diffusion and transmission. Side by side with the semi-literary development, the purely popular forms continued to exist and grow. With regard to Scotland, the chief Ossianic problem is, how far these may be looked upon as independent of the semi-literary twelfth century forms, that is, as derived substantially from the earlier traditions brought by the Gael to Scotland in the early centuries of the Christian era. There is much to be said for and against this view. There is practically nothing to be said in favour of the Fenian saga being older on Scotch ground than the Dalriadic colonisation. Both Scotland and Ireland have an equal claim to the saga in this sense—that both countries were inhabited by Gaels, who told and localised it wherever they went; but Ireland’s claim is so far superior that these tales were told in Ireland earlier than in Scotland; that whatever admixture of fact there is in them is Irish fact, and that the chief shapers of the cycle have been Irish, and not Scotch Gaels. On the other hand, the Gaels seem both to have preserved the popular form in a more genuine state, and the semi-literary form orally with greater tenacity.”