Modern research and historical criticism have done much for Celtic literature. Not long ago the subject might be regarded as a tangled web of fact and fiction. Inquirers found it hard to thread their way through the unsifted mass of materials, to know the true from the fabulous, authentic history from myth and legend. All the more because the original documents, like the graves of a household, were “severed far and wide by mount and stream and sea,” and for the most part inaccessible. It must be matter of astonishment to many to learn that very few of our older Celtic MSS.—MSS. written in these islands—have found a home in Scotland. They have long ago been transferred to the Continent, to France, Italy, Holland, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany. So that to-day scores of these venerable relics are preserved in places as distant and far apart as Milan, St. Gall, Würzburg, Carlsruhe, Brussels, Turin, Vienna, Berne, Leyden, Nancy, Paris. Even the oldest MS. now existing that can be proved to have been written in Scotland, is kept not in Edinburgh or Glasgow, but in the public library of Schaffhausen in Switzerland. One reason for this seems to have been that the Irish or Scots gave so many evangelists and professors in those early days to the Continent, men like Columbanus and St. Gall, and their followers; and another, when the books were in danger in the British Isles from the depredations of the Norsemen, they were removed for security to the monasteries and seats of learning presided over by these Celtic scholars. The records thus available, here and there, carry us back over a period of well nigh 1500 years to the days of St. Patrick and St. Columba. As Cædmon was the pioneer of English literature, so is St. Patrick the first known litterateur of Ireland, and St. Columba the first of Scotland. From the time of the introduction of Christianity by these men, Celtic literature has a history, continuous and verifiable. Beyond their day all is uncertain and cloudy. Pagan Scotland lies in the dim background enveloped in haze. Sagas and myths and poems and romances it undoubtedly had in abundance, floating by oral tradition, but no written record. In almost every instance of its old-time lore, authorship is unknown. That by-past is the region of conjecture, and we can be as little certain of the origins as Greek scholars are of the genesis of the _Iliad_ or of the _Odyssey_. In this study, then, we go back to the march between Pagan and Christian times, and leaving behind at present the doubtful and uncertain, we shall endeavour to trace the dawn of letters in Scotland.