I have said that Irish literature was exceptionally rich in the monstrous and marvellous. This indeed is a characteristic insisted upon by Mr. W. B. Yeats in his admirable introduction to Lady Gregory’s _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_ as the great distinction between Celtic and Scandinavian writings. ‘The Irish story-teller’, he says, ‘could not interest himself with an unbroken interest in the way men like himself burned a house or won wives no more wonderful than themselves. His mind constantly escaped out of daily circumstance, as a bough that has been held down by a weak hand suddenly straightens itself out. His imagination was always running off to Tir-nan-Oge, to the land of Promise, which is as near to the country-people of to-day as it was to Cuchulain and his companions.’ ‘Just so,’ says Dr. Nansen, ‘and therefore when the Icelander borrowed he rationalized.’ But had he the necessary critical discrimination to enable him to reject the fabulous? Was he so free from superstitious beliefs as to be able to discredit the mythical? By no means. Nothing is clearer than that he was highly superstitious, believing intensely in ghosts, and portents of all kinds: in fact, he believed in them so thoroughly that they almost ceased to be portentous from the matter-of-fact way in which he thought of them. For all he knew, the wildest flights of the Celtic imagination might be sober truth, and as truth he would have set them down if they had concerned him. But if they were no part of the story he was telling, they could be left out of it. Now if we examine one of these Irish stories, we shall find the marvellous elements to be the very bones and sinews of the tale. Eliminate these and nothing is left which it would not be easy to parallel from the records of any voyage of discovery. There is nothing characteristic to which any resemblance can be traced, except these clearly mythical features. Take as an example the summary of Maelduin’s voyage given on p. 336 of the first volume of Dr. Nansen’s work. First we hear how ‘swarms of ants, as large as foals, came down to the beach and showed a desire to eat’ the crew and the boat.