Now it is at this point, namely, Homer's peculiar treatment of the legendary material which reached him, whether in verse or in prose _Märchen_, that his art stands especially apart from the art of poets who followed him, whether the authors of the "Cyclic" Ionian Epics, or the Athenian tragedians, or the dim genealogisers in verse of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. Homer deliberately _selects_ from the "saga," or folk-tale, or bardic tradition, what is noble, heroic, possible, and human. He also, in the _Iliad_, deliberately rejects what is _märchenhaft_; the situations which belong to the datelessly old popular _Märchen_, or "fairy tale." Later poets put these things prominently forward; Homer ignores them. This is to be proved later in detail: meanwhile here is another mark of the aloofness of Homer, of his high aristocratic genius. It seems certain that the Trojan legend, with the legends of the Theban wars and tragedies, of the voyage of Argo, and of the hunt of the Calydonian boar, existed in some consecutive form, and was supposed to be record of historical facts before our Homeric poems were composed. Actual history it was not, any more than the _Chansons de Geste_, the poem of _Beowulf_, the two Irish cycles of Cuchullin and of Fian, or the _Volsunga Saga_, or the romances of Arthur, are records of actual history. In some of these cycles of western Europe we know that historical personages are involved,--about Charlemagne, of course, there is no doubt; and there really were wars of the Cymri of Strathclyde against the English invaders; and the romances appear to contain fanciful accounts of actual battles of Arthur fought in Cumberland, Lothian, Ettrick Forest, and the Lennox. But when King Loth of Lothian, whose house plays so great a part in the romances, appears, we see that he is only an "eponymous hero," his name being derived by legend from the name of his realm, Lothian. About any real characters whose fame may echo in the ancient Irish bardic traditions nothing can be known.