Heroic Romances of Ireland | Page 3

their time. The course of study at the schools established for the training of the fili in the tenth and eleventh centuries was certainly, as has been pointed out, very different from that of the ecclesiastical schools (see Joyce, vol. i. p. 430). No classical instruction was included in this training, but it is not certain that this separation of studies was so complete before what is called the "antiquarian age" set in. Cormac mac Cuninan, for example, was a classical scholar, and at the same time skilled in the learning of the fili. It should also be observed that the course at the ecclesiastical schools, as handed down to us, hardly seems to be classical enough to have produced a Columbanus or an Erigena; the studies that produced these men must have been of a different kind, and the lay schools as originally established by Sanchan Torpest may have included much that afterwards gave place to a more purely Irish training. The tale of Troy seems to have been known to the fili, and there are in their works allusions to Greek heroes, to Hercules and Hector, but it has been pointed out by Mr. Nutt that there is little if any evidence of influence produced by Latin or Greek literature on the actual matter or thought of the older Irish work. On this point reference may be made to a note on "Mae Datho's Boar" in this volume (p. 173), but even if this absence of classical influence is established (and it is hard to say what will not be found in Irish literature), it is just possible that the same literary feeling which made Irish writers of comparatively late tales keep the bronze weapons and chariots of an earlier date in their accounts of ancient wars, while they described arms of the period when speaking of battles of their own time, affected them in this instance also; and that they had enough restraint to refrain from introducing classical and Christian ideas when speaking of times in which they knew these ideas would have been unfamiliar.
It may be, and often is, assumed that the appearance of grotesque or savage passages in a romance is an indication of high antiquity, and that these passages at least are faithful reproductions of Druidic originals, but this does not seem to be quite certain. Some of these passages, especially in the case of romances preserved in the Leabhar na h-Uidhri (The Book of the Dun Cow), look like insertions made by scribes of an antiquarian turn of mind,[FN#3] and are probably of very ancient date; in other cases, as for example in the "Boar of Mac Datho," where Conall dashes Anluan's head into Ket's face, the savagery is quite in 'keeping with the character of the story, and way have been deliberately invented by an author living in Christian times, to add a flavour to his tale, although in doing so he probably imitated a similar incident in some other legend. To take a classical parallel, the barbarity shown by Aeneas in Aeneid x. 518-520, in sacrificing four youths on the funeral pyre of Pallas, an act which would have been regarded with horror in Virgil's own day, does not prove that there was any ancient tale of the death of Pallas in which these victims were sacrificed, nor even that such victims were sacrificed in ancient Latium in Pallas' day; but it does show that Virgil was familiar with the fact that such victims used in some places to be sacrificed on funeral pyres; for, in a sense, he could not have actually invented the incident.
[FN#3] See the exhibition of the tips of tongues in the "Sick-bed of Cuchulain," page 57.
Thus the appearance of an archaic element in an Irish romance is in itself no proof of the Druidic origin of that form of the romance, nor even of the existence of that element in the romance's earliest form: upon such a principle the archaic character of the motif of the "Oedipus Coloneus" would prove it to be the oldest of the Greek tragedies, while as a matter of fact it seems to be doubtful whether the introduction of this motif into the story of Oedipus was not due to Sophocles himself, although of course he drew the idea of it, if not from the original legend of Oedipus, from some other early legend.
The most satisfactory test of the authorship of an Irish romance, and one of the most satisfactory tests of its date, is its literary character; and if we look at the literary character of the best of the Irish romances, there is one point that is immediately apparent, the blending of prose and verse. One, the most common, explanation of this, is that the verse was added to