Heroic Romances of Ireland

Heroic Romances of Ireland

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Title: Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined
Author: A. H. Leahy
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HEROIC ROMANCES OF IRELAND
TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH PROSE AND VERSE, WITH
PREFACE, SPECIAL INTRODUCTIONS AND NOTES
BY
A. H. LEAHY
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I

PREFACE
At a time like the present, when in the opinion of many the great
literatures of Greece and Rome are ceasing to hold the influence that
they have so long exerted upon human thought, and when the study of
the greatest works of the ancient world is derided as "useless," it may
be too sanguine to hope that any attention can be paid to a literature
that is quite as useless as the Greek; which deals with a time, which, if
not actually as far removed from ours as are classical times, is yet
further removed in ideas; a literature which is known to few and has yet
to win its way to favour, while the far superior literature of Greece
finds it hard to defend the position that it long ago won. It may be that
reasons like these have weighed with those scholars who have opened
up for us the long-hidden treasures of Celtic literature; despairing of the
effort to obtain for that literature its rightful crown, and the homage due
to it from those who can appreciate literary work for itself, they have
been contented to ask for the support of that smaller body who from
philological, antiquarian, or, strange as it may appear, from political
reasons, are prepared to take a modified interest in what should be
universally regarded as in its way one of the most interesting literatures

of the world.
The literary aspect of the ancient literature of Ireland has not indeed
been altogether neglected. It has been used to furnish themes on which
modern poems can be written; ancient authority has been found in it for
what is essentially modern thought: modern English and Irish poets
have claimed the old Irish romances as inspirers, but the romances
themselves have been left to the scholars and the antiquarians.
This is not the position that Irish literature ought to fill. It does
undoubtedly tell us much of the most ancient legends of modern
Europe which could not have been known without it; but this is not its
sole, or even its chief claim to be heard. It is itself the connecting-link
between the Old World and the New, written, so far as can be
ascertained, at the time when the literary energies of the ancient world
were dead, when the literatures of modern Europe had not been
born,[FN#1] in a country that had no share in the ancient civilisation of
Rome, among a people which still retained many legends and possibly
a rudimentary literature drawn from ancient Celtic sources, and was
producing the men who were the earliest classical scholars of the
modern world.
[FN#1] The only possible exceptions to this, assuming the latest
possible date for the Irish work, and the earliest date for others, are the
kindred Welsh literature and that of the Anglo-Saxon invaders of
Britain.
The exact extent of the direct influence of Irish literature upon the
development of other nations is hard to trace, chiefly because the
influence of Ireland upon the Continent was at its height at the time
when none of the languages of modern Europe except Welsh and
Anglo-Saxon had reached a stage at which they might be used for
literary purposes, and