Heroic Romances of Ireland | Page 2

a Continental literature on which the Irish one
might have influence simply did not exist. Its subsequent influence, in
the tenth and eleventh centuries, upon Welsh, and through Welsh upon
the early Breton literature (now lost) appears to be established; it is
usually supposed that its action upon the earliest French compositions
was only through the medium of these languages, but it is at least
possible that its influence in this case also was more direct. In
Merovingian and early Carlovingian times, when French songs were
composed, which are now lost but must have preceded the extant

chansons de geste, the Irish schools were attracting scholars from the
neighbouring countries of Europe; Ireland was sending out a steady
stream of "learned men" to France, Germany, and Italy; and it is at least
possible that some who knew the Irish teachers realized the merit of the
literary works with which some of these teachers must have been
familiar. The form of the twelfth-century French romance, "Aucassin
and Nicolete," is that of the chief Irish romances, and may well have
been suggested by them; whilst the variety of the rhythm and the
elaborate laws of the earliest French poetry, which, both in its Northern
and Southern form, dates from the first half of the twelfth century,
almost imply a pre-existing model; and such a model is more easily
traced in Irish than in any other vernacular literature that was then
available. It is indeed nearly as hard to suppose that the beautiful
literature of Ireland had absolutely no influence upon nations known to
be in contact with it, as it would be to hold to the belief that the ancient
Cretan civilisation had no effect upon the liter ary development that
culminated in the poems of Homer.
Before speaking of what the Irish literature was, it may be well to say
what it was not. The incidents related in it date back, according to the
"antiquaries" of the ninth to the twelfth centuries, some to the Christian
era, some to a period long anterior to it; but occasional allusions to
events that were unknown in Ireland before the introduction of
Christianity, and a few to classical personages, show that the form of
the present romances can hardly be pre-Christian, or even close
translations into Old or Middle Irish of Druidic tales. It has therefore
been the fashion to speak of the romances as inaccurate survivals of
pre-Christian works, which have been added to by successive
generations of "bards," a mode of viewing our versions of the romances
which of course puts them out of the category of original literature and
hands them over to the antiquarians; but before they suffer this fate, it
is reasonable to ask that their own literary merit should be considered
in a more serious manner than has yet been attempted.
The idea that our versions of the romances are inaccurate reproductions
of Druidic tales is not at all borne out by a study of the romances
themselves; for each of these, except for a few very manifestly late
insertions, has a style and character of its own. There were,
undoubtedly, old traditions, known to the men who in the sixth and

seventh centuries may have written the tales that we have, known even
to men who in the tenth and eleventh centuries copied them and
commented upon them; but the romances as they now stand do not look
like pieces of patchwork, but like the works of men who had ideas to
convey; and to me at least they seem to bear approximately the same
relation to the Druid legends as the works of the Attic tragedians bear
to the archaic Greek legends on which their tragedies were based. In
more than one case, as in the "Courtship of Etain," which is more fully
discussed below, there are two versions of the same tale, the framework
being the same in both, while the treatment of the incidents and the
view of the characters of the actors is essentially different; and when
the story is treated from the antiquarian point of view, that which
regards both versions as resting upon a common prehistoric model, the
question arises, which of the two more nearly represents the "true"
version? There is, I would submit, in such cases, no true version. The
old Druidic story, if it could be found, would in all probability contain
only a very small part of either of our two versions; it would be bald,
half-savage in tone, like one of the more ancient Greek myths, and
producing no literary effect; the literary effect of both the versions that
we have, being added by men who lived in Christian times, were
influenced by Christian ideals, and probably were, like many of their
contemporaries, familiar with the literary bequests