Heroic Romances of Ireland | Page 4

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 the original tale, another that the verse is the older part,
the prose being added to make a framework for the verse, but a general
view of some of the original romances appears to lead to a very
different conclusion. It seems much more probable that the Irish
authors deliberately chose a method of making their work at once
literary and suited to please a popular audience; they told their stories
in plain prose, adding to them verse, possibly chanted by the reciters of
the stories, so that while the prose told the story in simple language, the
emotions of pity, martial ardour, and the like were awakened by the
verse. They did not use the epic form, although their knowledge of
classical literature must have made them familiar with it; the Irish epic
form is Romance. They had, besides the prose and what may be called
the "regular" verse, a third form, that of rose, or as it is sometimes
called rhetoric, which is a very irregular form of verse. Sometimes it
rhymes, but more often not; the lines are of varying lengths, and to scan
them is often very difficult, an alliteration taking the place of scansion
in many cases. The rhetoric does not in general develop the story nor
take the form of description, it usually consists of songs of triumph,
challenges, prophecies, and exhortations, though it is sometimes used
for other purposes. It does not conform to strict grammatical rules like
the more regular verse and the prose, and many of the literal

translations which Irish scholars have made for us of the romances omit
this rhetoric entirely, owing to the difficulty in rendering it accurately,
and because it does not develop the plots of the stories. Notable
examples of such omissions are in Miss Faraday's translation of the
Leabhar na h-Uidhri version of the "Great Tain," and in Whitley
Stokes' translation of the "Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel." With all
respect to these scholars, and with the full consciousness of the
difficulty of the task that has naturally been felt by one who has vainly
attempted to make sense of what their greater skill has omitted, it may
be suggested that the total omission of such passages injures the literary
effect of a romance in a manner similar to the effect of omitting all the
choric pieces in a Greek tragedy: the rhetoric indeed, on account of its
irregularity, its occasional strophic correspondence, its general
independence of the action of the tale, and its difficulty as compared
with the other passages, may be compared very closely to a Greek
"chorus." Few of the romances written in prose and verse are entirely
without rhetoric; but some contain very little of it; all the six romances
of this character given in the present volume (counting as two the two
versions of "Etain") contain some rhetoric, but there are only
twenty-one such passages in the collection altogether, ten of which are
in one romance, the "Sick-bed of Cuchulain."
The present collection is an attempt to give to English readers some of
the oldest romances in English literary forms that seem to correspond
to the literary forms which were used in Irish to produce the same
effect, and has been divided into two parts. The first part contains five
separate stories, all of which are told in the characteristic form of prose
and verse: they are the "Courtship of Etain," the "Boar of Mac Datho,"
the "Sick-bed of Cuchulain," the "Death of the Sons of Usnach" (Book
of Leinster version), and the "Combat at the Ford" out of the Book of
Leinster version of the "Tain bo Cuailnge." Two versions are given of
the "Courtship of Etain "; and the "Sick-bed of Cuchulain," as is
pointed out in the special preface prefixed to it, really consists of two
independent versions. It was at first intended to add the better-known
version of the "Death of the Sons of Usnach" known as that of the
Glenn Masain MS., but the full translation of this has been omitted,
partly to avoid making the volume too bulky, partly because this
version is readily attainable in a literal form; an extract from it has,

however, been added to the Book of Leinster version for the purpose of
comparison. In the renderings given of these romances the translation
of the prose is nearly literal, but no attempt has been made to follow the
Irish idiom where this idiom sounds harsh in English; actives have been
altered to passive forms and the reverse, adjectives are sometimes
replaced by short sentences which give the image better in