The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland | Page 7

who did it imported into the rest of the tale the exquisite tenderness which fills it, and yet with so much reverence for his original that he did not make the body of the story Christian. He kept the definite Christian element to the very end, but he filled the whole with its tender atmosphere.
No Christianity and very little gentleness intrude into the heroic cycle. The story of Christ once touches it, but he who put it in did not lose the pagan atmosphere, or the wild fierceness of the manners of the time. How it was done may be read in this book at the end of the story of the Vengeance of Mesgedra. Very late in the redaction of these stories a Christian tag was also added to the tale of the death of Cuchulain, but it was very badly done.
When we come to the Fenian cycle there is a well-defined borderland between them and Christianity. The bulk of the stories is plainly pagan; their originals were frankly so. But the temper of their composers is more civilized than that of those who conceived the tales of the previous cycles; the manners, as I have already said, of their personages are gentler, more chivalrous; and their atmosphere is so much nearer to that of Christianity, that the new Christian elements would find themselves more at home in them than in the terrible vengeance of Lugh, the savage brutality of Conor to Deirdré, or the raging slaughterings of Cuchulain. So much was this the case that a story was skilfully invented which linked in imagination the Fenian cycle to a Christianized Ireland. This story--_Oisín in the Land of Youth_--is contained in this book. Oisín, or Ossian, the son of Finn, in an enchanted story, lives for 300 years, always young, with his love in Tir-na-n-óg, and finds on his return, when he becomes a withered old man, St Patrick and Christianity in Ireland. He tells to Patrick many tales of the Fenian wars and loves and glories, and in the course of them paganism and Christianity are contrasted and intermingled. A certain sympathy with the pagan ideas of honour and courage and love enters into the talk of Patrick and the monks, and softens their pious austerity. On the other hand, the Fenian legends are gentled and influenced by the Christian elements, in spite of the scorn with which Oisín treats the rigid condemnation of his companions and of Finn to the Christian hell, and the ascetic and unwarlike life of the monks.[4] There was evidently in the Fenian cycle of story-telling a transition period in which the bards ran Christianity and paganism in and out of one another, and mingled the atmosphere of both, and to that period the last editing of the story of _Lir and his Children_ may be referred. A lovely story in this book, put into fine form by Mr Rolleston, is as it were an image of this transition time--the story or How Ethne quitted Fairyland. It takes us back to the most ancient cycle, for it tells of the great gods Angus and Mananan, and then of how they became, after their conquest by the race who live in the second cycle, the invisible dwellers in a Fairy country of their own during the Fenian period, and, afterwards, when Patrick and the monks had overcome paganism. Thus it mingles together elements from all the periods. The mention of the great caldron and the swine which always renew their food is purely mythological. The cows which come from the Holy Land are Christian. Ethne herself is born in the house of a pagan god who has become a Fairy King, but loses her fairy nature and becomes human; and the reason given for this is an interesting piece of psychology which would never have occurred to a pagan world. She herself is a transition maiden, and, suddenly finding herself outside the fairy world and lost, happens on a monastery and dies on the breast of St Patrick. But she dies because of the wild wailing for her loss of the fairy-host, whom she can hear but cannot see, calling to her out of the darkened sky to come back to her home. And in her sorrow and the battle in her between the love of Christ and of Faerie, she dies. That is a symbol, not intended as such by its conceiver, but all the more significant, of the transition time. Short as it is, few tales, perhaps, are more deeply charged with spiritual meaning.
[4] I speak here of the better known of the two versions of this encounter of the pagan with the Christian spirit. There are others in which the reconciliation is carried still?further. One example is to be found in