lives, and of the five white roads that carried their armies to the
lesser kingdoms of Ireland, or brought to the great fair that had given
Teamhair its sovereignty, all that sought justice or pleasure or had
goods to barter.


II

It is certain that we must not confuse these kings, as did the mediæval
chroniclers, with those half-divine kings of Almhuin. The chroniclers,
perhaps because they loved tradition too well to cast out utterly much
that they dreaded as Christians, and perhaps because popular imagination
had begun the mixture, have mixed one with another ingeniously, making
Finn the head of a kind of Militia under Cormac MacArt, who is supposed
to have reigned at Teamhair in the second century, and making Grania,
who travels to enchanted houses under the cloak of Angus, god of Love,
and keeps her troubling beauty longer than did Helen hers, Cormac's
daughter, and giving the stories of the Fianna, although the impossible
has thrust its proud finger into them all, a curious air of precise
history. It is only when one separates the stories from that mediæval
pedantry, as in this book, that one recognises one of the oldest worlds
that man has imagined, an older world certainly than one finds in the
stories of Cuchulain, who lived, according to the chroniclers, about the
time of the birth of Christ. They are far better known, and one may be
certain of the antiquity of incidents that are known in one form or
another to every Gaelic-speaking countryman in Ireland or in the
Highlands of Scotland. Sometimes a labourer digging near to a cromlech,
or Bed of Diarmuid and Crania as it is called, will tell one a tradition
that seems older and more barbaric than any description of their
adventures or of themselves in written text or story that has taken form