in the mouths of professed story-tellers. Finn and the Fianna found
welcome among the court poets later than did Cuchulain; and one finds
memories of Danish invasions and standing armies mixed with the
imaginations of hunters and solitary fighters among great woods. One
never hears of Cuchulain delighting in the hunt or in woodland things;
and one imagines that the story-teller would have thought it unworthy in
so great a man, who lived a well-ordered, elaborate life, and had his
chariot and his chariot-driver and his barley-fed horses to delight in.
If he is in the woods before dawn one is not told that he cannot know
the leaves of the hazel from the leaves of the oak; and when Emer
laments him no wild creature comes into her thoughts but the cuckoo that
cries over cultivated fields. His story must have come out of a time
when the wild wood was giving way to pasture and tillage, and men had no
longer a reason to consider every cry of the birds or change of the
night. Finn, who was always in the woods, whose battles were but hours
amid years of hunting, delighted in the "cackling of ducks from the Lake
of the Three Narrows; the scolding talk of the blackbird of Doire an
Cairn; the bellowing of the ox from the Valley of the Berries; the
whistle of the eagle from the Valley of Victories or from the rough
branches of the Ridge of the Stream; the grouse of the heather of
Cruachan; the call of the otter of Druim re Coir." When sorrow comes
upon the queens of the stories, they have sympathy for the wild birds
and beasts that are like themselves: "Credhe wife of Cael came with the
others and went looking through the bodies for her comely comrade, and
crying as she went. And as she was searching she saw a crane of the
meadows and her two nestlings, and the cunning beast the fox watching
the nestlings; and when the crane covered one of the birds to save it,
he would make a rush at the other bird, the way she had to stretch
herself out over the birds; and she would sooner have got her own death
by the fox than the nestlings to be killed by him. And Credhe was