is the case in the stories of the Hero and the Fenian Cycles.[5]

[5] Everything, on the contrary, in the Mythological Cycle is
gifted with life, all the doings and things of nature are
represented as the work of living creatures; but it is quite
possible that those in Ireland who made these myths were not
Celts at all.

What the Irish of the Heroic, and still more of the Fenian Cycle, did
make in their imagination was a world, outside of themselves, of
living spiritual beings, in whose actuality they fully believed, and
in whom a great number of them still believe. A nation, if I may use
this term, dwelt under the sea. Another dwelt in the far island of the
ocean, the Isle of the Ever-Young. Another dwelt in the land, in the
green hills and by the streams of Ireland; and these were the ancient
gods who had now lost their dominion over the country, but lived on,
with all their courtiers and warriors and beautiful women in a country
underground. As time went on, their powers were dwarfed, and they
became small of size, less beautiful, and in our modern times are less
inclined to enter into the lives of men and women. But the Irish
peasant still sees them flitting by his path in the evening light, or
dancing on the meadow round the grassy mound, singing and playing
strange melodies; or mourns for the child they have carried away to
live with them and forget her people, or watches with fear his
dreaming daughter who has been touched by them, and is never again
quite a child of this earth, or quite of the common race of man.

These were the invisible lands and peoples of the Irish imagination;
and they live in and out of many of the stories. Cuchulain is lured
into a fairy-land, and lives for more than a year in love with Fand,