closely.

The Táin Bó Cúalnge is the work not of any one man but of a corporation of
artists known as _filid_. The author of the Táin in its present state,
whoever he may have been, was a strong partisan of Ulster and never misses
an opportunity of flattering the pride of her chieftains. Later a kind of
reaction against the pre-eminence given to Ulster and the glorification of
its hero sets in, and a group of stories arises in which the war takes a
different end and Cuchulain is shown to disadvantage, finally to fall at
the hands of a Munster champion. It is to this southern province that the
saga-cycle which followed the Cuchulain at an interval of two hundred years
belongs, namely, the Fenian saga,--the saga of Finn son of Cumhall, which
still flourishes among the Gaelic speakers of Ireland and Scotland, while
the Cuchulain stories have almost died out among them. The mingling of the
two sagas is the work of the eighteenth-century Scots Lowlander, James
Macpherson.

The Táin Bó Cúalnge is one of the most precious monuments of the world's
literature, both because of the poetic worth it evidences at an early stage
of civilization, and for the light it throws on the life of the people
among whom it originated and that of their ancestors centuries earlier. It
is not less valuable and curious because it shows us the earlier stages of
an epic--an epic in the making--which it does better perhaps than any other
work in literature. Ireland had at hand all the materials for a great
national epic, a wealth of saga-material replete with interesting episodes,
picturesque and dramatic incidents and strongly defined personages, yet she
never found her Homer, a gifted poet to embrace her entire literary wealth,
to piece the disjointed fragments together, smooth the asperities and hand
down to posterity the finished epic of the Celtic world, superior, perhaps,
to the Iliad or the Odyssey. What has come down to us is "a sort of