themselves; for each of these, except for a few very manifestly late
insertions, has a style and character of its own. There were,
undoubtedly, old traditions, known to the men who in the sixth and
seventh centuries may have written the tales that we have, known even
to men who in the tenth and eleventh centuries copied them and
commented upon them; but the romances as they now stand do not look
like pieces of patchwork, but like the works of men who had ideas to
convey; and to me at least they seem to bear approximately the same
relation to the Druid legends as the works of the Attic tragedians bear
to the archaic Greek legends on which their tragedies were based. In
more than one case, as in the "Courtship of Etain," which is more fully
discussed below, there are two versions of the same tale, the framework
being the same in both, while the treatment of the incidents and the
view of the characters of the actors is essentially different; and when
the story is treated from the antiquarian point of view, that which
regards both versions as resting upon a common prehistoric model, the
question arises, which of the two more nearly represents the "true"
version? There is, I would submit, in such cases, no true version. The
old Druidic story, if it could be found, would in all probability
contain only a very small part of either of our two versions; it would
be bald, half-savage in tone, like one of the more ancient Greek myths,
and producing no literary effect; the literary effect of both the
versions that we have, being added by men who lived in Christian times,
were influenced by Christian ideals, and probably were, like many of
their contemporaries, familiar with the literary bequests of the
ancient world.[FN#2]


[FN#2] It seems to be uncertain whether or not the writers of the
Irish romances shared in the classical learning for which Ireland was