It may be, and often is, assumed that the appearance of grotesque or
savage passages in a romance is an indication of high antiquity, and
that these passages at least are faithful reproductions of Druidic
originals, but this does not seem to be quite certain. Some of these
passages, especially in the case of romances preserved in the Leabhar
na h-Uidhri (The Book of the Dun Cow), look like insertions made by
scribes of an antiquarian turn of mind,[FN#3] and are probably of very
ancient date; in other cases, as for example in the "Boar of Mac
Datho," where Conall dashes Anluan's head into Ket's face, the savagery
is quite in 'keeping with the character of the story, and way have been
deliberately invented by an author living in Christian times, to add a
flavour to his tale, although in doing so he probably imitated a
similar incident in some other legend. To take a classical parallel,
the barbarity shown by Aeneas in Aeneid x. 518-520, in sacrificing four
youths on the funeral pyre of Pallas, an act which would have been
regarded with horror in Virgil's own day, does not prove that there was
any ancient tale of the death of Pallas in which these victims were
sacrificed, nor even that such victims were sacrificed in ancient
Latium in Pallas' day; but it does show that Virgil was familiar with
the fact that such victims used in some places to be sacrificed on
funeral pyres; for, in a sense, he could not have actually invented the
incident.


[FN#3] See the exhibition of the tips of tongues in the "Sick-bed of
Cuchulain," page 57.


Thus the appearance of an archaic element in an Irish romance is in