lines are of varying lengths, and to scan them is often very difficult,
an alliteration taking the place of scansion in many cases. The
rhetoric does not in general develop the story nor take the form of
description, it usually consists of songs of triumph, challenges,
prophecies, and exhortations, though it is sometimes used for other
purposes. It does not conform to strict grammatical rules like the
more regular verse and the prose, and many of the literal translations
which Irish scholars have made for us of the romances omit this
rhetoric entirely, owing to the difficulty in rendering it accurately,
and because it does not develop the plots of the stories. Notable
examples of such omissions are in Miss Faraday's translation of the
Leabhar na h-Uidhri version of the "Great Tain," and in Whitley Stokes'
translation of the "Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel." With all
respect to these scholars, and with the full consciousness of the
difficulty of the task that has naturally been felt by one who has
vainly attempted to make sense of what their greater skill has omitted,
it may be suggested that the total omission of such passages injures
the literary effect of a romance in a manner similar to the effect of
omitting all the choric pieces in a Greek tragedy: the rhetoric indeed,
on account of its irregularity, its occasional strophic correspondence,
its general independence of the action of the tale, and its difficulty
as compared with the other passages, may be compared very closely to a
Greek "chorus." Few of the romances written in prose and verse are
entirely without rhetoric; but some contain very little of it; all the
six romances of this character given in the present volume (counting as
two the two versions of "Etain") contain some rhetoric, but there are
only twenty-one such passages in the collection altogether, ten of
which are in one romance, the "Sick-bed of Cuchulain."

The present collection is an attempt to give to English readers some of