And so I came by the road nearest me to the old legends, the old heroic
poems. It was a man of a hundred years who told me the story of
Cuchulain's fight with his own son, the son of Aoife, and how the young
man as he lay dying had reproached him and said "Did you not see how
I threw every spear fair and easy at you, and you threw your spear
hard and wicked at me? And I did not come out to tell my name to one
or to two but if I had told it to anyone in the whole world, I would
soonest tell it to your pale face." Deirdre's beauty "that brought
the Sons of Usnach to their death" comes into many of the country songs.
Grania of the yet earlier poems is not so well thought of. An old
basket-maker said scornfully "Many would tell you she slept under the
cromlechs but I don't believe that, and she a king's daughter. And
I don't believe she was handsome, either. If she was, why would she
have run away?" And another said "Finn had more wisdom than all the
men of the world, but he wasn't wise enough to put a bar on Grania."
I was told in many places of Osgar's bravery and Goll's strength and
Conan's bitter tongue, and the arguments of Oisin and Patrick. And
I have often been given the story of Oisin's journey to Tir-nan-Og,
the Country of the Young, that is, as I am told, "a fine place and
everything that is good is in it. And if anyone is sent there for a
minute he will want to stop in it, and twenty years will seem to him
like one half hour;" and "they say Tir-nan-Og is there yet, and so
it may be in any place."




VI