into Tir-na-n-og went on through time, the fairy-world of the
bards, receiving every century new inhabitants, whose humbler human
origin being forgotten, were supplied there with both wives and
children. The apotheosis of great men went forward, tirelessly; the
hero of one epoch becoming the god of the next, until the formation
of the Tuatha De Danan, who represent the gods of the historic
ages. Had the advent of exact genealogy been delayed, and the
creative imagination of the bards suffered to work on for a couple
of centuries longer, unchecked by the historical conscience,
Cuculain's human origin would, perhaps, have been forgotten, and he
would have been numbered amongst the Tuatha De Danan, probably, as
the son of Lu Lamfada and the Moreega, his patron deities. It was,
indeed, a favourite fancy of the bards that not Sualtam, but Lu
Lamfada himself, was his father; this, however, in a spiritual or
supernatural sense, for his age was far removed from that of the
Tuatha De Danan, and falling well within the scope of the historic
period. Even as late as the time of Alexander, the Greeks could
believe a great contemporary warrior to be of divine origin, and
the son of Zeus.

When the Irish bards began to elaborate a general history of their
country, they naturally commenced with the enumeration of the elder
gods. I at one time suspected that the long pedigrees running
between those several divisions of the mythological period were the
invention of mediaeval historians, anxious to spin out the national
record, that it might reach to Shinar and the dispersion. Not only,
however, was such fabrication completely foreign to the genius of
the literature, but in the fragments of those early divine cycles,
we see that each of these personages was at one time the centre of
a literature, and holds a definite place as regards those who went