It is only when one separates the stories from that mediaeval
pedantry, as in this book, that one recognises one of the oldest worlds
that man has imagined, an older world certainly than one finds in the
stories of Cuchulain, who lived, according to the chroniclers, about the
time of the birth of Christ. They are far better known, and one may be
certain of the antiquity of incidents that are known in one form or
another to every Gaelic-speaking countryman in Ireland or in the
Highlands of Scotland. Sometimes a labourer digging near to a cromlech,
or Bed of Diarmuid and Crania as it is called, will tell one a tradition
that seems older and more barbaric than any description of their
adventures or of themselves in written text or story that has taken form
in the mouths of professed story-tellers. Finn and the Fianna found
welcome among the court poets later than did Cuchulain; and one finds
memories of Danish invasions and standing armies mixed with the
imaginations of hunters and solitary fighters among great woods. One
never hears of Cuchulain delighting in the hunt or in woodland things;
and one imagines that the story-teller would have thought it unworthy in
so great a man, who lived a well-ordered, elaborate life, and had his
chariot and his chariot-driver and his barley-fed horses to delight in.
If he is in the woods before dawn one is not told that he cannot know
the leaves of the hazel from the leaves of the oak; and when Emer
laments him no wild creature comes into her thoughts but the cuckoo that
cries over cultivated fields.
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