In these pages then we may disregard the otherwise interesting
question of historic credibility in the Ossianic romances: firstly,
because they have their being in a land unaffected by fact; secondly,
because if they ever did reflect the history of the third century the
reflection was distorted in after-times, and a pseudo-history based upon
events of the ninth and tenth centuries was substituted for it. What the
historian seeks for in legend is far more a picture of the society in
which it took rise than a record of the events which it commemorates."
In a later part of the pamphlet Mr Nutt discusses such questions as
whether we may look for examples of third-century customs in the
stories, what part of the stories first found their way into writing,
whether the Oisin and Patrick dialogues were written under the influence
of actual Pagan feeling persisting from Pagan times, or whether "a
change came over the feeling of Gaeldom during the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries," when the Oisin and Patrick dialogues in their
present form began to be written. His final summing-up is that
"well-nigh the same stories that were told of Finn and his warrior
braves by the Gael of the eleventh century are told in well-nigh the
same way by his descendant to-day." Mr Nutt does not enquire how long
the stories may have been told before the first story was written down.
Larminie, however, whose early death was the first great loss of our
intellectual movement, pushes them backward for untold ages in the
introduction to his _West Irish Folk Tales and Romances_.
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