Ecna_; the second, one of law-makers
and lawyers; the third, the Bardic order, the _Gradh Fili_, the poets
being termed _File_ in Irish. Of the many degrees to which the poets
or _File_ could attain, the highest (as in the other grades, of
_Ecna_, "Wisdom," and of _Fene_, "Law") was the _Ollave_, or Doctor.
These doctors of literature, so to call them, were already the
continuators of a great tradition, especially in poetry. They had to
carry, written only in their heads, an immense body of bardic and
religious legendary history and philosophy. And inasmuch as they were
the sole depositories of this profound and occult learning, to say
nothing of those heroic tales and romances in which the Celtic people
so delighted, they received high honor wherever they went. When the
chief poet, the ollave, or doctor of poetry, arrived, in his
weather-beaten cloak of dark crimson trimmed with white feathers,
accompanied by his little band of disciples, at some chieftain's
house, he was received with signal hospitality and treated to the best
his host could afford.

While literature was still oral, it is clear that despite the care
used in its preservation in the bardic schools, it could not be
maintained with the absolute accuracy of a written or a printed text.
The remoter the historical matter to be remembered, the less likely
was it to be preserved, _literatim et verbatim_, without those little
liberties of the imagination which the Celtic word-master of earlier
ages was always ready to take. Thus the first cycle of Irish legendary
history, dating back many centuries before the Christian era,--the
primitive and mythological cycle,--allows full license to the
imagination, working upon a basis of semi-barbaric tradition, with a
mixture in it of nature-myths and remotest history. Both because of
the extent and the extreme difficulty of the materials afforded by
this cycle in the study of the pre-Christian religious beliefs of the
Celtic races, its stories will always form a great hunting-ground for
Celtic students. We learn from it how the Nemedians were overtaken by
the Fomorians and fought with them, almost to extermination, on Tory
Island, escaping then to the south of Europe, particularly to Greece;
and a couple of centuries later returned, under their new name of the
Firbolgs. The Nemedians meanwhile supplied similarly a recrudescent
race, the Tuatha De Danann, of whom came the Dagda,--the all-king,
almost the Zeus of ancient