s vi. and vii. are two variants showing how
widespread the story is in Gaelic Scotland. It occurs in Ireland where
it has been printed in the chapbook, _Hibernian Tales_, as the "Black
Thief and the Knight of the Glen," the Black Thief being Conall, and
the knight corresponding to the King of Lochlan (it is given in Mr.
Lang's _Red Fairy Book_). Here it attracted the notice of Thackeray,
who gives a good abstract of it in his _Irish Sketch-Book_, ch. xvi. He
thinks it "worthy of the Arabian Nights, as wild and odd as an Eastern
tale." "That fantastical way of bearing testimony to the previous tale
by producing an old woman who says the tale is not only true, but who
was the very old woman who lived in the giant's castle is almost" (why
"almost," Mr. Thackeray?) "a stroke of genius." The incident of the
giant's breath occurs in the story of Koisha Kayn, MacInnes' _Tales_,
i. 241, as well as the Polyphemus one, _ibid._ 265. One-eyed giants are
frequent in Celtic folk-tales (_e.g._ in _The Pursuit of Diarmaid_ and
in the _Mabinogi_ of Owen).

_Remarks._--Thackeray's reference to the "Arabian Nights" is especially
apt, as the tale of Conall is a framework story like _The 1001 Nights_,
the three stories told by Conall being framed, as it were, in a fourth
which is nominally the real story. This method employed by the Indian
story-tellers and from them adopted by Boccaccio and thence into all
European literatures (Chaucer, Queen Margaret, &c.), is generally
thought to be peculiar to the East, and to be ultimately derived from
the Jatakas or Birth Stories of the Buddha who tells his adventures in
former incarnations. Here we find it in Celtdom, and it occurs also in
"The Story-teller at Fault" in this collection, and the story of
_Koisha Kayn_ in MacInnes' _Argyllshire Tales_, a variant of which,
collected but not published by Campbell, has no less than nineteen
tales enclosed in a framework. The question is whether the method was
adopted independently in Ireland, or was due to foreign influences.
Confining ourselves to "Conal Yellowclaw," it seems not unlikely that
the whole story is an importation. For the second episode is clearly
the story of Polyphemus from the Odyssey which was known in Ireland
perhaps as early as the tenth century (see Prof. K. Meyer's edition of
_Merugud Uilix maic Leirtis_, Pref. p. xii). It also crept into the
voyages of Sindbad in the _Arabian Nights_. And as told in the
Highlands it bears compariso