The Project Gutenberg EBook of Gods and Fighting Men, by Lady I. A. Gregory

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Title: Gods and Fighting Men

Author: Lady I. A. Gregory

Release Date: December 25, 2004 [EBook #14465]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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GODS AND FIGHTING MEN:

THE STORY OF THE TUATHA DE DANAAN
AND OF THE FIANNA OF IRELAND,

ARRANGED AND PUT INTO ENGLISH BY LADY GREGORY.

WITH A PREFACE BY W.B. YEATS

1905

DEDICATION TO THE MEMBERS OF THE IRISH LITERARY SOCIETY OF NEW YORK

My Friends, those I know and those I do not know, I am glad in the year
of the birth of your Society to have this book to offer you.

It has given great courage to many workers here--working to build up
broken walls--to know you have such friendly thoughts of them in your
minds. A few of you have already come to see us, and we begin to hope
that one day the steamers across the Atlantic will not go out full, but
come back full, until some of you find your real home is here, and say
as some of us say, like Finn to the woman of enchantments--

[Illustration: Irish Gaelic]

"We would not give up our own country--Ireland--if we were to get the
whole world as an estate, and the Country of the Young along with it."

AUGUSTA GREGORY.

PREFACE

I

A few months ago I was on the bare Hill of Allen, "wide Almhuin of
Leinster," where Finn and the Fianna lived, according to the stories,
although there are no earthen mounds there like those that mark the
sites of old buildings on so many hills. A hot sun beat down upon
flowering gorse and flowerless heather; and on every side except the
east, where there were green trees and distant hills, one saw a level
horizon and brown boglands with a few green places and here and there
the glitter of water. One could imagine that had it been twilight and
not early afternoon, and had there been vapours drifting and frothing
where there were now but shadows of clouds, it would have set stirring
in one, as few places even in Ireland can, a thought that is peculiar to
Celt