ic romance, as I think, a thought of a mystery coming not as with
Gothic nations out of the pressure of darkness, but out of great spaces
and windy light. The hill of Teamhair, or Tara, as it is now called,
with its green mounds and its partly wooded sides, and its more gradual
slope set among fat grazing lands, with great trees in the hedgerows,
had brought before one imaginations, not of heroes who were in their
youth for hundreds of years, or of women who came to them in the
likeness of hunted fawns, but of kings that lived brief and politic
lives, and of the five white roads that carried their armies to the
lesser kingdoms of Ireland, or brought to the great fair that had given
Teamhair its sovereignty, all that sought justice or pleasure or had
goods to barter.

II

It is certain that we must not confuse these kings, as did the mediaeval
chroniclers, with those half-divine kings of Almhuin. The chroniclers,
perhaps because they loved tradition too well to cast out utterly much
that they dreaded as Christians, and perhaps because popular imagination
had begun the mixture, have mixed one with another ingeniously, making
Finn the head of a kind of Militia under Cormac MacArt, who is supposed
to have reigned at Teamhair in the second century, and making Grania,
who travels to enchanted houses under the cloak of Angus, god of Love,
and keeps her troubling beauty longer than did Helen hers, Cormac's
daughter, and giving the stories of the Fianna, although the impossible
has thrust its proud finger into them all, a curious air of precise
history. 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; a