of the greater number of the stories in this book has
been published, and from this text I have worked, making my own
translation as far as my scholarship goes, and when it fails, taking the
meaning given by better scholars. In some cases the Irish text has not
been printed, and I have had to work by comparing and piecing together
various translations. I have had to put a connecting sentence of my own
here and there, and I have fused different versions together, and
condensed many passages, and I have left out many, using the choice that
is a perpetual refusing, in trying to get some clear outline of the
doings of the heroes.

I have found it more natural to tell the stories in the manner of the
thatched houses, where I have heard so many legends of Finn and his
friends, and Oisin and Patrick, and the Ever-Living Ones, and the
Country of the Young, rather than in the manner of the slated houses,
where I have not heard them.

Four years ago, Dr Atkinson, a Professor of Trinity College, Dublin, in
his evidence before the Commission of Intermediate Education, said of
the old literature of Ireland:--"It has scarcely been touched by the
movements of the great literatures; it is the untrained popular feeling.
Therefore it is almost intolerably low in tone--I do not mean naughty,
but low; and every now and then, when the circumstance occasions it, it
goes down lower than low ... If I read the books in the Greek, the Latin
or the French course, in almost every one of them there is something
with an ideal ring about it--something that I can read with positive
pleasure--something that has what the child might take with him as a
[Greek: ktema eis dei]--a perpetual treasure; but if I read the Irish
books, I see nothing ideal in them, and my astonishment is that through
the whole range of Irish literature that I have read (and I have read
an enormous range of it), the smallness of the element of idealism is
most noticeable ... And as there is very little idealism there is very
little imagination ... The Irish tales as a rule are devoid of it
fundamentally."

Dr Atkinson is an Englishman, but unfortunately not only
fellow-professors in Trinity but undergraduates there have been
influenced by his opinion, that Irish literature is a thing to be
despised. I do not quote his words to draw attention to a battle that is
still being fought, but to explain my own object in working, as I have
worked ever since that evidence was given, to