ve state of society.

I have come to my own conclusion not so much because of any weight of
argument, as because I found it impossible to arrange the stories in a
coherent form so long as I considered them a part of history. I tried to
work on the foundation of the Annalists, and fit the Fianna into a
definite historical epoch, but the whole story seemed trivial and
incoherent until I began to think of them as almost contemporaneous with
the battle of Magh Tuireadh, which even the Annalists put back into
mythical ages. In this I have only followed some of the story-tellers,
who have made the mother of Lugh of the Long Hand the grandmother of
Finn, and given him a shield soaked with the blood of Balor. I cannot
think of any of the stories as having had a modern origin, or that the
century in which each was written down gives any evidence as to its age.
"How Diarmuid got his Love-Spot," for instance, which was taken down
only a few years ago from some old man's recitation by Dr Hyde, may well
be as old as "Finn and the Phantoms," which is in one of the earliest
manuscripts. It seems to me that one cannot choose any definite period
either from the vast living mass of folk-lore in the country or from the
written text, and that there is as good evidence of Finn being of the
blood of the gods as of his being, as some of the people tell me, "the
son of an O'Shaughnessy who lived at Kiltartan Cross."

Dr Douglas Hyde, although he placed the Fenian after the Cuchulain cycle
in his _History of Irish Literature_, has allowed me to print this
note:--

"While believing in the real objective existence of the Fenians as a
body of Janissaries who actually lived, ruled, and hunted in King
Cormac's time, I think it equally certain that hundreds of stories,
traits, and legends far older and more primitive than any to which they
themselves could have given rise, have clustered about them. There is
probably as large a bulk of primitive mythology to be found in the Finn
legend as in that of the Red Branch itself. The story of the Fenians was
a kind of nucleus to which a vast amount of the flotsam and jetsam of a
far older period attached itself, and has thus been preserved."

As I found it impossible to give that historical date to the stories, I,
while not adding in anything to support my theory, left out such names
as those of Cormac and Art, and such more or less historical personages,
substituting "the High King." And in the "Battle o