the long pedigrees running between
those several divisions of the mythological period were the invention of
mediaeval historians, anxious to spin out the national record, that it
might reach to Shinar and the dispersion. Not only, however, was such
fabrication completely foreign to the genius of the literature, but in
the fragments of those early divine cycles, we see that each of these
personages was at one time the centre of a literature, and holds a
definite place as regards those who went before and came after.
These pedigrees, as I said before, have no historical meaning, being
pre-Milesian, and therefore absolutely prehistoric; but as the genealogy
of the gods, and as representing the successive generations of that
invisible family, whose history not one or ten bards, but the whole
bardic and druidic organisation of the island, delighted to record,
collate, and verify--those pedigrees are as reliable as that of any of
the regal clans. They represent accurately the mythological panorama, as
it unrolled itself slowly through the centuries before the
imagination and spirit of our ancestors accurately that divine
drama, millennium--lasting, with its exits and entrances of gods.
Millennium-lasting, and more so, for it is plain that one divine
generation represents on the average a much greater space of time than
a generation of mortal men. The former probably represents the period
which would elapse before a hero would become so divine, that is, so
consecrated in the imagination of the country, as to be received into
the family of the gods. Cuculain died in the era of the Incarnation,
three hundred years, if not more, before the country even began to be
Christianised, yet he is never spoken of as anything but a great hero,
from which one of two things would follow, either that the apotheosis of
heroes needed the lapse of centuries, or that, during the first,
second, third, and fourth centuries, the historical conscience was so
enlightened, and a positive definite knowledge of the past so universal,
that the translation of heroes into the divine clans could no longer
take place. The latter is indeed the more correct view; but the
reader will, I think, agree with me that the divine generations, taken
generally, represent more than the average space of man's life. To what
remote unimagined distances of time those earlier cycles extend has been
shown by an examination of the tombs of the lower Moy Tura. The ancient
heroes t