ed in
dialects and poetry, seems to be credited with the invention of the
Ogam alphabet, and he probably was the equivalent of the Gaulish god
Ogmios, the god of eloquence, so interestingly described by Lucian.

We may take it then that the Irish pagans knew sufficient letters to
hand down to Irish Christians the substance of their pagan epics,
sagas, and poems. We may take it for granted also that the greater
Irish epics (purely pagan in character, utterly untouched in
substance by that Christianity which so early conquered the country)
really represent the thoughts, manners, feelings, and customs of
pagan Ireland.

The effect of this conclusion must be startling indeed to those who
know the ancient world only through the medium of Greek and Roman
literature. To the Greek and to his admiring master, the Roman, all
outside races were simply barbarians, at once despised,
misinterpreted, and misunderstood.

We have no possible means of reconstructing the ancient world as it
was lived in by the ancestors of some of the leading races in Europe,
the Gauls, Spaniards, Britons, and the people of all those countries
which trace themselves back to a Celtic ancestry, because these races
have left no literature or records behind them, and the Greeks and
Romans, who tell us about them, saw everything through the false
medium of their own prejudices. But now since the discovery and
publication of the Irish sagas and epics, the descendants of these
great races no longer find it necessary to view their own past
through the colored and distorting glasses of the Greek or the Roman,
since there has now opened for them, where they least expected to
find it, a window through which they can look steadily at the life of
their race, or of one of its leading offshoots, in one of its
strongholds, and reconstruct for themselves with tolerable accuracy
the life of their own ancestors. It is impossible to overrate the
importance of this for the history of Europe, because neither Teutons
nor Slavs have preserved pictures of their own heroic past, dating
from pagan times. It is only the Celts, and of these the Irish, who
have handed down such pictures drawn with all the fond intimacy of
romance, and descriptions which exhibit the life of western Europeans
at an even earlier culture-stage in the evolution of humanity than do
the poems of Homer.

This conclusion, to which a study of the literature invites us, falls
in exactly with that arrived a