ions from Ancient Irish Poetry (2d
edition, London, 1913); Best: Bibliography of Irish Philology and of
Printed Irish Literature (Dublin, 1913); Loth: La metrique galloise
(Paris, 1902); Thurneysen: Mittelirische Verslehren, Irische Texte
III.; Buile Suibhne (Dublin, 1910).

IRISH HEROIC SAGAS

By ELEANOR HULL.

Ireland has the unique distinction of having preserved for mankind a
full and vivid literary record of a period otherwise, so far as
native memorials are concerned, clouded in obscurity. A few
fragmentary suggestions, derived from ancient stone monuments or from
diggings in tumuli and graves, are all that Gaul or Britain have to
contribute to a knowledge of that important period just before and
just after the beginning of our era, when the armies of Rome were
overrunning western Europe and were brought, for the first time, into
direct contact with the Celtic peoples of the West. Almost all that
we know of the early inhabitants of these countries comes to us from
the pens of Roman writers and soldiers--Poseidonius, Caesar,
Diodorus, Tacitus. We may give these observers credit for a desire to
be fair to peoples they sometimes admired and often dreaded, but
conquerors are not always the best judges of the races they are
engaged in subduing, especially when they are ignorant of their
language, unversed in their lore and customs, and unused to their
ways. Valuable as are the reports of Roman authorities, we feel at
every point the need of checking them by native records; but the
native records of Gaul, and in large part also those of Britain and
Wales, have been swept away. Caesar is probably right in saying that
the Druids, who were the learned men of their race and day, committed
nothing to writing; if they did, whatever they wrote has been
irrecoverably lost.

But Ireland was exempt from the sweeping changes brought about
through long periods of Roman and Saxon occupation; no great upheaval
from without disturbed the native political and social conditions up
to the coming of the Norse and Danes about the beginning of the ninth
century. Agricola, standing on the western coast of Britain, looked
across the dividing channel, and reflected upon "the beneficial
connection that the conquest of Ireland would have formed between the
most powerful parts of the Roman Empire," but, fortunately for the
literature of Ireland, if not for her history, he never came. The
early incursions of the Scotti or Irish were ea