[99] Cf. D’Arbois de Jubainville, op. cit. p. 188.
[100] When Cuchulainn was opposing the warriors of Ireland in their invasion of Ulster one of his feats is to make smooth chariot-poles out of rough branches of trees by passing them through his clenched hand, so that however bent and knotted they were they came from his hands even, straight, and smooth. Tain bo Cualgne, quoted by Windisch, Rev. Celt., Vol. V.
[101] This epithet recalls Lug, of whom it is the stock designation. Now Lug was par excellence the craftsman’s god; he, too, at the battle of Mag Tured acted as a sort of armourer-general to the Tuatha de Danann. A dim reminiscence of this may be traced in the words which the folk-tale applies to Ullamh l.f., “he was the one special man for taking their arms.”
[102] Cf. my Aryan Expulsion and Return formula, pp. 8, 13, for variants of these incidents in other stories belonging to this cycle and in the allied folk-tales.
[103] This incident is only found in the living Fionn-sage, being absent from all the older versions, and yet, as the comparison with the allied Perceval sage shows, it is an original and essential feature. How do the advocates of the theory that the Ossianic cycle is a recent mass of legend, growing out of the lives and circumstances of historical men, account for this development along the lines of a formula with which, ex hypothesi, the legend has nothing to do? The Fionn-sage, it is said, has been doctored in imitation of the Cuchulainn-sage, but the assertion (which though boldly made has next to no real foundation) cannot be made in the case of the Conte du Graal. Mediæval Irish bards and unlettered Highland peasants did not conspire together to make Fionn’s adventures agree with those of Perceval.
[104] In the Gawain form of the feud quest found in Gautier, the knight whose death he sets forth to avenge is slain by the cast of a dart. Can this be brought into connection with the fact that Perceval slays with a cast of his dart the Red Knight, who, according to the Thornton romance, is his father’s slayer.
[105] This prose tale precedes an oral version of one of the commonest Fenian poems, which in its present shape obviously goes back to the days when the Irish were fighting against Norse invaders. The poem, which still lives in Ireland as well as in the Highlands, belongs to that later stage of development of the Fenian cycle, in which Fionn and his men are depicted as warring against the Norsemen. It is totally dissimilar from the prose story summarised above, and I am inclined to look upon the prose as belonging to a far earlier stage in the growth of the cycle, a stage in which the heroes were purely mythical and their exploits those of mythical heroes generally.
[106] The prohibition seems to be an echo of the widely-spread one which forbids the visitor to the otherworld tasting the food of the dead, which, if he break, he is forfeit to the shades. The most famous instance of this myth is that of Persephone.
[107] Cf. Procopius quoted by Elton, Origins of English History, p. 84.
[108] Prof. Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, looks upon him as a Celtic Zeus. He dispossessed his father of the Brug by fraud, as Zeus dispossessed Kronos by force.