As for Richard his predecessor—
"The skipping king, he ambled up and down
With shallow jesters and rash bavin wits,
Soon kindled, and soon burned; carded his state;
Mingled his royalty with capering fools,' etc."
"Henry IV.," Part I., act iii., scene 2.
[CHAPTER XX]
THE SUGGESTIVELY PAGAN ELEMENT IN IRISH LITERATURE
It is this easy analysis of early Irish literature into its ante-Christian and its post-Christian elements, which lends to it its absorbing value and interest. For when all spurious accretions have been stripped off, we find in the most ancient Irish poems and sagas, a genuine picture of pagan life in Europe, such as we look for in vain elsewhere.
"The Church," writes Windisch, "adopted towards pagan sagas, the same position that it adopted towards pagan law.... I see no sufficient ground for doubting that really genuine pictures of a pre-Christian culture are preserved to us in the individual sagas, pictures which are of course in some places faded, and in others painted over by a later hand."[1]
Again in his notes on the story of Déirdre, he remarks—
"The saga originated in pagan, and was propagated in Christian times, and that too without its seeking fresh nutriment as a rule from Christian elements. But we must ascribe it to the influence of Christianity that what is specifically pagan in Irish saga is blurred over and forced into the background. And yet there exist many whose contents are plainly mythological. The Christian monks were certainly not the first who reduced the ancient sagas to fixed form, but later on they copied them faithfully, and propagated them after Ireland had been converted to Christianity."