When the survivors of the old Fianna, Oisín (or Ossian), Caoilte and the rest, were told about Hell and the Devil by St. Patrick and his clergy, they could not, according to the Ossianic legends, comprehend it in the least, and the misunderstandings which the doctrine gave rise to were taken full advantage of by the composers of the Ossianic ballads. The idea of bringing the last great figure of Paganism, the warrior and poet Ossian, into contact with the first great Christian figure in Ireland, St. Patrick, was a brilliant one, and it gave birth to whole volumes of badinage and semi-comic wrangling in the popular ballads which told of the warrior and the cleric. These ballads used to be in great vogue at one time, and any seanchuidhe worthy of the name used to be able to repeat by heart many hundreds of lines of the dialogue between Patrick and Oisín. This is now nearly a thing of the past, but the poems exist in numberless manuscripts, and are not yet forgotten by the older Irish speakers, though the only specimen I have given in this volume is the Baptism of Oisín, and it is in prose. St. Patrick displays in places an excess of priestly rigour, but this is always done to set off the naïveté of Oisín's answers.
But Oisín could not understand how Patrick's God could get the better of his Fianna, or why He should try to put them in hell at all.
Were God and my son Oscar seen
On Knocknaveen in combat long,
And I saw my Oscar on the sod,
It's then I'd say that God was strong.
How is your God a better man
(Or all your clan of clerics there)
Than Finn, our Fenian chief, so great,
So straight, so generous, so fair?
The spirit of banter in which St. Patrick and the Church are treated, and which just stops short of irreverence, is, of course, a mediaeval and not a primitive trait. My friend, the late Mr. Nutt, thought that it is a trait more characteristic of the twelfth than of any succeeding century.
It would be exceedingly easy to fill volumes with stories from the lives of Saints which exist either in old vellum or in paper MSS., but this has not been my aim. I have kept to actual folk survivals, and have drawn upon MSS. of Saints' lives only for the elucidation of the folk-tale.
Finally, I should say that after having collected Irish folk-lore for a quarter of a century, the amount of folk-stories which are wholly conditioned by Christianity or largely based upon Christian conceptions would be, in my opinion, about one story in four, or one story in five. There still remains the fascinating problem of their sources. If foreign, what was their origin and who brought them here; if native, who invented them, and when, and with what purpose? I have prefixed a few notes to each of the following stories which possibly may not be wholly uninteresting to the reader who has an eye for these problems.