[215] Cf. Frazer, Golden Bough,2 i. 233 ff., 343.
[216] Cf. E. J. Gwynn, On the Idea of Fate in Irish Literature, in Journ. Ivernian Society (Cork), April 1910.
[217] Cf. our evidence, pp. [38], [44]; also Kirk’s Secret Commonwealth (c. i), where it is said of the ‘good people’ or fairies that their bodies are so ‘plyable thorough the Subtilty of the Spirits that agitate them, that they can make them appear or disappear att Pleasure. Some have Bodies or Vehicles so spungious, thin, and delecat, that they are fed by only sucking into some fine spirituous Liquors, that pierce lyke pure Air and Oyl’.
[218] Laws, iv; cf. Jowett, Dialogues of Plato, v. 282-90.
[219] Chief general references: Le Cycle Mythologique Irlandais (Paris, 1884) and L’Épopée celtique en Irlande (Paris, 1892)—both by H. D’Arbois de Jubainville. Chief sources: The Book of Armagh, a collection of ecclesiastical MSS. probably written at Armagh, and finished in A. D. 807 by the learned scribe Ferdomnach of Armagh; the Leabhar na h-Uidhre or ‘Book of the Dun Cow’, the most ancient of the great collections of MSS. containing the old Irish romances, compiled about A. D. 1100 in the monastery of Clonmacnoise; the Book of Leinster, a twelfth-century MS. compiled by Finn Mac Gorman, Bishop of Kildare; the Yellow Book of Lecan (fifteenth century); and the Book of Lismore, an old Irish MS. found in 1814 by workmen while making repairs in the castle of Lismore, and thought to be of the fifteenth century. The Book of Lismore contains the Agallamh na senórach or ‘Colloquy of the Ancients’, which has been edited by S. H. O’Grady in his Silva Gadelica (London, 1892), and by Whitley Stokes, Ir. Texte, iv. 1. For additional texts and editions of texts see Notes by R. I. Best to his translations of Le Cycle Mythologique Irlandais (Dublin, 1903).
[220] Cf. Le Cycle Myth. Irl., pp. 144-5.
[221] Cf. Le Cycle Myth. Irl., pp. 266-7. From the way they are described in many of the old Irish manuscripts, we may possibly regard the Tuatha De Danann as reflecting to some extent the characteristics of an early human population in Ireland. In other words, on an already flourishing belief in spiritual beings, known as the Sidhe, was superimposed, through anthropomorphism, an Irish folk-memory about a conquered pre-Celtic race of men who claimed descent from a mother goddess called Dana.
[222] Page 10, col. 2, ll. 6-8; cf. Le Cycle Myth. Irl., p. 143.
[223] Rhŷs, Hib. Lect., p. 581 n.; and Cóir Anmann, in Ir. Texte, III, ii. 355.
[224] Kuno Meyer’s trans. in Voy. of Bran, ii. 300.