Legendary fictions of the Irish Celts

4
Fictions of the Irish Celts.
The preservation of these tales by unlettered people
from a period anterior to the going forth of Celt or
Teuton or Slave from the neighbourhood of the Caspian
Sea is hard to be accounted for. The number of good
Scealuidhes dispersed through the country parts is but
small compared to the mass of the people, and hundreds
may be found who recollect the succession of events
and the personages of a tale while utterly incapable of
relating it.
In remote neighbourhoods, where the people have
scarcely any communication with towns or cities, or
access to books, stories will be heard identical with
those told in the Brothers Grimm's German collection,
or among the Norse tales gathered by MM. Asbjornsen
and Moe. We cannot for a moment imagine an Irish-
man of former days speaking English or his native
tongue communicating these household stories to Swede
or German who could not understand him, or suppose
the old dweller in Deutschland doing the good office for
the Irishman. The ancestors both of Celt and Teuton
brought the simple and wonderful narratives from the
parent ancestral household in Central Asia. In con-
sideration of the preference generally given by young
students to stirring action rather than dry disquisition,
we omit much we had to say on the earliest forms of
fiction, and introduce a story known in substance to
every Gothic and Celtic people in Europe. It is given