Standish O'Grady; selected essays and passages

IRISH BARDIC HISTORY 69
though having supernatural attributes. Were the Faed
Fia removed, they could be seen distinctly, eaten with,
fought with, touched, like mortals. Uath, of Lough
Uath, walks out of his lake to the call of the Red Branch
diampions, with his brazen adze in his hand, as real as
a man, and addresses the heroes. Cuculain finds the
Liath Macha grazing on the shores of his enchanted lake,
seizes him by the mane, struggles with, tames, and
compels him to draw his war chariot. The great epic
contest between Cuculain and Far-Dia was really, and
in its original, a strife with the god of the Avon Dia.
The river refuses to flow in horror at the mighty duel,
and leaves its channel dry, while its god contends with the
great northern champion.
I incline to think that the strife between Achilles and
the river gods indicates the late origin of that portion
of the Iliad. In the primal imagination, the gods would
not have been so vague and elemental. They would have
risen in armour out of the waters, and resisted the hero.
The most valuable of the Irish heroic literature may
be distinguished into three great divisions :— ^the first,
that which relates directly to the wars and adventures
of the gods ; the second, the great Ultonian cycle revol-
ving round Cuculain and his contemporaries (tempore
Christi) ; the third, the Ossianic, referring to Finn
mac Cool and the Fianna Eireen heroes of the third cen-
tury A.D. The latter and the former, to a certain extent,
exhibit some mediaeval features. In the second, the
sesthetic view of nature hardly appears ; but the others
reveal something modern in their feeling towards the