Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race - Knowledge Rush

248 Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race
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St. Patrick, Oisīn, and Keelta
Before we leave the “Colloquy” another interesting point
must be mentioned in connexion with it. To the general public
probably the best-known things in Ossianic literature—I refer,
of course, to the true Gaelic poetry which goes under that name,
not to the pseudo-Ossian of Macpherson—are those dialogues in
which the pagan and the Christian ideals are contrasted, often
in a spirit of humorous exaggeration or of satire. The earliest
of these pieces are found in the manuscript called “The Dean of
Lismore's Book,” in which James Macgregor, Dean of Lismore
in Argyllshire,wrote down, some time before the year 1518, all
he could remember or discover of traditional Gaelic poetry in
his time. It may be observed that up to this period, and, indeed,
long after it, Scottish and Irish Gaelic were one language and
one literature, the great written monuments of which were in
Ireland, though they belonged just as much to the Highland Celt,
and the two branches of the Gael had an absolutely common
stock of poetic tradition. These Oisīn-and-Patrick dialogues
are found in abundance both in Ireland and in the Highlands,
though, as I have said, “The Dean of Lismore's Book” is their
first written record now extant. What relation, then, do these
dialogues bear to the Keelta-and-Patrick dialogues with which
we make acquaintance in the “Colloquy” The questions which
really came first, where they respectively originated, and what
current of thought or sentiment each represented, constitute, as
Mr. Alfred Nutt has pointed out, a literary problem of the greatest
interest; and one which no critic has yet attempted to solve, or,
indeed, until quite lately, even to call attention to. For though
these two attempts to represent, in imaginative and artistic form,
the contact of paganism with Christianity are nearly identical in
machinery and framework, save that one is in verse and the other
in prose, yet they differ widely in their point of view.
In the Oisīn dialogues 186 there is a great deal of rough humour
186
Examples of these have been published, with translations, in the