Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race - Knowledge Rush

216 Myths and Legends of the Celtic RaceGaelic which first introduced him to the English-speaking world)was a poet as well as a warrior, and is the traditional author ofmost of them. The events of the Ultonian Cycle are supposedto have taken place about the time of the birth of Christ. Thoseof the Ossianic Cycle fell mostly in the reign of Cormac macArt, who lived in the third century A.D. During his reign theFianna of Erin, who are represented as a kind of military Ordercomposed mainly of the members of two clans, Clan Bascna andClan Morna, and who were supposed to be devoted to the serviceof the High King and to the repelling of foreign invaders, reachedthe height of their renown under the captaincy of Finn.[253]The annalists of ancient Ireland treated the story of Finn andthe Fianna, in its main outlines, as sober history. This it canhardly be. Ireland had no foreign invaders during the period whenthe Fianna are supposed to have flourished, and the tales do notthrow a ray of light on the real history of the country; they arefar more concerned with a Fairyland populated by supernaturalbeings, beautiful or terrible, than with any tract of real earthinhabited by real men and women. The modern critical reader ofthese tales will soon feel that it would be idle to seek for any basisof fact in this glittering mirage. But the mirage was created bypoets and storytellers of such rare gifts for this kind of literaturethat it took at once an extraordinary hold on the imagination ofthe Irish and Scottish Gael.The Ossianic CycleThe earliest tales of this cycle now extant are found inmanuscripts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and werecomposed probably a couple of centuries earlier. But the cyclelasted in a condition of vital growth for a thousand years, rightdown to Michael Comyn's “Lay of Oisin in the Land of Youth,”which was composed about 1750, and which ended the long