"For 1200 years at least, they
have been," he says, "intimately bound up with the thought and
feelings of the whole Gaelic race in Ireland and Scotland." Even at
the present day new forms are given to the tales in the cottage homes
of Ireland. And it is no wonder. The mysterious giant forms of the
mythological period, removed by divinity from the sympathy of men; the
vast heroic figures of Cuchulain and his fellows and foes, their close
relation to supernatural beings and their doings, are far apart from
the more natural humanity of Cormac and Finn, of Dermot and Goll, of
Oisin and Oscar, of Keelta, and last of Conan, the coward, boaster and
venomous tongue, whom all the Fenians mocked and yet endured. They are
a very human band of fighting men, and though many of them, like Oisin
and Finn and Dermot, have adventures in fairyland, they preserve in
these their ordinary human nature. The Connacht peasant has no
difficulty in following Finn into the cave of Slieve Cullinn, where
the witch turned him into a withered old man, for the village where he
lives has traditions of the same kind; the love affairs of Finn, of
Dermot and Grania, and of many others, are quite in harmony with a
hundred stories, and with the temper, of Irish lovers. A closer, a
simpler humanity than that of the other cycles pervades the Fenian
cycle, a greater chivalry, a greater courtesy, and a greater
tenderness.
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