It was a habit, even of Teutonic poets,
to tell of the various trees and their uses in verse, and Spenser and
Drayton have both done it in later times. But few of them have added,
as the Irish story does, a spiritual element to their description, and
made us think of malign or beneficent elements attached to them. The
woodbine, and this is a strange fancy, is the king of the woods. The
rowan is the tree of the magicians, and its berries are for poets. The
bramble is inimical to man, the alder is full of witchcraft, and the
elder is the wood of the horses of the fairies. Into every tree a
spiritual power is infused; and the good lords of the forest are loved
of men and birds and bees.
Thus the Irish love of nature led them to spiritualise, in another way
than mythical, certain things in nature, and afterwards to humanise,
up to a certain point, the noble implements wrought by human skill out
of natural materials. And this is another element in all these
stories, as it is in the folk-lore also of other lands. In the tale of
the Sons of Turenn, the stones of the wayside tell to Lugh the story
of the death of his father Kian, and the boat of Mananan, indwelt by a
spirit, flies hither and thither over the seas, obeying the commands,
even the thought, of its steersman. The soul of some famed spears is
so hot for slaughter that, when it is not being used in battle, its
point must stand in a bath of blood or of drowsy herbs, lest it
should slay the host.
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