North-Western Europe, whether Celts or Teutons, had, before this contact with Greco-Roman civilisation, no culture of their own worth speaking of, and that whatever we find of myth, custom, or institution in the early records of both these races is, if not a direct loan from classic culture, at all events profoundly and radically influenced by it. Here the folk-lorist and the student of literature cannot dispense with the aid of the archæologist, using that word in its restricted sense as designating a student of material antiquities. If the folk-lorist, working on the same lines and using the same methods as the palæontologist, reconstructs from existing survivals the picture of a past civilisation, if the student of literature confirms the results thus arrived at, the archæologist has still to have his say. Well-nigh every civilisation has left some material traces of its nature, and if these are found to justify other conclusions from those arrived at by the folk-lorist, the latter must pause and reconsider both his facts and his deductions from those facts. Thus, if early Irish literature, both legendary and legal, gives us an idea of archaic Celtic civilisation altogether different from that derived from the material remains of Celtic antiquity, there will be reason for suspecting the influence of an alien and more highly developed civilisation upon that literature.
These general considerations involve the principle and system of this and succeeding annual reports upon Celtic myth and saga. In setting forth the results arrived at by Celtic scholars, I shall endeavour to bear in view the general trend of anthropological and archæological research. If Celtologists differ in a very marked degree from workers in other fields of study, it will be evident that their methods and results require very careful examination before they can be accepted.[1] Furthermore, as one of the
- ↑ It would by no means follow that such a difference necessarily implied error upon the part of Celtic scholars. It has happened before now that a generalisation, which obtained in many and varying branches of research, has been disproved by the results reached in
