Whitley Stokes’ latest publication will thus be welcomed by all who wish to have a clear idea of the mental and social condition of oar forefathers, as well as by all lovers of the mystical, charming Celtic genius. Many of the incidents recorded in these Lives are well-nigh unsurpassed for their mingling of naïve humanity and mystical spirituality. Needless to say that the editor has done everything to facilitate the understanding and criticism of his texts. Especially noteworthy from our point of view are pp. xci-cxix of the Introduction, in which the testimony of the Lives to the history and social conditions of Ireland is summarised under commonplaces—pp. cv-cx being given to “Religion and Superstition”, pp. cxi-cxii to the “Family”, pp. cxiii-cxix to the “State”.
Hitherto we have been considering Irish evidence for the existence and nature of early Celtic culture, and chiefly that afforded by literary monuments. It is upon documents, partly literary, partly historical, collated with and controlled by folk-usage, that a suggestive and brilliant attempt to penetrate to the myth and ritual of the Continental Celts is based. I allude to the late M. Cerquand’s second series of articles, “Taranous et Thor”, in which he supplies and discusses the evidence for the thesis maintained in the first series.[1] The value of these articles lies not so much in the conclusion reached—that the Continental Celts possessed a god of thunder, whose rôle and attributes were much the same as those of the Teutonic Thor—nor in the principle upon which the argument rests, which is, that the pre-Roman and pre-Christian Gaulish culture was not annihilated by the alien and higher elements, but struggled long against them, and was compromised with rather than eliminated—but in the penetrating sagacity with which the most unlikely texts are cross-examined and made to yield witness to this principle. This latter, indeed, was, not so long ago, a quasi-axiomatic assumption with most investigators, but of late it has been
- ↑ Revue Celtique, vol. vi, vol. x.
