greatly increased since 1872, and in most respects more than revision would be required to bring the work up to date. But it still deserves careful study, and in 1876 it was so immeasurably ahead of anything published in this country, that its issue could not have failed to exercise a stimulating and beneficent influence upon the course of Celtic studies in these islands.
Vol. iii of this MS. series is lettered Translations. Campbell describes in a preliminary note what he has here done, as “scraps of translation made at odd times. To translate the whole (i.e., the texts contained in vol. i) would be very hard and very thankless work . . . . work for a professor, not for J. F. C., the collector.” He adds: “I know enough to be sure that the stuff corresponds to like stuff in Japan, Ceylon, and Eurasia.”
These scraps of translation are not arranged in the order of the printed text, or indeed in any order, and the volume is one of those which would best repay careful collation and indexing. In addition to the aforesaid scraps it contains numberless newspaper cuttings anent Ossian, and other odds and ends which it would probably be impossible to gather together again. In one place Campbell remarks upon the “common malady of his collectors, who insist upon explaining things they cannot possibly understand”.
There are more translations in a volume bound in red, lettered L. n. F., and marked in left-hand upper corners A. N. 5. Campbell thus describes them in a preliminary note (dated July 22, 1871):
“It is not translation of any one version of a story told in Gaelic. It is my way of telling in English the pith of a great many versions of the same story told in Gaelic, written in short notes and stored in a good memory, trained to this sort of oral collection. Fresh from hearing the story, this version of Fionn’s birth and the slaying of his father, Cumhal, was written. Nobody else used to do this sort of work. It is oral heroic tradition told by the collector. I doubt if I could do it now, after ten years.”
