Preface
the magic power of his fairy opponent, such as that with which he is credited in a recently published version of the story, he collects his warriors, storms the fairy mound,[1] and carries off his wife from the disconsolate though divine lover. The well-known boast of Ossian: "Were God and my son Oscar hand to hand together on Knock-na-veen; if I were to see Oscar down, I would then say God was a strong man," seems to give the original Celtic feeling about the power of the supernatural better than can be got from the notion of ever-present magical spell which is now held up to us as the peculiarly Celtic view.
Yet the Ossianic tales, which appear to be of comparatively modern date, cannot really be taken to represent the original Celtic spirit. For, whatever the Irish of a later day may have become after the history of the last thousand years, and the modifications of the race by outside influences which have been made in that time, there is little doubt that if we wish to find the true Celtic ideas, untouched by foreign additions, or by Danish or later influences of race, we must go to the old tales found in the eleventh and twelfth-century manuscripts, or to those which modern scholarship finds to be undoubtedly of equally ancient origin. There we find a mythology, the gods of that mythology appearing from
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- ↑ Tochmarc Etaine (Egerton version), § 20; Irische Texte, vol. i, page 130.
