43 



h'aditions, they may be allowed to evidence the facts of the existence 

 of this chieftain, as well as the country which was the theatre of his 

 achievements. Suhm's history of Denmark, cited by Sir John Sin- 

 clair,* and put forward by him as "a work of great authority,"-f 

 supplies a more legitimate testimony to both points in the passage 

 *' Swaran, the son of Starno, carried on many wars in Ireland, where 

 he subdued most of the heroes who opposed him, except Cuchullin." 

 Yet, it must be understood, that the making him contemporary with the 

 other heroes of Ossian's poems, is one of those anachronisms, which 

 have been at all times conceded to the poets of antiquity, and which, 

 in this instance, the writer of the article " Ossian," in Rees's Cyclo- 

 paedia, admits ; while the whole focus of Irish historians, the Codex 

 Cluanensis, the Codex Lecanus, the Annales Innisfalenses, Flannus 

 apud O Duvegan, the book of Ballymote, and more fully, the ancient 

 metrical fragments in the library of Stowe, as stated by Dr. O'Conor, 

 in the first volume of his splendid work on the Irish annalists, record 

 tlie death of Cuchullin as having occurred in the above year, and the 

 Chronicon Scotorum confirms this calculation, having a mention at 

 the year 432, " From the death of the hero Concullan to this, is a 

 period of 430 years.".|. 



The civil feuds, which have agitated Ireland in too constant suc- 

 cession, and yet more exposed her to the merciless desolation of foreign 

 pirates and oppressors, always afforded opportunities for the exercise 

 of martial ardour; and accordingly Cuchullin is represented in the 

 Irish annals, as having so signalized himself at the age of seventeen, 



• Dissertation, p. Ixiii. 



t Dissertation, p. Ixii. Suhm was Chamberlain and Historiographer to the King of Den- 

 mark, and to him is the world indebted for a complete and excellent edition of Abulfeda in 

 Arabic and Latin. 



j " A morte Concullaind herois usque ad hunc annum 430 anni sunt." 



G 2 



