Manchester iMenioirs, Vol. xliv. (1899), No. *-}. 1 1 



komu"' (there the prince waited until they came thither), 

 by the Irish " Et tancatar co hairm i mbai Conall" (and 

 they came to the place where Conall was) ; or the 

 description of a storm at sea."-^) 



The theory'' that the Valkyriur of Old Norse myth are 

 due to the working of Celtic suggestion on a Germanic 

 basis of fact, is again unsupported hypothesis. In the 

 absence of any evidence of actual intercourse, no scholar 

 can do more than point out that supernatural battle-maids, 

 of very different character, appear in both literatures, as 

 also in the literature of other races ; there is no proof that 

 either borrowed from the mythology of the other, except 

 such as may be drawn from a {q.\v isolated and obscure 

 references in Irish stories, which look like suggestions from 

 Norse mythology ; and these might be otherwise explained 

 with greater knowledge.* 



We now return to the older and broader theory that a 

 Celtic admixture in race first gave the impulse for literary 

 composition in Iceland.^ That such an admixture was 

 large enough either to ensure a knowledge of the Irish 

 speech among Icelanders or to make the spread of Irish 

 ideas probable, is not supported by such evidence as we 



^ Helgi Hundingsbani, I. 22. 



- Helgi Hundingsbani, I., 27-31 ; Cath Kit is na Rig, ch. 10. 



3 Helgedigtene, p. 177. 



* Such is the sentence " Fanocrat in da fiach drundechta {? druidechta) 

 dogensat in tsh'iaig " (Serglige Conculaind, Lebor na hUidhre, fol. 48^, R. I. 

 A. Dublin), which may be translated "The two ravens announced the 

 enchantments which the host performed " ; no ravens have been mentioned 

 before, and their isolated appearance here as messengers from the battletield 

 seems like a reminiscence of Odin's two ravens. 



'" See Matthew Arnold, Study of Celtic Literature (London, 1867), 

 p. 141, f., " There is a fire, a sense of style, a distinction, in Icelandic poetry, 

 which German poetry has not. Icelandic poetry too shows a powerful and 

 developed technic ; and I wish to throw out .... the suggestion that this 

 power of style and development of technic in the Norse poetry seems to point 

 towards an early Celtic influence or intermixture." See also Sturlunga Saqa, 

 Prolegomena, p. xx. 



