xiv THE BA TTLE OF VENTRY. 



ii3,\vhere Aife, the daughterof Manannan mac Lir, is saidto have become 

 enamoured of mac Liighach, a nephew of Finn's. There is a tendency 

 to eive the favourite heroes some relation with them. Thus Finn in 

 LL. p. 379a is said to be the grandson of Nuadu do Thuathaib De Danand, 

 Cf. my letter to the ' Academy,' quoted above. The Tuatha De Danand 

 still Hve in the folklore of the Irish and Scotch of our days. Campbell, 

 Popular Tales of the West Highlands, ii. p. 77, gives a tale from Barra, in 

 which a combat between the fhin and the sluagh de Dana or sluagh de 

 Danainn is described, which ends with the total destruction of the latter. 

 ' Alharbh an fJiinn an sluagJi de Danainn tiile^ p. 79- 



It is well known that one of the principal charges commonly brougjit 

 against Macpherson is that he has in his poems thrown together and mixed 

 up elements and persons, times and places, which in genuine Irish tradition 

 are always strictly kept apart. Windisch, in his article on Ossianic poetry, 

 which I only know in its French shape (' Rev. Celt.' v. pp. 70-93), thus con- 

 cludes his remarks on Macpherson : ' Enfin, a-t-il toujours ete le premier 

 auteur des confusions, des mutilations, des combinaisons nouvelles qu'a 

 subies sa mati^re } ou bien d'autres redacteurs lui avaicnt-ils, ga et la, pre- 

 pare Touvrage? Cest cequ'il n'est pas facile de juger.' Now it seems to 

 me that this confusion was neither the doing of Macpherson nor of any other 

 single adapter, but simply the natural outcome of centuries of oral tradi- 

 tion in Ireland and Scotland. As we find in the later Ossianic tales the 

 Tuatha De Danand side by side with the fianns, so we see, in CampbelFs 

 Popular Tales of tJie VVest Highlands, the older heroic and the Ossianic 

 cycle mixed up exactly in the same way. Cf. e.g. iii. p. 181, where the 

 well-known story from the Macgnimrada Conctdaind about the smith 

 Culand is found in its modern form, Ctdand having become Cumhal, the 

 father of Finn, and Cikhulaind thus being explained as Cu CJiumJiail. 

 The fact is, the later stages of development are not yet sufficiently known 

 to us, there being few publications and these mostly very untrustworthy. 

 Yet nowhere that I know of is there a better opportunity for the student 

 of folklore to trace the development of popular tradition from stage to 

 stage through more than a thousand years. For, on the one hand, we have 

 the oldest Irish MSS. dating from the eleventhand twelfth centuries, with 

 their wealth of national tradition, containing as they do but the echo of 

 many centuries of preceding tradition ; and, on the other hand, we find at 



