Ma ca lister — Temair Breg ; Remains and Traditions of Tara. 303 



with or without a covering of wax, were doubtless the materials on which 

 the documents were written, hi criticizing the contents of Irish historical 

 documents, we must always He prepared to look back from the writings 

 as we have them to the archaic records from which, on this hypothesis, they 

 have been translated. In this, and in no other way, can the following 

 phenomena be explained : — 



(«) The use of an archaic language in the Ogham inscriptions. These 

 cannot possibly be so old as the time when, for instance, the natural way 

 of expressing the genitive of the word for "son" was magi. There was, 

 doubtless, once such a stage of the spoken language; nothing but a carefully 

 treasured and meticulously studied body of traditional literature could have 

 preserved the memory of such ancient forms down to the time when they 

 began to be written in Ogham. 



(&) The archaeological accuracy of romances like Tain Bo C'italnge; 

 which though written in their present form in or about the seventh or eighth 

 century A. P., reproduce the life of the first or second century B.C. Something 

 more than mere oral tradition must have existed, to preserve the memory of 

 the details of La Tene civilization which Professor Eidgeway has detected and 

 set forth in his well-known monograph On the Date of the first Shaping of the 

 Guchullainn Saga} 



(c) The non-metrical character of certain early poems; such as the 

 concluding lines of Amergin's Am gocth immuir? which may, perhaps, be 

 actually a translation of a hymn of one of the Drnidie "Vedas." These 

 may be presumed to have been regularly metrical in their archaic form, 

 but to have lost their metre through translation, just as would an ode of 

 Horace if it were to be translated literally, line for line, into Italian. 



(d) The streams of nonsense, dignified by the name of " retoricc," occa- 

 sionally introduced into the prose romances. These, at first at least, were 

 nothing but the bungling of an incompetent translator: though in the later 

 imitative literature they became an artificial pose. 3 Such a text as Brio/hnr- 

 chath Ban nUlad must have been almost Ilomeric in its original form, with 

 its stately roll of inflexions ; the version which we possess is on the level of 

 a sixpenny " crib " to the Iliad. 



On such materials, then, the " official history " is ultimately based. The 

 tales were told by the professional story-tellers and historians, at first 

 enshrined in their memories; afterwards, when bhey became acquainted with 



1 Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. ii. 



: The translator lias been able to cast the first part of this rhapsody into :i metrical 

 form, owing to its regular structure. 



3 As in Aided Conchobnir (Todd Lectures, xiv. 10) 



R.I.A. PROC. VOL. XXXIV, SECT. 1 . [42] 



