main, if not the main source of the knowledge respecting Celtic antiquity consists of the pre-mediæval and mediæval literature of Gael and Brython (i.e., Irish and Welsh) it will be my endeavour to show in what degree the researches of students of literary history affect our estimate of that literature; in other words, to what extent it may be looked upon as a genuine exponent of Celtic culture. The relations between that early literature and current folk-lore will also demand special attention; and the work of the historian and the archæologist must be examined to see how far it proves, or disproves, the results arrived at by other methods.
Professor Zimmer’s essay upon the Brendan legend is at once the most considerable and the most important contribution of the past year to the history of Irish literature. It is a worthy continuation of the masterly researches which I noticed so fully in my former article. It is difficult to give the pith of studies so complicated and detailed, and injustice can hardly fail to be done to the master’s methods and results in the attempt to summarise them. Briefly speaking, Professor Zimmer may be held to have proved that the mediæval Latin legend of St. Brendan is a Christian adaptation of a genre of Irish story-telling, one example of which, dating from a much earlier period and comparatively little influenced by Christianity, has come down to us in the “Seafaring of Mael Duin”, known to all English-speaking peoples through the Laureate’s imitation. Another, and yet earlier fragment of this, one of the favourite categories of Irish story-telling, is probably preserved in the opening to the “Seafaring of the O’Corras”, a text only known to us in a much later and, as regards the body of the tale, in a
one special branch. So many new facts are coming within the ken of scholars, that a certain amount of over-hasty systematisation is inevitable, and even those who champion most warmly the fashionable theories of the day respecting the early history of mankind and the growth of human civilisation, can hardly feel that they are building a very solid edifice.
