17th century. The comparison is interesting not only as showing the variations through which a few of the more popular of the tales of old Ireland have passed, but yet more because these changes give us glimpses into the social and moral conceptions of the people themselves.
What the age demands, that the story-teller, if he desires to retain his popularity, must add to his recital; that which changed ideas of life and character reject, that he must needs remodel. Thus the tales become a touchstone by which the moral sensitiveness of the nation can, to a certain extent, be gauged. In the beautiful modern folk-version taken down by Mr. Alexander Carmichael from Iain MacNeill ("Iain Donn"), an old man of eighty-three, in the Western Islands of Scotland,[1] the whole cast of the story is remodelled. Here it is not the king who shuts up the maiden to preserve her for himself, but her own father, who, on account of his great age and the age of his wife when Deirdre is born, is ashamed to be known to have a child. He therefore will not allow a living creature to know of her birth save the nurse or "knee-woman," alone. He gets three men to "dig a green conical mound inside out, and line the hollow thus formed right round," so that the child and nurse might live there comfortably. It is made far away from human habitation "among the great high hills in the wild distant desert," and it is provided year by year with food sufficient to last for twelve months and a day. The descriptions in this piece are of the loveliest, and we see Deirdre growing up in her solitude "lithe and fair as a stately sapling, straight and symmetrical as the young rush of the moorland. Her nurse-mother taught her all knowledge that she herself knew. There was no plant springing from root, nor bird singing from spray, nor star gazing from heaven, for which Deirdre had not a name." She is no longer the sentimental hothouse-reared
- ↑ Transactions of the Gaelic Society, Inverness, vol. xiii., pp. 241-257. Translation, vol. xiv., pp. 370-387.
