forth on the quest. In Campbell's LXXVII., "How the Een was set up," Fionn applies for his sword to Ullamh Lamhfhada[1] (Ullamh the Longhanded), who gives him the most likely sword and the best he found. The hero takes it, shakes it, casts it out of the wooden handle and discards it. Thrice is this repeated, and when the right weapon is in Fionn's hand, he quells utterly all he sees.[2] Now how had Fionn obtained this sword originally? By slaying black Arcan, his father's slayer. It may, I think, be looked upon as certain that in an earlier form of the story, the weapon in question would turn out to be the one with which the treacherous deed was done, and Fionn, a counterpart of Peredur in his bringing up, would also be his counterpart in this incident.[3] For the sword with which Partinal slew Goon Desert is treasured up for the use of Perceval, but only after a repeated essay is he held worthy of it.[4]
The sword incident reappears in a tale of Campbell's, Manus (Vol. III.), which presents some very remarkable analogies with the romances. Manus is driven into various adventures by his aunt;
- ↑ This epithet recalls Lug, of whom it is the stock designation. Now Lug was par excellence the craftsman's god; he, too, at the battle of Mag Tured acted as a sort of armourer-general to the Tuatha de Danann. A dim reminiscence of this may be traced in the words which the folk-tale applies to Ullamh l.f., "he was the one special man for taking their arms."
- ↑ Cf. my Aryan Expulsion and Return formula, pp. 8, 13, for variants of these incidents in other stories belonging to this cycle and in the allied folk-tales.
- ↑ This incident is only found in the living Fionn-sage, being absent from all the older versions, and yet, as the comparison with the allied Perceval sage shows, it is an original and essential feature. How do the advocates of the theory that the Ossianic cycle is a recent mass of legend, growing out of the lives and circumstances of historical men, account for this development along the lines of a formula with which, ex hypothesi, the legend has nothing to do? The Fionn-sage, it is said, has been doctored in imitation of the Cuchulainn-sage, but the assertion (which though boldly made has next to no real foundation) cannot be made in the case of the Conte du Graal. Mediæval Irish bards and unlettered Highland peasants did not conspire together to make Fionn's adventures agree with those of Perceval.
- ↑ In the Gawain form of the feud quest found in Gautier, the knight whose death he sets forth to avenge is slain by the cast of a dart. Can this be brought into connection with the fact that Perceval slays with a cast of his dart the Red Knight, who, according to the Thornton romance, is his father's slayer.
