The
early History of Ireland clings around and grows out of the Irish
barrows until, with almost the universality of that primeval forest
from which Ireland took one of its ancient names, the whole isle
and all within it was clothed with a nobler raiment, invisible, but
not the less real, of a full and luxuriant history, from whose
presence, all-embracing, no part was free. Of the many poetical and
rhetorical titles lavished upon this country, none is truer than
that which calls her the Isle of Song. Her ancient history passed
unceasingly into the realm of artistic representation; the history
of one generation became the poetry of the next, until the whole
island was illuminated and coloured by the poetry of the bards.
Productions of mere fancy and imagination these songs are not,
though fancy and imagination may have coloured and shaped all their
subject-matter, but the names are names of men and women who once
lived and died in Ireland, and over whom their people raised the
swelling rath and reared the rocky cromlech. In the sepulchral
monuments their names were preserved, and in the performance of
sacred rites, and the holding of games, fairs, and assemblies in
their honour, the memory of their achievements kept fresh, till the
traditions that clung around these places were inshrined in tales
which were finally incorporated in the Leabhar na Huidhre and the
Book of Leinster.
Pre-historic narrative is of two kinds--in one the imagination is
at work consciously, in the other unconsciously.
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