The Ossianic tales and poems still told and sung by the Irish
peasantry at the present day in the country of Ossian and Oscar,
would be, if collected even now, quite as valuable, if not more so.
Truer to the antique these latter are, for in them the cycles are
not blended. The Red Branch heroes are not confused with Ossian's
Fianna.
But MacPherson's Ossian is not a translation. In the publications
of the Irish Ossianic poetry we see what that poetry really was--
rude, homely, plain-spoken, leagues removed from the nebulous
sublimity of MacPherson.
With regard to the other, the Germans, who naturally desire to
refer its composition to as remote a date as possible, and who
arguing from no scientific data, but only style, ascribe the
authorship of the Nibelungen to a poet living in the latter part of
the twelfth century. Be it remembered, that the poem does not
purport to be a collection of the scattered fragments of a cycle,
but an original composition, then actually imagined and written. It
does not even purport to deal with the ethnic times. _Its heroes
are Christian heroes. They attend Mass._ The poem is not true, even
to the leading features of the late period of history in which it
is placed, if it have any habitat in the world of history at all.
Attila, who died A.D. 450, and Theodoric, who did not die until the
succeeding century, meet as coevals.
Turn we now from the sole boast of Germany to one out of a hundred
in the Irish bardic literature.
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