Their grandson was Lu Lamada, one of the
noblest of the Irish gods.
The last of the mythological cycles is that of the Tuatha De Danan,
whose character, attributes, and history will, I hope, be rendered
interesting and intelligible in my account of Cuculain and the Red
Branch of Ulster.
Irish history has suffered from rationalism almost more than from
neglect and ignorance. The conjectures of the present century are
founded upon mediaeval attempts to reduce to verisimilitude and
historical probability what was by its nature quite incapable of
such treatment. The mythology of the Irish nation, being relieved
of the marvellous and sublime, was set down with circumstantial
dates as a portion of the country's history by the literary men of
the middle ages. Unable to excide from the national narrative those
mythological beings who filled so great a place in the imagination
of the times, and unable, as Christians, to describe them in their
true character as gods, or, as patriots, in the character which
they believed them to possess, namely, demons, they rationalized
the whole of the mythological period with names, dates, and ordered
generations, putting men for gods, flesh and blood for that
invisible might, till the page bristled with names and dates, thus
formulating, as annals, what was really the theogony and mythology
of their country. The error of the mediaeval historians is shared
by the not wiser moderns. In the generations of the gods we seem to
see prehistoric racial divisions and large branches of the Aryan
family, an error which results from a neglect of the bardic
literature, and a consequently misdirected study of the annals.
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