It was,
indeed, a favourite fancy of the bards that not Sualtam, but Lu
Lamfada himself, was his father; this, however, in a spiritual or
supernatural sense, for his age was far removed from that of the
Tuatha De Danan, and falling well within the scope of the historic
period. Even as late as the time of Alexander, the Greeks could
believe a great contemporary warrior to be of divine origin, and
the son of Zeus.
When the Irish bards began to elaborate a general history of their
country, they naturally commenced with the enumeration of the elder
gods. I at one time suspected that the long pedigrees running
between those several divisions of the mythological period were the
invention of mediaeval historians, anxious to spin out the national
record, that it might reach to Shinar and the dispersion. Not only,
however, was such fabrication completely foreign to the genius of
the literature, but in the fragments of those early divine cycles,
we see that each of these personages was at one time the centre of
a literature, and holds a definite place as regards those who went
before and came after. These pedigrees, as I said before, have no
historical meaning, being pre-Milesian, and therefore absolutely
prehistoric; but as the genealogy of the gods, and as representing
the successive generations of that invisible family, whose history
not one or ten bards, but the whole bardic and druidic organisation
of the island, delighted to record, collate, and verify--those
pedigrees are as reliable as that of any of the regal clans.
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