Note 9 — Chapter XXIX

Mr. Nutt seems to believe that the whole groundwork of the Fenian tales is mythical. His position with regard to them is fairly summed up in this extract from his note on Mac Innes' Gaelic stories. "Every Celtic tribe," he writes, "possessed traditions both mythical and historical, the former of substantially the same character, the latter necessarily varying. Myth and history acted and reacted upon each other, and produced heroic saga which may be defined as myth tinged and distorted by history. The largest element is as a rule suggested by myth, so that the varying heroic sagas of the various portions of a race, have always a great deal in common. These heroic sagas, together with the official or semi-official mythologies of the pre-Christian Irish are the subject-matter of the Annals. They were thrown into a purely artificial chronological shape by men familiar with biblical and classical history. A framework was thus created into which the entire mass of native legend was gradually fitted, whilst the genealogies of the race were modelled, or it may be remodelled in accord with it. In studying the Irish sagas we may banish entirely from our mind all questions as to the truth of the early portions of the Annals. The subject matter of the latter is mainly mythical, the mode in which it has been treated is literary. What residuum of historic truth may still survive can be but infinitesimal." (See Mr. Nutt's valuable essay on Ossianic or Fenian Saga in "Waifs and Strays of Celtic Tradition," vol. ii. p. 399.)