than once their
divinity is practically acknowledged. When the Fian Caoilte and a woman
of the Tuatha De Danann appear before S. Patrick, he asks, "Why is she
youthful and beautiful, while you are old and wrinkled?" And Caoilte
replies, "She is of the Tuatha De Danann, who are unfading and whose
duration is perennial. I am of the sons of Milesius, that are perishable
and fade away."[197]

After their conversion, the Celts, sons of Milesius, thought that the
gods still existed in the hollow hills, their former dwellings and
sanctuaries, or in far-off islands, still caring for their former
worshippers. This tradition had its place with that which made them a
race of men conquered by the Milesians--the victory of Christianity over
paganism and its gods having been transmuted into a strife of races by
the euhemerists. The new faith, not the people, conquered the old gods.
The Tuatha De Danann became the _Daoine-sidhe_, a fairy folk, still
occasionally called by their old name, just as individual fairy kings or
queens bear the names of the ancient gods. The euhemerists gave the
Fomorians a monstrous and demoniac character, which they did not always
give to the Tuatha De Danann; in this continuing the old tradition that
Fomorians were hostile and the Tuatha De Danann beneficent and mild.

The mythological cycle is not a complete "body of divinity"; its
apparent completeness results from the chronological order of the
annalists. Fragments of other myths are found in the _Dindsenchas_;
others exist as romantic tales, and we have no reason to believe that
all the old myths have been preserved. But enough remains to show the
true nature of the Tuatha De Danann--their supernatural character, their
powers, their divine and unfailing food and drink, their mysterious and
beautiful abode. In their contents, their personages, in the actions
that are described in them, the materials of the "mythological cycle,"
show how widely it differs from the Cuchulainn and Fionn cycles.[198]
"The white radiance of eternity" suffuses it; the heroic cycles, magical
and romantic as they are, belong far more to earth and time.

FOOTNOTES:

[153] For some Highland references to the gods in saga and _Maerchen_,
see _Book of the Dean of Lismore_, 10; Campbell, _WHT_ ii. 77. The
sea-god Lir is probably the Liur of Ossianic ballads (Campbell, _LF_
100, 125), and his son Manannan is perhaps "the Son of the Sea" in a
Gaelic song (Carmichael, _CG_ ii. 122)