palace of Angus near the Boyne, or across the
seas in Tir-na-n-Og, the land of immortal youth, whither Niam brings
Oisin to live with her in love, as Morgan le Fay brought Ogier the
Dane to her fairyland. The land of the Immortals in the heroic cycle,
to which, in the story of _Etain and Midir_ in this book, Midir brings
back Etain after she has sojourned for a time on earth, is quite
different in conception from the Land of Youth over the far seas where
delightfulness of life and love is perfect. This, in its conception of
an unknown world where is immortal youth, where stormless skies, happy
hunting, strange adventure, gentle manners dwell, where love is free
and time is unmarked, is pure romance. So are the adventures of Finn
against enchanters, as in the story of the _Birth of Oisin_, of
_Dermot in the Country under the Seas_, in the story of the _Pursuit
of the Gilla Dacar_, of the wild love-tale of _Dermot and Grania_,
flying for many years over all Ireland from the wrath of Finn, and of
a host of other tales of enchantments and battle, and love, and
hunting, and feasts, and discoveries, and journeys, invasions,
courtships, and solemn mournings. No doubt the romantic atmosphere has
been deepened in these tales by additions made to them by successive
generations of bardic singers and storytellers, but for all that the
original elements in the stories are romantic as they are not in the
previous cycles.

Again, these Fenian tales are more popular than the others. Douglas
Hyde has dwelt on this distinction. "For 1200 years at least, they
have been," he says, "intimately bound up with the thought and
feelings of the whole Gaelic race in Ireland and Scotland." Even at
the present day new forms are given to the tales in the cottage homes
of Ireland. And it is no wonder. The mysterious giant forms of the
mythological period, removed by divinity from the sympathy of men; the
vast heroic figures of Cuchulain and his fellows and foes, their close
relation to supernatural beings and their doings, are far apart from
the more natural humanity of Cormac and Finn, of Dermot and Goll, of
Oisin and Oscar, of Keelta, and last of Conan, the coward, boaster and
venomous tongue, whom all the Fenians mocked and yet endured. They are
a very human band of fighting men, and though many of them, like Oisin
and Finn and Dermot, have adventures in fairyland, they preserve in
these their ordinary human nature. The Connacht peasant has no
dif