hought that is peculiar to Celtic
romance, as I think, a thought of a mystery coming not as with Gothic
nations out of the pressure of darkness, but out of great spaces and
windy light. The hill of Teamhair, or Tara, as it is now called, with
its green mounds and its partly-wooded sides, and its more gradual slope
set among fat grazing lands, with great trees in the hedgerows, had
brought before one imaginations, not of heroes who were in their youth
for hundreds of years, or of women who came to them in the likeness of
hunted fawns, but of kings that lived brief and politic lives, and of
the five white roads that carried their armies to the lesser kingdoms of
Ireland, or brought to the great fair that had given Teamhair its
sovereignty all that sought justice or pleasure or had goods to barter.

It is certain that we must not confuse these kings, as did the medieval
chroniclers, with those half-divine kings of Almhuin. The chroniclers,
perhaps because they loved tradition too well to cast out utterly much
that they dreaded as Christians, and perhaps because popular imagination
had begun the mixture, have mixed one with another ingeniously, making
Finn the head of a kind of Militia under Cormac MacArt, who is supposed
to have reigned at Teamhair in the second century, and making Grania,
who travels to enchanted houses under the cloak of AEngus, god of Love,
and keeps her troubling beauty longer than did Helen hers, Cormac's
daughter, and giving the stories of the Fianna, although the impossible
has thrust its proud finger into them all, a curious air of precise
history. It is only when we separate the stories from that medieval
pedantry, that we recognise one of the oldest worlds that man has
imagined, an older world certainly than we find in the stories of
Cuchulain, who lived, according to the chroniclers, about the time of
the birth of Christ. They are far better known, and we may be certain of
the antiquity of incidents that are known in one form or another to
every Gaelic-speaking countryman in Ireland or in the Highlands of
Scotland. Sometimes a labourer digging near to a cromlech, or Bed of
Diarmuid and Grania as it is called, will tell you a tradition that
seems older and more barbaric than any description of their adventures
or of themselves in written text or in story that has taken form in the
mouths of professed story-tellers. Finn and the Fianna found welcome
among the court poets later than did Cuchulain; a