nd one finds memories
of Danish invasions and standing armies mixed with the imaginations of
hunters and solitary fighters among great woods. We never hear of
Cuchulain delighting in the hunt or in woodland things; and one imagines
that the story-teller would have thought it unworthy in so great a man,
who lived a well-ordered, elaborate life, and could delight in his
chariot and his chariot-driver and his barley-fed horses. If he is in
the woods before dawn we are not told that he cannot know the leaves of
the hazel from the leaves of the oak; and when Emer laments him no wild
creature comes into her thoughts but the cuckoo that cries over
cultivated fields. His story must have come out of a time when the wild
wood was giving way to pasture and tillage, and men had no longer a
reason to consider every cry of the birds or change of the night. Finn,
who was always in the woods, whose battles were but hours amid years of
hunting, delighted in the 'cackling of ducks from the Lake of the Three
Narrows; the scolding talk of the blackbird of Doire an Cairn; the
bellowing of the ox from the Valley of the Berries; the whistle of the
eagle from the Valley of Victories or from the rough branches of the
Ridge of the Stream; the grouse of the heather of Cruachan; the call of
the otter of Druim re Coir.' When sorrow comes upon the queens of the
stories, they have sympathy for the wild birds and beasts that are like
themselves: 'Credhe wife of Cael came with the others and went looking
through the bodies for her comely comrade, and crying as she went. And
as she was searching she saw a crane of the meadows and her two
nestlings, and the cunning beast the fox watching the nestlings; and
when the crane covered one of the birds to save it, he would make a rush
at the other bird, the way she had to stretch herself out over the
birds; and she would sooner have got her own death by the fox than the
nestlings to be killed by him. And Credhe was looking at that, and she
said: "It is no wonder I to have such love for my comely sweetheart, and
the bird in that distress about her nestlings."'

One often hears of a horse that shivers with terror, or of a dog that
howls at something a man's eyes cannot see, and men who live primitive
lives where instinct does the work of reason are fully conscious of many
things that we cannot perceive at all. As life becomes more orderly,
more deliberate, the supernatural world sinks farther away. Although the
g