Ireland has preserved for us the most ancient monuments of Celtic
thought. Nothing has reached us of those "quantities of verses" that,
according to Caesar, the druids taught their pupils in Gaul, with the
command that they should never be written.[10] Only too well was the
injunction obeyed. Nothing, again, has been transmitted to us of the
improvisations of the Gallic or British bards ([Greek: bardoi]), whose
fame was known to, and mentioned by, the ancients. In Ireland, however,
Celtic literature had a longer period of development. The country was
not affected by the Roman Conquest; the barbarian invasions did not
bring about the total ruin they caused in England and on the Continent.
The clerks of Ireland in the seventh and eighth centuries committed to
writing the ancient epic tales of their land. Notwithstanding the advent
of Christianity, the pagan origins constantly reappear in these
narratives, and we are thus taken back to the epoch when they were
primarily composed, and even to the time when the events related are
supposed to have occurred. That time is precisely the epoch of Caesar and
of the Christian era. Important works have, in our day, thrown a light
on this literature[11]; but all is not yet accomplished, and it has been
computed that the entire publication of the ancient Irish manuscripts
would fill about a thousand octavo volumes. It cannot be said that the
people who produced these works were men of scanty speech; and here
again we recognise the immoderate love of tales and the insatiable
curiosity that Caesar had noticed in the Celts of the Continent.[12]

Most of those Irish stories are part of the epic cycle of Conchobar and
Cuchulainn, and concern the wars of Ulster and Connaught. They are in
prose, interspersed with verse. Long before being written, they existed
in the shape of well-established texts, repeated word for word by men
whose avocation it was to know and remember, and who spent their lives
in exercising their memory. The corporation of the _File_, or seers, was
divided into ten classes, from the _Oblar_, who knew only seven stories,
to the _Ollam_, who knew three hundred and fifty.[13] Unlike the bards,
the File never invented, they remembered; they were obliged to know, not
any stories whatsoever, but certain particular tales; lists of them have
been found, and not a few of the stories entered in these catalogues
have come down to us.

If we look through the collections that hav