istory is professedly the same as that of
the Annals, firstly, we are transported to a world entirely romantic, in
which divine and semi-divine beings, ungainly monsters and giants, play a
prominent part, in which men and women change shapes with animals, in
which the lives of the heroes are miraculously prolonged--in short, we
find ourselves in a land of Faery; secondly, we find that the historic
conditions in which the heroes are represented as living do not, for the
most part, answer to anything we know or can surmise of the third
century. For Finn and his warriors are perpetually on the watch to guard
Ireland against the attacks of over-sea raiders, styled Lochlannac by
the narrators, and by them undoubtedly thought of as Norsemen. But the
latter, as is well known, only came to Ireland at the close of the
eighth century, and the heroic period of their invasions extended for
about a century, from 825 to 925; to be followed by a period of
comparative settlement during the tenth century, until at the opening of
the eleventh century the battle of Clontarf, fought by Brian, the great
South Irish chieftain, marked the break-up of the separate Teutonic
organisations and the absorption of the Teutons into the fabric of Irish
life. In these pages then we may disregard the otherwise interesting
question of historic credibility in the Ossianic romances: firstly,
because they have their being in a land unaffected by fact; secondly,
because if they ever did reflect the history of the third century the
reflection was distorted in after-times, and a pseudo-history based upon
events of the ninth and tenth centuries was substituted for it. What the
historian seeks for in legend is far more a picture of the society in
which it took rise than a record of the events which it commemorates."

In a later part of the pamphlet Mr Nutt discusses such questions as
whether we may look for examples of third-century customs in the
stories, what part of the stories first found their way into writing,
whether the Oisin and Patrick dialogues were written under the influence
of actual Pagan feeling persisting from Pagan times, or whether "a
change came over the feeling of Gaeldom during the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries," when the Oisin and Patrick dialogues in their
present form began to be written. His final summing-up is that
"well-nigh the same stories that were told of Finn and his warrior
braves by the Gael of the eleventh century are told