ABSTRACT
The story is pre-Christian; and these immortal refugees seem to have come to Alba about the first century a.d., long before the Dalriadic kingdom was heard. Macpherson’s mystifications have hopelessly confused the whole subject of Ossian. But place-names and popular knowledge make it fairly certain that the whole Fenian cycle belongs largely if mainly to Scotland. The people who possessed that literature as nothing is possessed by peoples to-day had certain defects. Down to the Reformation, Gaelic literature was a common inheritance of the whole of Gaeldom, Irish and Scots; and its influence extended, in subtle ways, beyond Gaeldom. The debaters, taking sides, unconsciously, according to their temperaments, traditions, and intellectual make-up, do not clearly perceive that the things they are wrangling over are mainly symbols, and that the real issue is nothing less than a philosophy and way of life.
