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Updated: May 14, 2025
The peasant visionaries that are, the landlord duelists that were, and the whole hurly-burly of legends Cuchulain fighting the sea for two days until the waves pass over him and he dies, Caolte storming the palace of the gods, Oisin seeking in vain for three hundred years to appease his insatiable heart with all the pleasures of faeryland, these two mystics walking up and down upon the mountains uttering the central dreams of their souls in no less dream-laden sentences, and this mind that finds them so interesting all are a portion of that great Celtic phantasmagoria whose meaning no man has discovered, nor any angel revealed.
As Richard Wagner received from the Scandinavian folk-lore the inspiration for his great music, as Tennyson found the incentive for The Idylls of the Kings in Malory's Morte d'Arthur, so the modern Celtic poets turned back to the primitive legends of their country for tales of Cuchulain who fought the sea, Caolte who besieged the castle of the gods, Oisin, who wandered three hundred years in the land of the immortals, and Deirdre who stands in the same relation to Celtic literature as Helen to Greek and Brunnhilde to German literature.
And there sat with him the high sinhedrim of the twelve tribes of Iar, for every tribe one man, of the tribe of Patrick and of the tribe of Hugh and of the tribe of Owen and of the tribe of Conn and of the tribe of Oscar and of the tribe of Fergus and of the tribe of Finn and of the tribe of Dermot and of the tribe of Cormac and of the tribe of Kevin and of the tribe of Caolte and of the tribe of Ossian, there being in all twelve good men and true.
He said that he was Caolte, one of Fin's famous warriors, that the king whose place of death was in dispute was killed where Mongan had said, that if they dug down into the earth they would find the spear-head, that it would fit the shaft he held in his hand, that it was the spear-head that had killed the king." "Go on, and tell me some more stories.
I have said to myself he might have given us an Oscar, a Diarmuid or a Caolte, an equal comrade to Cuculain, but he could not, being lit up by the spirit of his hero, he merely the bard and not the fighter, and no man in Ireland intervened in the affairs of his country with a superior nobility of aim.
He will go to hell; he will not surrender the pride and glory of his soul to the mere meanness of fate. He will "Go to Caolte and Conan, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair And dwell in the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or at feast." So with Llywarch Hen, Prince of Cumberland, in his old age and desolation.
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