like him a supernatural span of years, was able to give St. Patrick an ample account of this same Cnu, surnamed Dereoil (Diminutive Nut), “the finest musician that was in either Ireland or Scotland," and from him we learn* that the cause of Cnu's leaving the faery realm, the land of the Tuatha de Danaan, was that "the other musicians were grown jealous of him." The first man that came his way after he emerged from the sidh, was Finn, who discovered the tiny fellow playing on a green (faery) mound, and welcomed him as a friend. It was the third best windfall Finn ever had." The dwarf came to be " a spell in [Finn's] companionship." ""The man's it was (and a stupendous gift) to gratify the whole world's throngs at once with minstrelsy "; but he did the Fianna, apparently, still greater service; " when evil awaited them, the dwarf would not conceal it from them." † 66 Still another very famous minstrel of the Tuatha de Danaan, was Cascorach, son of Cainchinn, who came out of the sidh of the Dagda's son, Bodhb Derg, with the interesting purpose "to acquire knowledge, and information, and lore for recital, and the Fianna's mighty deeds of valour, from Caeilte son of Ronan." Caeilte, who was now preternaturally old, heard with emotion Cascorach's request. "To his heed and mind Caeilte then recalled the losses of all those warriors and great numerous bands among whom he had been; and miserably, wearily, he wept so that breast and chest were wet with him." Cascorach was a minstrel of marvellous skill and played with " a certain fairy cadence " so that even wounded men slept peacefully at the sound." Caeilte introduced him to St. Patrick, who asked him for a specimen of his musical art and craft. After hearing him play, the saint granted him the guerdon of Heaven and broke out into praise of minstrels and reciters of tales. "But for a twang of the fairy spell that infested it," he declared to his scribe Brogan, "nothing could more nearly than Cascorach's music resemble Heaven's harmony." Happily St. Patrick was represented as fond of Fian-lore, and the myths of ancient Erin.* Finally, we may mention the marvellous Glasgerion of ballad fame,† who harped in the queen's chamber "till ladies waxed wood (mad)." Every stroke on his harp gladdened the heart of the king's daughter whose love he sought. He, of course, is "the Bret Glascurion," whom Chaucer speaks of in the House of Fame along with Arion and Chiron and mythical harpers of antiquity, and Gavin Douglas along with Orpheus in his Palace of Honor. The association of these four specially deserves our notice, for their likeness in fundamental nature is clear. To them, mediaeval poets might have added Amphion, son of Zeus and Antiope, of whom it is said that when he played his lyre the stones not only moved of their own accord to the place where they were wanted, but fitted themselves together so as to form the wall. Different accounts represent him as receiving his lyre from Hermes, Apollo, or the Muses. But most instructive perhaps of such parallels between Greek and Celtic fable regarding mythical harpers is that concerning Orpheus, the "tuneful bard," the son of Apollo and the muse Calliope, who performed marvels of minstrelsy. It was not without reason that the story of Orpheus and Eurydice was made over into a Breton lay, and infused with the spirit of Celtic faery. In our time Fiona MacLeod has poetically emphasized the likeness of Orpheus's effort to conduct Eurydice from the nether world with the story of Ossian.* “I have wondered often," he says, "if the ancient Gaelic tale of Oisin and Niamh the later-life tale of the Son of Fionn and his otherworld love, in the days of his broken years and gathered sorrows has not in it the heart of the old Greek story. . . . For Oisin, too, went to the otherworld to gather love, and to bring back his youth; but even as Orpheus had to relinquish Eurydice and youth and love, because he looked to take away with him what Aidôneus had already gathered to be his own, so Oisin, the Orpheus of the Gael, had to come away from the place of defeated dreams, and see again the hardness and bitterness of the hitherworld, with age and death as the grey fruit on the tree of life. . . . Oisin did not dwell evermore in the pleasant land whither his youth had gone and he to seek it, but came back to find the world grown old, and all he loved below the turf, and the taunts of the monks of Patrick in his ears, and the bell of Christ ringing in the glens and upon the leas. Nor does any know of his death, though the Gaels of the North believe that he looked his last across the grey seas from Drumadoon in Arran, where that Avalon of the Gael lies between the waters of Argyll and the green Atlantic wave." How much it must have meant for Blind Harry to have been "long in faery"! CHAPTER V IMAGINARY BARDS My locks were not then so grey; My eyes were not closed in darkness; My feet failed not in the race! Who can relate the deaths of the people? MACPHERSON HE Dwarf's Part of the Play introduced us to THE Amergin and Taliessin, two of the most famous Celtic bards, both of whom were connected with invisible powers and gained their skill thereby. Merlin, the great prophet of Wales (begotten by an incubus and himself the consort of a fay) was similarly allied with the otherworld. These three, as well as Aneurin, Llewarch Hen and others of their sort less well known,* unprejudiced scholars have at last come to perceive, were mythical personages; and yet they were credited with the composition of extant poems written, as Celtic specialists affirm, in far more recent epochs than those in which the authors were said, even by euhemerizing or otherwise ingenious annalists, to have flourishedthe majority not before the twelfth century.† |