Blair Collection > Beside the fire

PREFACE. Xli
Story can hardly be accounted for, except on the suppo-
sition, that both Slavs and Celts carried it from the
original home of the Aryan race, in pre-historic times,
or at least from some place where the two races were in
contiguity with one another, and that it, too — little as it
appears so now — was at one time in all probability a
nature myth.
Such myth stories as these ought to be preserved,
since they are about the last visible link connecting
civilized with pre-historic man ; for, of all the traces
that man in his earliest period has left behind him, there
is nothing except a few drilled stones or flint arrow-
heads that approaches the antiquity of these tales, as
told to-day by a half-starving peasant in a smoky
Connacht cabin.
It is time to say a word about the narrators of these
stories. The people who can recite them are, as far as
my researches have gone, to be found only amongst the
oldest, most neglected, and poorest of the Irish-speaking
population. English-speaking people either do not
know them at all, or else tell them in so bald and con-
densed a form as to be useless. Almost all the men
from whom I used to hear stories in the County Ros-
common are dead. Ten or fifteen years ago I used to
hear a great many stories, but I did not understand their
value. Now when I go back for them I cannot find
them. They have died out, and will never again be