Matheson Collection > Popular tales of the west Highlands > Volume 1

XXXIV INTRODUCTION.
Which I vmdei'stand to mean —
The three coldest winds that came to Fion M'Cooil,
Wind from a thaw, wind from a hole,
And wind from under the sails.
In short, I believe that the heroes of Ossian belong to
the race, not to any one set of poems, or to any single
branch of the Celtic language.
2cl. There are tales, not necessarily about the Fin,
consisting partly of plain narrative and dialogue, which
vary with every narrator, and probably more or less
every time the story is told ; and partly of a kind of
measured prose, which is unlike anything I know in
any other language. I suspect that these have been
compositions at some time, but at what time I cannot
even guess.
These almost always relate to Ireland and Scandi-
navia ; to boats, knights, swords, and shields. There
are adventures under ground, much battle, generally an
island with fire about it (perhaps Iceland), and a lady
to be carried off. There is often an old Avoman who
has some mysterious vessel of balsam which brings the
dead to life, and a despised character who turns out to
be the real hero, sometimes a boaster who is held up to
ridicule. I believe these to be bardic recitations fast
disappearing and changing into prose ; for the older the
narrator is, the less educated, and the farther removed
from the rest of the world, the more his stories are
garnished with these passages. " Fin MacCumhal goes
go Graffee," published in 1857, from Mayo, is evidently
a translation of a tale of this kind. In all these, the
scene is laid in Eirinn and Lochlan, now Ireland and
Scandinavia; and these would seem to have been
border countries. Perhaps the stories relate to the time