Matheson Collection > Popular tales of the west Highlands > Volume 4

PUBLISHED AND TRADITIONAL. 159
him and his followers use cannon. I heard a story
told of Fergus the First, king of Scotland, in Barra, in
which that ancient monarch was armed with a gun ;
strange that the Barra people never thought of arming
Fionn and Diarmaid with one a-piece, more especially
as these warriors are much more popular in that island
than Fergus the First.
Much of the groundwork of these ballads, as well as
the substance of many Fenian tales and traditions, are
embodied in the Gaelic Ossian published from Mac-
Pherson's manuscript, but there everything has under-
gone an entire change. We have no longer the
simplicity of the traditional poems; smoothness of
versification is almost entirely wanting, and the idiom
of the language is every now and then violated. Inver-
sions abound, such as we find in learned English poetry,
and words are so wrenched out of their general meaning,
as to be unintelligible to the generality of Highlanders ;
but while this is the case, there are but few ancient
or obsolete words. In this respect this Gaelic contrasts
with that of traditional ballads. The difficulty of
understanding the epic poems does not lie in ancient
forms of speech, or in old obsolete words, but in the
strange liberty that is taken with words by using them
in quite a new way, and in arranging them in a
manner that is incomprehensible to those whose native
language the Gaelic is, unless they happen to know
English, or some classical tongue. In many lines the
words only are Gaelic ; the structure has nothing to
do with that language. The sentences may be English,
or Latin, or Greek, may, in fact, be specimens of a new
universal language, but they are not Gaelic. Vague-
ness and obscurity abound everywhere, and like the
darkness of night which makes hills and dales appear