Radcliffe College Monographs (Volume 11-14)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1901. Excerpt: ... enclose a place by magic forms the nucleus of the last scene. Each of these details occupies in the Lancelot one sentence; in the Merlin each forms almost a complete narrative by itself. The authors are quite transparent in their methods. The common source is elaborated in Class A by the introduction, as we have seen, of material current in tales of enchanters and of maidens seeking to thwart the desires of unwelcome suitors; in Class B it is evidently condensed, although its outlines are preserved. The characteristic feature of Class B lies in the conclusion: --Niniane seals Merlin asleep in a cave of the forest. In the Ossianic saga there are traces of a twofold tradition concerning Oisin's experiences with a fairy mistress. One embodied in a literary form tells of his life with the golden-haired Niamh in the Land of Youth;1 the other is current to-day among the peasants of Cork, and makes the scene of his sojourn with a fay the so-called cavern of the Grey Sheep near Mitchelstown in Cork. Oisin chanced to go into the cave, and on the other side of the stream that flows through it he met a beautiful damsel with whom he lived, as he fancied, a few days. When he asked her consent to revisit the Fenians, she told him that he had been with her for more than three hundred years, and that he might return to his countrymen provided he did not alight from a horse that she gave him. He disobeyed her, however, and the steed fled away from him, leaving him a decrepit old man. There is no means of telling the age of the tradition; a different and unmistakably late story is told of the Cavern of the Grey Sheep, accounting for its name, and the tale of Oisin may be an old tradition connected with the cave by the peasants of the district, who wished to localize in the...