Two Tales about Find

Abstract

To Professor Kuno Meyer, whose death was an irreparable loss to Celtic scholarship, belongs the credit of first editing these two tales,' but at the time of publication he knew only of their existence in Ms. D.iv.22 of the Royal Irish Academy. In this Ms., both texts occur in a corrupt state, for the scribe reproduced his source very inaccurately, since he did not always understand what he was transcribing and also wearied of his task.' He has, in consequence, distorted several words to such an extent that they can no longer be identified, and on two occasions he has omitted verbs which are vital to the sense. Apart from these scribal lapses, the Ms is badly rubbed at one spot, so that approximately five lines are no longer legible. It is, therefore, not surprising that Meyer was unable to provide a perfect translation of the tales in question, but that he succeeded so well despite the difficulties with which he was faced deserves the warmest praise of all scholars. Fortunately, however, as Meyer himself later discovered,4 both of these tales are also preserved in the Yellow Book of Lecans which affords a much better, though by no means faultless, text. In this codex there is a small triangular rent which has obliterated a few letters and even words, but these lacunae can be supplied from D.iv.2. On the other hand, the lines which cannot be read in D.iv.2 are quite legible in the Yellow Book of Lecan. Since in almost every way the Yellow Book of Lecan provides a superior text, it has been considered advisable to re-edit these tales on the basis of this codex,6 and to indicate the important variant readings from D.iv.2 in the footnotes. For the sake of completeness, a fresh translation7 is also offered which follows in the main Meyer's rendering, except that it is now possible to interprete the illegible part in D.iv.2 as well as several other passages where the scribe of that Ms. carelessly left out the main verb and thereby completely obscured the sense. These tales display that curious mixture of Old and Middle Irish terminations which is so characteristic of the codices written after the tenth century. On linguistic grounds, Meyer originally assigned the probable period of composition to the eleventh century,8 but, later, on the basis of certain of the readings in the Yellow Book of Lecan he thought that the prototext was compiled about two centuries earlier.9 Even that date, however, seems too recent. For the Yellow Book of Lecan contains two forms which are sufficiently archaic to justify the