Again, these Fenian tales are more popular than the others.  Douglas Hyde has dwelt on this distinction.  “For 1200 years at least, they have been,” he says, “intimately bound up with the thought and feelings of the whole Gaelic race in Ireland and Scotland.”  Even at the present day new forms are given to the tales in the cottage homes of Ireland.  And it is no wonder.  The mysterious giant forms of the mythological period, removed by divinity from the sympathy of men; the vast heroic figures of Cuchulain and his fellows and foes, their close relation to supernatural beings and their doings, are far apart from the more natural humanity of Cormac and Finn, of Dermot and Goll, of Oisin and Oscar, of Keelta, and last of Conan, the coward, boaster and venomous tongue, whom all the Fenians mocked and yet endured.  They are a very human band of fighting men, and though many of them, like Oisin and Finn and Dermot, have adventures in fairyland, they preserve in these their ordinary human nature.  The Connacht peasant has no difficulty in following Finn into the cave of Slieve Cullinn, where the witch turned him into a withered old man, for the village where he lives has traditions of the same kind; the love affairs of Finn, of Dermot and Grania, and of many others, are quite in harmony with a hundred stories, and with the temper, of Irish lovers.  A closer, a simpler humanity than that of the other cycles pervades the Fenian cycle, a greater chivalry, a greater courtesy, and a greater tenderness.  We have left the primeval savagery behind, the multitudinous slaughtering, the crude passions of the earlier men and women; we are nearer to civilization, nearer to the common temper and character of the Irish people.  No one can doubt this who will compare the Vengeance of Mesgedra with the Chase of the Gilla Dacar.

The elaborate courtesy with which Finn and his chief warriors receive all comers, as in the story of Vivionn the giantess, is quite new, even medieval in its chivalry; so is the elaborate code of honour; so also is, on the whole, the treatment of women and their relation to men.  How far this resemblance to medieval romance has been intruded into the stories—­(there are some in which there is not a trace of it)—­by the after editors and re-editors of the tales, I cannot tell, but however that may be, their presence in the Fenian cycle is plain; and this brings the stories into a kindlier and more pleasurable atmosphere for modern readers than that which broods in thunderous skies and fierce light over dreadful passions and battles thick and bloody in the previous cycles.  We are in a gentler world.