Preface
them often impress by their poetic imagery, but it is more often hard to realise, in face of a too close translation of the Irish idioms, that the translations do really represent verse. In the version here given of The Courtship of Ferb the verse is translated as verse and the prose as prose; and in the verse translations endeavour has been made to add nothing to a literal rendering except scansion and rhyme. The original metres are not reproduced—it is as undesirable to do so as it is to reproduce Homer in hexameters—but few deviations from the sense of the original have been allowed, the few changes made being such as seemed necessary in order to clear up the meaning of passages which, when more literally rendered, seemed too obscure. To make it easy for a reader to test how far the verse translations do give the sense of the Irish, a literal translation of the metrical passages is placed at the end. Further reference may be made to the Irish text, and to the German rendering given by Professor Windisch in the volume of the Irische Texte, already mentioned.
The tale of The Courtship of Ferb belongs to a group of romances which, taken together, tell the story of what has been called the Heroic Age of Ireland. The date of this Heroic Age is traditionally placed in the first century of our era, but no greater reliance need be placed on its actual date than we place on the date of 1184 B.C., which used to be given as the date of the
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