This, in its conception of an unknown world where is immortal youth, where stormless skies, happy hunting, strange adventure, gentle manners dwell, where love is free and time is unmarked, is pure romance.

So are the adventures of Finn against enchanters, as in the story of the _Birth of Oisin_, of _Dermot in the Country under the Seas_, in the story of the _Pursuit of the Gilla Dacar_, of the wild love-tale of _Dermot and Grania_, flying for many years over all Ireland from the wrath of Finn, and of a host of other tales of enchantments and battle, and love, and hunting, and feasts, and discoveries, and journeys, invasions, courtships, and solemn mournings.

No doubt the romantic atmosphere has been deepened in these tales by additions made to them by successive generations of bardic singers and storytellers, but for all that the original elements in the stories are romantic as they are not in the previous cycles.
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.