Early Irish literature

Early Irish literature is one of the oldest vernacular literatures in Western Europe, though inscriptions utilising Irish and Latin are found on Ogham stones dating from the 4th century, indicating simultaneous usage of both languages by this period of late antiquity. According to Professor Elva Johnston, "the Irish were apparently the first western European people to develop a full-scale vernacular written literature expressed in a range of literary genres". A significant number of loan words in Irish from other Indo-European languages, including, but not limited to Latin and Greek, are evidenced in Sanas Cormaic, which dates from the 9th century. Two of the earliest examples of literature from an Irish perspective are Saint Patrick's ''Confessio'' and ''Letter to Coroticus'', written in Latin some time in the 5th century, and preserved in the '' Book of Armagh''.

The earliest Irish authors

It is unclear when literacy first came to Ireland. The earliest Irish writings are inscriptions, mostly simple memorials, on stone in the Ogham alphabet, the earliest of which date to the 4th century. The Latin alphabet was in use by 431, when the fifth century Gaulish chronicler Prosper of Aquitaine records that Palladius was sent by Pope Celestine I as the first bishop to the Irish believers in Christ. Pelagius, an influential British heretic who taught in Rome in the early 5th century, fragments of whose writings survive, is said by Jerome to have been of Irish descent. Coelius Sedulius, the 5th century author of the ''Carmen Paschale'', who has been called the "Virgil of theological poetry", was probably also Irish: the 9th-century Irish geographer Dicuil calls him ''noster Sedulius'' ("our Sedulius"), and the Latin name Sedulius usually translates to the Irish name Siadal.

Two works written by Saint Patrick, his ''Confessio'' ("Declaration", a brief autobiography intended to justify his activities to the church in Britain) and ''Epistola'' ("Letter", condemning the raiding and slaving activities in Ireland of a British king, Coroticus), survive. They were written in Latin some time in the 5th century, and preserved in the '' Book of Armagh'', dating to around 812, and a number of later manuscripts. The 6th-century saint Colum Cille is known to have written, but only one work which may be his has survived: the psalter known as the ''Cathach'' or "Book of Battles", now in the Royal Irish Academy. Another important early writer in Latin is Columbanus (543-615), a missionary from Leinster who founded several monasteries in continental Europe, from whose hand survive sermons, letters and monastic rules, as well as poetry attributed to him whose authenticity is uncertain. The earliest identifiable writer in the Irish language is Dallán Forgaill, who wrote the ''Amra Coluim Chille'', a poetic elegy to Colum Cille, shortly after the subject's death in 597. The ''Amra'' is written in archaic Old Irish and is not perfectly understood. It is preserved in heavily annotated versions in manuscripts from the 12th century on. Only a little later, in the early 7th century, Luccreth moccu Chiara, a Kerryman, wrote poems recording the legendary origins of Munster dynasties, including ''Conailla Medb michuru'' ("Medb enjoined illegal contracts"), which contains the oldest surviving reference to characters and events from the Ulster Cycle.

The Old Irish glosses

The oldest surviving manuscripts containing examples of the written Irish language date to the 8th century. Their Irish contents consist of glosses written between the lines or on the margins of religious works in Latin, most of them preserved in monasteries in Switzerland, Germany, France, and Italy, having been taken there by early Irish missionaries, and where, not being understood, they were rarely consulted and did not wear out, unlike their counterparts in Ireland. They are thus quite different from manuscripts with significant Irish language content preserved in Ireland, the oldest of which is the ''Book of Armagh'' (c. 812). The early glosses, though of little interest outside of philology, show the wide learning of the commentators and the extraordinary development, even at that early period, of the language in which they wrote. Their language and style, says Kuno Meyer, stand on a high level in comparison with those of the Old High German glosses. "We find here", he writes, "a formed learned prose style which allows even the finest shades of thought to be easily and perfectly expressed, from which we must conclude that there must have been a long previous culture f the languagegoing back at the very least to the beginning of the sixth century". The glosses are to be found in manuscripts from Würzburg, St. Gallen, Karlsruhe, Milan, Turin, Sankt Paul im Lavanttal, and elsewhere. The '' Liber Hymnorum'' and the '' Stowe Missal'' are, after the glosses and the ''Book of Armagh'', perhaps the most ancient manuscripts in which Irish is written. They date from about 900 to 1050.

Existing manuscript literature

The oldest books of miscellaneous literature are the '' Lebor na hUidre'', or "Book of the Dun Cow", transcribed about 1100, and the '' Book of Leinster'', which dates from about fifty years later. These books are great miscellaneous literary collections. After them come many valuable vellums. The date at which these manuscripts were penned is no criterion of the date at which their contents were first written, for many of them contain literature which, from the ancient forms of words and other indications, must have been committed to writing at least as early as the 7th century. We cannot carry these pieces further back with firm certainty using linguistic methods, but it is evident from their contents that many of them must have been orally transmitted for centuries before they were committed to writing. A 17th-century manuscript may sometimes give a more correct version of a 7th-century piece than a vellum many centuries older.

The exact number of Irish manuscripts still existing has never been accurately determined. The number in the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, alone is enormous, probably amounting to some fifteen hundred. O'Curry, O'Longan, and O'Beirne catalogued a little more than half the manuscripts in the Academy, and the catalogue filled thirteen volumes containing 3448 pages; to these an alphabetic index of the pieces contained was made in three volumes, and an index of the principal names, in addition to some other material in thirteen volumes more. From an examination of these books one may roughly calculate that the pieces catalogued would number about eight or ten thousand, varying from long epic sagas to single quatrains or stanzas, and yet there remains a great deal more to be indexed, a work which after a delay of very many years is happily now at last in process of accomplishment. The Library of Trinity College, Dublin, also contains a great number of valuable manuscripts of all ages, many of them vellums, probably about 160. The British Museum, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, the Advocates Library in Edinburgh, and the Bibliothèque Royale in Brussels are all repositories of a large number of valuable manuscripts.

From what we know of the contents of the existing manuscripts we may set down as follows a rough classification of the literature contained in them. We may well begin with the ancient epics dating substantially from pagan times, probably first written down in the seventh century or even earlier. These epics generally contain verses of poetry and often whole poems, just as in the case of the French ''chantefable'', ''Aucassin et Nicollet''. After the substantially pagan efforts may come the early Christian literature, especially the lives of the saints, which are both numerous and valuable, visions, homilies, commentaries on the Scriptures, monastic rules, prayers, hymns, and all possible kinds of religious and didactic poetry. After these we may place the many ancient annals, and there exists besides a great mass of genealogical books, tribal histories, and semi-historical romances. After this may come the bardic poetry of Ireland, the poetry of the hereditary poets attached to the great Gaelic families and the provincial kings, from the 9th century down to the 17th. Then follow the Brehon Laws and other legal treaties, and an enormous quantity of writings on Irish and Latin grammar, glossaries of words, metrical tracts, astronomical, geographical, and medical works. Nor is there any lack of free translations from classical and medieval literature, such as Lucan's '' Bellum Civile'', Bede's '' Historica Ecclesiastica'', Mandeville's ''Travels'', Arthurian romances and the like. To this catalogue may perhaps be added the unwritten folk-lore of the island both in prose and verse which has only lately begun to be collected, but of which considerable collections have already been made. Such, then, is a brief and bald résumé of what the student will find before him in the Irish language.

There may be observed in this list two remarkable omissions. There is no epic handed down entirely in verse, and there is no dramatic literature. The Irish epic is in prose, though it is generally interwoven with numerous poems, for though epic poems exist in rhyme, such as some of the Ossianic poems, they are of modern date, and none of the great and ancient epics are constructed in this way. The absence of the drama, however, is more curious still. Highly cultivated as Irish literature undoubtedly was, and excellent scholars both in Greek and Latin as the early Irish were, nevertheless they do not seem to have produced even a miracle play. It has been alleged that some of the Ossianic poems, especially those containing a semi-humorous, semi-serious dialogue between the last of the great pagans, the poet Oisín (Ossian as he is called in Scotland), and the first of the great Christian leaders, St. Patrick, were originally intended to be acted, or at least recited, by different people. If this be really so, then the Irish had at least the rudiments of a drama, but they never appear to have carried it beyond these rudiments, and the absence of all real dramatic attempt, however it may be accounted for, is one of the first things that is likely to strike with astonishment the student of comparative literature.

Early Irish epic or saga

In Ireland, the prose epic or saga developed, and kept on developing, for well over a thousand years. In the '' Book of Leinster'', a manuscript of the middle 12th century, we find a list of the names of 187 epic sagas. The '' ollam'', or arch-poet, who was the highest dignitary among the poets, and whose training lasted for some twelve years, was obliged to learn two hundred and fifty of these prime sagas and one hundred secondary ones.

The manuscripts themselves divide these prime sagas into the following categories, from the very names of which we may get a glance of the genius of the early Gael, and form some conception of the tragic nature of his epic: Destruction of Fortified Places, Cow Spoils (i.e., cattle-raids), Courtships or Wooings, Battles, Stories of Caves, Navigations, Tragical Deaths, Feasts, Sieges, Adventures of Travel, Elopements, Slaughters, Water-eruptions, Expeditions, Progresses, and Visions. "He is no poet", says the ''Book of Leinster'', "who does not synchronize and harmonize all these stories."

In addition to the names of 187 sagas in that book, more names occur in the 10th or 11th century tale of MacCoise. All the known ones—except for one added later, and another with a transcription error—refer to events prior to 650 or thereabouts. Apparently then, the list was drawn up in the 7th century.

No trace of author identity remains. ''Author'' may not even be the right word for stories that likely grew gradually—woven around racial, tribal, or even family history, and in some cases around incidents of early Celtic mythology. This process formed stories that were told and retold, burnished and added to by professional poets and saga-tellers.

Some of them were handed down for generations before ever put on parchments, even before scholars made lists of just their names and contents. Those that recount ancient tribal events or dynastic wars were probably much exaggerated, magnified, and undoubtedly distorted over time. More recent tales may provide fairly accurate accounts of real events.

It seems certain that—as soon as Christianity pervaded the island and bardic schools and colleges formed alongside the monasteries—no class of learning more popular than studying the great traditional doings, exploits, and tragedies of the various Irish tribes, families, and races. The peregrinations of the bards and communication among their colleges must have propagated throughout Ireland any local traditions worthy of preservation. These stories embodied the essence of the island's national life, but only a few of their enormous number survive—and most of these are mutilated, or preserved in mere digests.

Some, however, survive at nearly full length. These ancient vellums, however, probably don't tell the same exact tales as did the professional poet, for the poets didn't write them. Generally, early Christian monks recorded the tales. They took interest and pride in preserving early memorials of their people. They cultivated the native language to such a degree that at an early period it was used alongside Latin, and soon almost displaced it, even in the Church itself.

This patriotism of the Irish monks and early cultivation of the vernacular are remarkable, since it was the reverse of what took place in the rest of Europe. Elsewhere, the Church used Latin as a principal means of destroying native and pagan tradition.

The Northmen inflicted irrevocable losses on the Irish from the end of the 8th to the middle of the 11th century—followed by the ravages of the Norman invasion of Ireland, and the later and more ruthless destructions by the Elizabethan and Cromwellian English. Despite those tragic and violent cultural wounds, O'Curry could assert that he knew of 4,000 large quarto pages of strictly historical tales. He computes that tales of the Ossianic and Fenian cycles would fill 3,000 more and that, in addition to these, miscellaneous and imaginative cycles that are neither historical nor Fenian, would fill 5,000.

Pagan literature and Christian sentiment

The bulk of the ancient stories and some of the ancient poems were probably committed to writing by monks of the 7th century, but are substantially pagan in origin, conception, and colouring. Yet there is scarcely one of them in which some Christian allusion to heaven, or hell, or the Deity, or some Biblical subject, does not appear. This is likely because, when Christianity displaced paganism, in a tacit compromise, sympathetic clerics let the bard, fili (poet), and the representative of the old pagan learning propagate their stories, tales, poems, and genealogies—at the price of a little Christian admixture. So respectful is the dovetailing of the Christian into the pagan in most of the oldest romances, that even casual analysis easily separates the pieces. The pagan substratum stands forth entirely distinct from the Christian addition. For example, in the evidently pagan saga called the '' Wooing of Étaín'', we find the description of the pagan paradise given its literary passport by a cunningly interwoven allusion to Adam's fall. Étaín was the wife of one of the Tuatha Dé Danann, who were gods. She is reborn as a mortal—the pagan Irish seem to have believed in metempsychosis—and weds the king of Ireland. Her former husband of the Tuatha Dé Danann still loves her, follows her into life as a mortal, and tries to win her back by singing a captivating description of the glowing unseen land to which he would lure her. "O lady fair, wouldst thou come with me," he cries "...to the wondrous land that is ours?" He describes how, "..the crimson of the foxglove is in every brake—a beauty of land the land I speak of. Youth never grows into old age there, warm sweet streams traverse the country..." etc. Then the evidently pagan description of this land of the gods is made passable by an added verse that adroitly tells us that, though the inhabitants of this glorious country saw everyone, nobody saw them, "...because the cloud of Adam's wrongdoing has concealed us."

This easy analysis of the early Irish literature into its pre-Christian and post-Christian elements lends an absorbing interest and a great value in the history of European thought. For, when all Christian additions are removed, we find a picture of pagan life in Europe that we can't find elsewhere. "The church adopted n Irelandtowards Pagan sagas the same position that it adopted toward Pagan law ..I see no reasons for doubting that really genuine pictures of a pre-Christian culture are preserved to us in the individual sagas. "The saga originated in Pagan and was propagated in Christian times, and that too without its seeking fresh nutriment, as a rule, from Christian elements. But we must ascribe it to the influence of Christianity that what is specifically pagan in Irish saga is shifted into the background. And yet there exist many whose contents are plainly mythological. The Christian monks were certainly not the first who reduced the ancient sagas to fixed form. but later on they copied them faithfully and promulgated them after Ireland had been converted to Christianity".

Irish literature and early Europe

When it is understood that the ancient Irish sagas record, even though it be in a more or less distorted fashion, in some cases reminiscences of a past mythology, and in others real historical events, dating from the pagan times, then it needs only a moment's reflection to realize their value. Zimmer writes that nothing except a spurious criticism that "...takes for original and primitive the most palpable nonsense of which Middle-Irish writers from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth century are guilty with regard to their own antiquity, which is in many respects strange and foreign to them, nothing but such a criticism can on the other hand make the attempt to doubt of the historical character of the chief persons of the saga cycles. For we believe that Méve, Conor MacNessa, Cuchulainn, and Fionn mac Cumhaill (Cool) are just as much historical personalities as Arminius or Dietrich of Berne or Etzel, and their date is just as well determined." (''Kelt. Studien'', fasc. ii, 189.) The first three of these lived in the 1st century BC, and Finn in the 2nd or 3rd century. D'Arbois de Jubainville expresses himself to the same effect. "We have no reason", he writes, "to doubt the reality of the principal rôle in this ycle of Cuchulainn (''Introduction à l'étude de la littérature celtique'', 217); and of the story of the Boru tribute imposed on Leinster in the 1st century he writes: "The story has real facts for a basis though certain details may have been created by the imagination"; and again, "Irish epic story, barbarous though it be, is, like Irish law, a monument of a civilization far superior to that of the most ancient Germans" (''L'épopée celtique en Irlande'', preface, p. xli.).

"Ireland in fact," writes M. Darmesteter in his ''English Studies'', which summarize conclusions he derives from the works of the great Celtic scholars, "...has the peculiar privilege of a history continuous from the earliest centuries of our era to the present days. She has preserved in the infinite wealth of her literature a complete and faithful picture of the ancient civilization of the Celts. Irish literature is therefore the key which opens the Celtic world (Eng. tr., 1896, 182). But the Celtic world means a large portion of Europe and the key to its past history can be found at present nowhere else than in the Irish manuscripts. Without them we would have to view the past history of a great part of Europe through that distorting medium, the coloured glasses of the Greeks and Romans, to whom all outer nations were barbarians, into whose social life they had no motive for inquiring. Apart from Irish literature we would have no means of estimating what were the feelings, modes of life, manners, and habits of those great Celtic races who once possessed so large a part of the ancient world, Gaul, Belgium, North Italy, parts of Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and the British Isles, who burnt Rome, plundered Greece, and colonized Asia Minor. But in the ancient epics of Ireland we find another standard by which to measure, and through this early Irish medium we get a clear view of the life and manners of the race in one of its strongholds, and we find many characteristic customs of the continental Celts, which are just barely mentioned or alluded to by Greek and Roman writers, reappearing in all the circumstance and expansion of saga-telling.

Of such is the custom of the "Hero's Bit" Posidonius mentions, which provides the foundation for one of the most famous Irish sagas, ''Bricriu's Feast''. The Irish sagas repeatedly refer to the chariot, which became obsolete in Gaul a couple of hundred years before Caesar's invasion. In the greatest of the epic cycles, the warriors always fight from chariots. We find, as Diodorus Siculus mentions, that the bards had power to make battles cease by interposing with song between the combatants. Caesar says (Gallic War, 6.14) the Gaulish druids spent twenty years in studying and learned a great number of verses, but Irish literature tells us what the arch-poet, probably the counterpart of the Gaulish druid, actually did learn. "The manners and customs in which the men of the time lived and moved are depicted," writes Windisch, "...with a naive realism which leaves no room for doubt as to the former actuality of the scenes depicted. In matter of costume and weapons, eating and drinking, building and arrangement of the banqueting hall, manners observed at the feasts and much more, we find here the most valuable information." (''Ir. Texte'' I, 252). "I insist," he says elsewhere, "..that Irish saga is the only flowing source of unbroken Celtism." "It is the ancient Irish language," says d'Arbois de Jubainville, "that forms the connecting point between the neo-Celtic languages and the Gaulish of the inscribed stones, coins, and proper names preserved in Greek and Roman literature."

It is evident that those of the great Continental nations of today, whose ancestors were mostly Celtic—but whose language, literature, and traditions have completely disappeared—must, to study their own past, turn to Ireland.

The principal saga cycles

There are four great cycles in Irish story-telling, not all of which fully survive. Professor John Th. Honti stated that many of these Irish sagas show "a nucleus" that appear in "some later European folk-tale".Honti, John Th. "Celtic Studies and European Folk-Tale Research". In: ''Béaloideas'' 6, no. 1 (1936): 36. Accessed March 16, 2021. doi:10.2307/20521905.

Mythological Cycle

The Mythological Cycle dealt with the Tuatha Dé Danann, the gods of good, and the Fomorians, gods of darkness and evil, and giving us, under the apparently early history of the various races that colonised Ireland, really a distorted early Celtic pantheon. According to these accounts, the Nemedians first seized upon the islands and were oppressed by the Fomorians, who are described as African sea-robbers; these races nearly exterminated each other at the fight round Conand's Tower on Tory Island