By DOUGLAS HYDE, LL.D., M.R.I.A.
The Celtic languages consist of two divisions, (a) the Gaelic or
Irish division, and (b) the Kymric or Welsh division. Between them
they comprise (a) Irish, Scotch-Gaelic, and Manx, and (b) Welsh,
Armorican, and Cornish. All these languages are still alive except
Cornish, which died out about a hundred years ago.
Of all these languages Irish is the best preserved, and it is
possible to follow its written literature back into the past for some
thirteen hundred years; while much of the most interesting matter has
come down to us from pagan times. It has left behind it the longest,
the most luminous, and the most consecutive literary track of any of
the vernacular languages of Europe, except Greek alone.
For centuries the Irish and their language were regarded by the
English as something strange and foreign to Europe. It was not
recognized that they had any relationship with the Greeks or Romans,
the French, the Germans, or the English. The once well-known
statesman, Lord Lyndhurst, in the British parliament denounced the
Irish as aliens in religion, in blood, and in language. Bopp, in his
great Comparative Grammar, refused them recognition as
Indo-Europeans, and Pott in 1856 also denied their European
connection. It was left for the great Bavarian scholar, John Caspar
Zeuss, to prove to the world in his epoch-making "Grammatica Celtica"
(published in Latin in 1853) that the Celts were really
Indo-Europeans, and that their language was of the highest possible
value and interest. From that day to the present it is safe to say
that the value set upon the Irish language and literature has been
steadily growing amongst the scholars of the world, and that in the
domain of philology Old Irish now ranks close to Sanscrit for its
truly marvellous and complicated scheme of word-forms and
inflections, and its whole verbal system.
The exact place which the Celtic languages (of which Irish is
philologically far the most important) hold in the Indo-European
group has often been discussed. It is now generally agreed upon that,
although both the Celtic and Teutonic languages may claim a certain
kinship with each other as being both of them Indo-European, still
the Celtic is much more nearly related to the Greek and the Latin
groups, especially to the Latin.
All the Indo-European languages are more or less related to one
another. We Irish must acknowledge a relationship, or rather a very
distant connecting tie, with English. But, to trace this home, Irish
must be followed back to the very oldest form of its words, and
English must be followed back to Anglo-Saxon and when possible to
Gothic. The hard mutes (p, t, c) of Celtic (and, for that matter, of
Sanscrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Slavonic, and Lithuanian) will be
represented in Gothic by the corresponding soft mutes (b, d, g), and
the soft mutes in Celtic by the corresponding, hard mutes in Gothic.
Thus we find the Irish _dia_ (god) in the Anglo-Saxon _tiw_, the god
of war, whose name is perpetuated for all time in Tiwes-däg, now
"Tuesday", and we find the Irish _déad_ in the Anglo-Saxon "toth",
now "tooth", and so on. But of all the Indo-European languages Old
Irish possesses by far the nearest affinity to Latin, and this is
shown in a great many ways, not in the vocabulary merely, but in the
grammar, which for philologists is of far more importance,--as, for
example, the _b_-future, the passive in-_r_, the genitive singular
and nominative plural of "o stems", etc. Thus the Old Irish for
"man", nom. _fer_, gen. _fir_, dat. _fiur_, acc. _fer n_--, plur.
nom. _fir_, gen. _fer n_--, is derived from the older forms _viros,
viri, viro, viron_, nom. plur. _viri_, gen. plur. _viron_, which
everyone who knows Latin can see at a glance correspond very closely
to the Latin inflections, _vir, viri, viro, virum_, nom. plur.
_viri_, etc.
So much for the language. When did this language begin to be used in
literature? This question depends upon another--When did the Irish
begin to have a knowledge of letters; when did they begin to commit
their literature to writing; and whence did they borrow their
knowledge of this art?
The oldest alphabet used in Ireland of which remains exist appears to
have been the Ogam, which is found in numbers of stone inscriptions
dating from about the third century of our era on. About 300 such
inscriptions have already been found, most of them in the southwest
of Ireland, but some also in Scotland and Wales, and even in Devon
and Cornwall. Wherever the Irish Gael planted a colony, he seems to
have brought his Ogam writing with him.
The Irishman who first invented the Ogam character was probably a
pagan who obtained a knowledge of Roman letters. He brought back to
Ireland his invention, or, as is most likely, invented it on Irish
soil. Indeed, the fact that no certain trace of Ogam writing has been
found upon the European continent indicates that the alphabet was
invented in Ireland itself. An inscription at Killeen Cormac, Co.
Kildare, survives which seems to show that the Roman alphabet was
known in Ireland in pagan times. Ogam is an alphabet suitable enough
for chiselling upon stones, but too cumbrous for the purposes of
literature. For this the Roman alphabet must have been used. The Ogam
script consists of a number of short lines straight or slanting, and
drawn either below, above, or through one long stem-line. This
stem-line is generally the sharp angle between two faces or sides of
a long upright rectangular stone. Thus four cuts to the right of the
long line stand for S; to the left of it they mean C; passing through
it, half on one side and half on the other, they mean Z. The device
was rude, but it was applied with considerable skill, and it was
undoubtedly framed with much ingenuity. The vowels occurring most
often are also the easiest to cut, being scarcely more than notches
on the edge of the stone. The inscription generally contains the name
of the dead warrior over whom the memorial was raised; it usually
begins on the left corner of the stone facing the reader and is to be
read upwards, and it is often continued down on the right hand
angular line as well.
The language of the Ogam inscriptions is very ancient and nearly the
same forms occur as in what we know of Old Gaulish. The language, in
fact, seems to have been an antique survival even when it was first
engraved, in the third or fourth century. The word-forms are probably
far older than those used in the spoken language of the time. This is
a very important conclusion, and it must have a far-reaching bearing
upon the history of the earliest epic literature. Because if forms of
language much more ancient than any that were then current were
employed on pillar-stones in the third or fourth century, it follows
that this obsolescent language must have survived either in a written
or a regularly recited form. This immediately raises the probability
that the substance of Irish epic literature (which was written down
on parchment in the sixth or seventh century) really dates from a
period much more remote, and that all that is purely pagan in it was
preserved for us in the same antique language as the Ogam
inscriptions before it was translated into what we now call "Old
Irish."
The following is the Ogam alphabet as preserved on some 300 ancient
pillars and stones, in the probably ninth-century treatise in the
Book of Ballymote, and elsewhere:
[Illustration: Ogam Alphabet]
There are a great many allusions to this Ogam writing in the ancient
epics, especially in those that are purely pagan in form and
conception, and there can be no doubt that the knowledge of letters
must have reached Ireland before the island became Christianized.
With the introduction of Christianity and of Roman letters, the old
Ogam inscriptions, which were no doubt looked upon as flavoring of
paganism, quickly fell into disuse and disappeared, but some
inscriptions at least are as late as the year 600 or even 800. In the
thoroughly pagan poem, _The Voyage of Bran_, which such authorities
as Zimmer and Kuno Meyer both consider to have been committed to
parchment in the seventh century, we find it stated that Bran wrote
the fifty or sixty quatrains of the poem in Ogam. Cuchulainn
constantly used Ogam writing, which he cut upon wands and trees and
standing stones for Queen Medb's army to read, and these were always
brought to his friend Fergus to decipher. Cormac, king of Cashel, in
his glossary tells us that the pagan Irish used to inscribe the wand
they kept for measuring corpses and graves with Ogam characters, and
that it was a source of horror to anyone even to take it in his hand.
St. Patrick in his Confession, the authenticity of which no one
doubts, describes how he dreamt that a man from Ireland came to him
with innumerable letters.
In Irish legend Ogma, one of the Tuatha De Danann who was skilled in
dialects and poetry, seems to be credited with the invention of the
Ogam alphabet, and he probably was the equivalent of the Gaulish god
Ogmios, the god of eloquence, so interestingly described by Lucian.
We may take it then that the Irish pagans knew sufficient letters to
hand down to Irish Christians the substance of their pagan epics,
sagas, and poems. We may take it for granted also that the greater
Irish epics (purely pagan in character, utterly untouched in
substance by that Christianity which so early conquered the country)
really represent the thoughts, manners, feelings, and customs of
pagan Ireland.
The effect of this conclusion must be startling indeed to those who
know the ancient world only through the medium of Greek and Roman
literature. To the Greek and to his admiring master, the Roman, all
outside races were simply barbarians, at once despised,
misinterpreted, and misunderstood.
We have no possible means of reconstructing the ancient world as it
was lived in by the ancestors of some of the leading races in Europe,
the Gauls, Spaniards, Britons, and the people of all those countries
which trace themselves back to a Celtic ancestry, because these races
have left no literature or records behind them, and the Greeks and
Romans, who tell us about them, saw everything through the false
medium of their own prejudices. But now since the discovery and
publication of the Irish sagas and epics, the descendants of these
great races no longer find it necessary to view their own past
through the colored and distorting glasses of the Greek or the Roman,
since there has now opened for them, where they least expected to
find it, a window through which they can look steadily at the life of
their race, or of one of its leading offshoots, in one of its
strongholds, and reconstruct for themselves with tolerable accuracy
the life of their own ancestors. It is impossible to overrate the
importance of this for the history of Europe, because neither Teutons
nor Slavs have preserved pictures of their own heroic past, dating
from pagan times. It is only the Celts, and of these the Irish, who
have handed down such pictures drawn with all the fond intimacy of
romance, and descriptions which exhibit the life of western Europeans
at an even earlier culture-stage in the evolution of humanity than do
the poems of Homer.
This conclusion, to which a study of the literature invites us, falls
in exactly with that arrived at from purely archaeological sources.
Professor Ridgeway of Cambridge University, working on archaeological
lines, expresses himself as follows: "From this survey of the
material remains of the _la Tern_ period found actually in Ireland,
and from the striking correspondence between this culture and that
depicted in the _Táin Bó Cúalnge_, and from the circumstance that the
race who are represented in the epic as possessing this form of
culture resemble in their physique the tall, fair-haired, grey-eyed
Celts of Britain and the continent, we are justified in inferring (1)
that there was an invasion (or invasions) of such peoples from Gaul
in the centuries immediately before Christ, as is ascribed by the
Irish traditions, and (2) that the poems themselves originally took
shape when the _la Tène_ culture was still flourishing in Ireland.
But as this could hardly have continued much later than A.D. 100, we
may place the first shaping of the poems not much later than that
date and possibly a century earlier."
This conclusion would make the earliest putting together of the Irish
epics almost contemporaneous with Augustus Cæsar.
So much for the history and growth of Irish letters.