THE OLDEST BOOKS AND POEMS
The books of saga, poetry, and annals that have come down to our day,
though so vastly more ancient and numerous than anything that the rest
of Western Europe has to show, are yet an almost inappreciable fragment
of the literature that at one time existed in Ireland. The great native
scholar O'Curry, who possessed a unique and unrivalled knowledge of
Irish literature in all its forms, has drawn up a list of lost books
which may be supposed to have contained our earliest literature.
We find the poet Senchan Torpéist--according to the account in the
Book of Leinster, a manuscript which dates from about the year
1150--complaining that the only perfect record of the great Irish epic,
the Táin Bo Chuailgne[1] or Cattle-spoil of Cooley, had been taken to
the East with the Cuilmenn,[2] or Great Skin Book. Now Zimmer, who
made a special and minute study of this story, considers that the
earliest redaction of the Táin dates from the seventh century. This
legend about Senchan--a real historical poet whose eulogy in praise of
Columcille, whether genuine or not, was widely popular--is probably
equally old, and points to the early existence of a great skin book
in which pagan tales were written, but which was then lost. The next
great book is the celebrated Saltair of Tara, which is alluded to in
a genuine poem of Cuan O'Lochain about the year 1000, in which he
says that Cormac mac Art drew up the Saltair of Tara. Cormac, being
a pagan, could not have called the book a Saltair or Psalterium, but
it may have got the name in later times from its being in metre.
All that this really proves, however, is that there then existed a
book about the prerogatives of Tara and the provincial kings so old
that Cuan O'Lochain--no doubt following tradition--was not afraid to
ascribe it to Cormac mac Art who lived in the third century. The next
lost book is called the Book of the Uacongbhail, upon which both the
O'Clerys in their Book of Invasions and Keating in his history drew,
and which, according to O'Curry, still existed at Kildare so late as
1626. The next book is called the Cin of Drom Snechta. It is quoted in
the Leabhar na h-Uidhre, or "Book of the Dun Cow"--a MS. of about the
year 1100--and often in the Book of Ballymote and by Keating, who in
quoting it says, "And it was before the coming of Patrick to Ireland
that that book existed,"[3] and the Book of Leinster ascribes it to the
son of a king of Connacht who died either in 379 or 499. The next books
of which we find mention were said to have belonged to St. Longarad,
a contemporary of St. Columcille. The scribe who wrote the glosses on
the Féilĭrè of Angus the Culdee, said that the books existed still in
his day, but that nobody could read them; for which he accounts by the
tale that Columcille once paid Longarad a visit in order to see his
books, but that his host refused to show them, and that Columcille then
said, "May your books be of no use after you, since you have exercised
inhospitality about them." On account of this the books became
illegible after Longarad's death. Angus the Culdee lived about the year
800, but Stokes ascribes the Féilĭrè to the tenth century; a view,
however, which Mr. Strachan's studies on the Irish deponent verb, which
is of such frequent occurrence in the Féilĭrè, may perhaps modify. At
what time the scholiast wrote his note on the text is uncertain, but
it also is very old. It is plain, then, that at this time a number of
illegible books--illegible no doubt from age--existed; and to account
for this illegibility the story of Columcille's curse was invented. The
Annals of Ulster quote another book at the year 527 under the name of
the Book of St. Mochta, who was a disciple of St. Patrick. They also
quote the Book of Cuana at the year 468 and repeatedly afterwards down
to the year 610, while they record the death of Cuana, a scribe, at the
year 738, after which no more quotations from Cuana's book occur.
The following volumes, almost all of which existed prior to the
year 1100, are also alluded to in our old literature:--The Book of
Dubhdaleithe; the Yellow Book of Slane; the original Leabhar na
h-Uidhre, or "Book of the Dun Cow"; the Books of Eochaidh O'Flanagain;
a certain volume known as the book eaten by the poor people in the
desert; the Book of Inis an Dúin; the short Book of Monasterboice; the
Books of Flann of Monasterboice; the Book of Flann of Dungiven; the
Book of Downpatrick; the Book of Derry; the Book of Sábhal Patrick;
the Black Book of St. Molaga; the Yellow Book of St. Molling; the
Yellow Book of Mac Murrough; the Book of Armagh (not the one now so
called); the Red Book of Mac Egan; the Long Book of Leithlin; the
Books of O'Scoba of Clonmacnois; the "Duil" of Drom Ceat; the Book
of Clonsost; the Book of Cluain Eidhneach (the ivy meadow) in Leix;
and one of the most valuable and often quoted of all, Cormac's great
Saltair of Cashel, compiled by Cormac mac Culinan, who was at once king
of Munster and archbishop of Cashel,[4] and who fell in battle in
903, according to the chronology of the "Four Masters." The above are
certainly only a few of the books in which a large early literature was
contained, one that has now perished almost to a page. Michael O'Clery,
in the Preface to his Book of Invasions written in 1631, mentions the
books from which he and his four antiquarian friends compiled their
work--mostly now perished!--and adds:--
"The histories and synchronisms of Erin were written and tested in
the presence of those illustrious saints, as is manifest in the great
books that are named after the saints themselves and from their great
churches; for there was not an illustrious church in Erin that had
not a great book of history named from it or from the saints who
sanctified it. It would be easy, too, to know from the books which
the saints wrote, and the songs of praise which they composed in
Irish that they themselves and their churches were the centres of the
true knowledge, and the archives and homes of the manuscripts of the
authors of Erin in the elder times. But, alas! short was the time
until dispersion and decay overtook the churches of the saints, their
relics, and their books; for there is not to be found of them now
[1631] but a small remnant that has not been carried away into distant
countries and foreign nations--carried away so that their fate is
unknown from that time unto this."
As far as actual existing documents go, we have no specimens of
Irish MSS. written in Irish before the eighth century. The chief
remains of the old language that we have are mostly found on the
Continent, whither the Irish carried their books in great numbers,
and unfortunately they are not books of saga, but chiefly, with the
exception of a few poems, glosses and explanations of books used
evidently in the Irish ecclesiastical schools.[5] A list of the
most remarkable is worth giving here, as it will help to show the
extraordinary geographical diversity of the Irish settlements upon the
Continent, and the keenness with which their relics have been studied
by European scholars--French, German, and Italian. The most important
are the glosses found in the Irish MSS. of Milan, published by Ascoli,
Zeuss, Stokes, and Nigra; those in St. Gall--a monastery in Switzerland
founded by St. Gall, an Irish friend of Columbanus, in the sixth
century--published by Ascoli and Nigra; those in Wurtzburg, published
by Zimmer and Zeuss; those in Carlsruhe, published by Zeuss; those in
Turin, published by Zimmer, Nigra, and Stokes in his "Goidelica"; those
in Vienna, published by Zimmer in his "Glossæ Hibernicæ" and Stokes
in his "Goidelica"; those in Berne, those in Leyden, those in Nancy,
and the glosses on the Cambrai Sermon, published by Zeuss.[6] Next in
antiquity to these are the Irish parts of the Book of Armagh, the poems
in the MSS. of St. Gall and Milan,[7] and some of the pieces published
by Windisch in his "Irische Texte." Next to this is probably the
Martyrology of Angus the Culdee. And then come the great Middle-Irish
books--the Leabhar na h-Uidhre, the Book of Leinster, and the rest.
From a palæographic point of view the oldest books in Ireland are
probably the "Domhnach Airgid," a copy of the Four Gospels in a triple
shrine of yew, silver-plated copper, and gold-plated silver, which St.
Patrick was believed to have given to St. Carthainn when he told that
saint with a shrewd wisdom, which in later days aroused the admiration
of Mr. Matthew Arnold, to build himself a church "that should not
be too near to himself for familiarity nor too far from himself for
intercourse." It probably dates from the fifth or sixth century. The
Cathach supposed to have been surreptitiously written by Columcille
from Finnian's book[8]--a Latin copy of the Gospels in Trinity College,
Dublin; the Book of Durrow, a beautiful illuminated copy of the same;
the Book of Dimma, containing the Four Gospels, ritual, and prayers,
probably a work of the seventh century; the Book of Molling, of
probably about the same date; the Gospels of Mac Regol, the largest of
the Old Irish Gospel books, highly but not elegantly coloured, with
an interlinear Anglo-Saxon version in a late hand carried through
its pages; the Book of Kells, the unapproachable glory of Irish
illumination, and some other ecclesiastical books. After them come the
Leabhar na h-Uidre and the great books of poems and saga.
Although the language of these sagas and poems is not that of the
glosses, but what is called "Middle-Irish," still it does not in the
least follow that the poems and sagas belong to the Middle-Irish
period. "The old Middle-Irish manuscripts," says Zimmer, "contain for
the most part only Old Irish texts re-written."[9] "Unfortunately,"
says Windisch, "every new copyist has given to the text more or
less of the linguistic garb of his own day, so that as far as the
language of Irish texts goes, it depends principally upon the
age of the manuscript that contains them."[10] And again, in his
preface to Adamnan's vision, he writes: "Since we know that Irish
texts were rewritten by every fresh copyist more or less regularly
in the speech of his own day, the real age or a prose text cannot
possibly be determined by the linguistic forms of its language."[11]
It is much easier to tell the age of poetry than prose, for the
gradual modification of language, altering of words, shortening of
inflexions, and so on, must interfere with the metre, so that when
we find a poem in a twelfth-century manuscript written in Middle
Irish and in a perfect metrical form, we may--no matter to what age
it is _ascribed_--be pretty sure that it cannot be more than two or
three centuries older than the manuscript that contains it. Yet even
of the poems Dr. Atkinson writes: "The poem _may_ be of the eighth
century, but the forms are in the main of the twelfth."[12] Where poems
that really are of ancient date have had their language modified in
transcription so as to render them intelligible, the metre is bound
to suffer, and this lends us a criterion whereby to gauge the age of
verse, which is lacking to us when we come to deal with prose.
This modification of language is not uncommon in literature and takes
place naturally, but I doubt if there ever was a literature in which
it played the same important part as in Irish. Thus let us take the
story of the Táin Bo Chuailgne, of which I shall have more to say later
on. Zimmer, after long and careful study of the text as preserved to
us in a manuscript of about the year 1100, came to the conclusion from
the marks of Old Irish inflexion, and so forth, which still remain
in the eleventh-century text, that there had been two recensions of
the story, a pre-Danish, that is, say, a seventh-century one, and a
post-Danish, that is a tenth-or eleventh-century one. Thus the epic
may have been originally committed to paper in the seventh century,
modified in the tenth, transcribed into the manuscripts in which we
have it in the eleventh and twelfth, and propagated from that down to
the eighteenth century, in copies every one of which underwent more or
less alteration in order to render it more intelligible; and it was
in fact in an eighteenth-century manuscript, yet one that differed,
as I subsequently discovered, in few essentials from the copy in the
Book of Leinster that I first read it. As the bards lived to please
so they had to please to live. The popular mind only receives with
pleasure and transmits with readiness popular poetry upon the condition
that it is intelligible,[13] and hence granting that Finn mac Cool
was a real historical personage, it is perfectly possible that some
of his poetry was handed down from generation to generation amongst
the conservative Gael, and slightly altered or modified from time to
time to make it more intelligible, according as words died out and
inflexions became obsolete. The Oriental philologist, Max Müller, in
attempting to explain how myths arose (according to his theory) from
a disease of language, thinks that during the transition period of
which he speaks, there would be many words "understood perhaps by
the grandfather, familiar to the father, but strange to the son, and
misunderstood by the grandson." This is exactly what is taking place
over half Ireland at this very moment, and it is what has always been
at work amongst a people whose language and literature go back with
certainty for nearly 1,500 years. Accordingly before the art of writing
became common, ere yet expensive vellum MSS. and a highly-paid class
of historians and schools of scribes to a certain extent stereotyped
what they set down, it is altogether probable that people who trusted
to the ear and to memory, modified and corrupted but still handed down,
at least some famous poems, like those ascribed to Amergin or Finn
mac Cool. That the Celtic memory for things unwritten is long I have
often proved. I have heard from peasants stanzas composed by Donogha
Mór O'Daly, of Boyle, in the thirteenth century; I have recovered from
an illiterate peasant, in 1890 in Roscommon, verses which had been
jotted down in phonetic spelling in Argyleshire by Macgregor, Dean of
Lismore, in the year 1512, and which may have been sung for hundreds
of years before it struck the fancy of the Highland divine to commit
them to paper;[14] and I have again heard verses in which the measure
and sense were preserved, but found on comparing them with MSS. that
several obsolete words had been altered to others that rhymed with them
and were intelligible.[15] For these reasons I should, in many cases,
refuse absolutely to reject the authenticity of a poem simply because
the language is more modern than that of the bard could have been to
whom it is ascribed, and it seems to me equally uncritical either
to accept or reject much of our earliest poetry, except what is in
highly-developed metre, as a good deal of it may possibly be the actual
(but linguistically modified) work of the supposed authors.
This modifying process is something akin to but very different
in degree from Pope's rewriting of Donne's satires or Dryden's
version of Chaucer, inasmuch as it was probably both unconscious and
unintentional. To understand better how this modification may have
taken place, let us examine a few lines of the thirteenth-century
English poem, the "Brut" of Layamon:--
"And swa ich habbe al niht
Of mine swevene swithe ithoht,
For ich what to iwisse
Agan is al my blisse."
These lines were, no doubt, intelligible to an ordinary Englishman at
the time. Gradually they become a little modernised, thus:--
"And so I have all night
Of min-e sweeven swith ythought,
For I wat to ywiss
Agone is all my bliss."
Had these verses been preserved in folk-memory they must have undergone
a still further modification as soon as the words sweeven (dream),
swith (much), and ywiss (certainty) began to grow obsolete, and we
should have the verse modified and mangled, perhaps something in this
way:--
"And so I have all the night
Of my dream greatly thought,
For I wot and I wis
That gone is all my bliss."
The words "I wot and I wis," in the third line, represent just about
as much archaism as the popular memory and taste will stand without
rebelling. Some modification in the direction here hinted at may be
found in, I should think, more than half the manuscripts in the Royal
Irish Academy to-day, and just in the same sense as the lines,
"For I wot and I wis
That gone is my bliss,"
are Layamon's; so we may suppose,
"Dubthach missi mac do Lugaid
Laidech lantrait
Mé ruc inmbreith etir Loegaire
Ocus Patraic,"[16]
to be the fifth century O'Lugair's, or
"Leathaid folt fada fraich,
Forbrid canach fann finn,"[17]
to be Finn mac Cúmhail's.
Of the many _poems_--as distinguished from sagas, which are a mixture
of poetry and prose--said to have been produced from pagan times down
to the eighth century, none can be properly called epics or even
épopées. There are few continued efforts, and the majority of the
pieces though interesting for a great many reasons to students, would
hardly interest an English reader when translated. Unfortunately,
such a great amount of our early literature being lost, we can only
judge of what it was like through the shorter pieces which have been
preserved, and even these short pieces read rather jejune and barren
in English, partly because of the great condensation of the original,
a condensation which was largely brought about by the necessity of
versification in difficult metres. In order to see beauty in the
most ancient Irish verse it is absolutely necessary to read it in
the original so as to perceive and appreciate the alliteration and
other _tours de force_ which appear in every line. These verses, for
instance, which Mève, daughter or Conan, is said to have pronounced
over Cuchorb, her husband, in the first century, appear bald enough in
a literal translation:--
"Moghcorb's son whom fame conceals [covers]
Well sheds he blood by his spears,
A stone over his grave--'tis a pity--
Who carried battle over Cliú Máil.
My noble king, he spoke not falsehood,
His success was certain in every danger,
As black as a raven was his brow,
As sharp was his spear as a razor," etc.
One might read this kind of thing for ever in a translation without
being struck by anything more than some occasional _curiosa felicitas_
of phrase or picturesque expression, and one would never suspect that
the original was so polished and complicated as it really is. Here are
these two verses done into the exact versification of the original,
in which interlinear vowel-rhymes, alliterations, and all the other
requirements of the Irish are preserved and marked:--
"Mochorb's son of Fiercest FAME,
KNown his NAME for bloody toil,
To his Gory Grave is GONE,
He who SHONE o'er SHouting Moyle.
Kindly King, who Liked not LIES,
Rash to RISE to Fields of Fame,
Raven-Black his Brows of FEAR,
Razor-Sharp his SPEAR of flame," etc.[18]
This specimen of Irish metre may help to place much of our poetry in
another light, for its beauty depends less upon the intrinsic substance
of the thought than the external elegance of the framework. We must
understand this in order to do justice to our versified literature, for
the student must not imagine that he will find long-sustained epics or
interesting narrative poems after the manner of the Iliad or Odyssey,
or even the Nibelungenlied, or the "Song of Roland;" none such now
exist: if they did exist they are lost. The early poems consist rather
of eulogies, elegies, historical pieces, and lyrics, few of them of any
great length, and still fewer capable of interesting an English reader
in a translation. Occasionally we meet with touches of nature poetry
of which the Gael has always been supremely fond. Here is a tentative
translation made by O'Donovan of a part of the first poem which Finn
mac Cúmhail is said to have composed after his eating of the salmon of
knowledge:--
"May-Day, delightful time! How beautiful the colour; the blackbirds
sing their full lay; would that Laighaig were here! The cuckoos sing
in constant strains. How welcome is ever the noble brilliance of the
seasons! On the margin of the branching woods the summer swallows skim
the stream. The swift horses seek the pool. The heath spreads out its
long hair, the weak, fair bog-down grows. Sudden consternation attacks
the signs, the planets, in their courses running, exert an influence;
the sea is lulled to rest, flowers cover the earth."
The language of this poem is so old as to be in parts unintelligible,
and the broken metre points to the difficulties of transmission over
a long period of time, yet he would be a bold man who would ascribe
with certainty the authorship of it to Finn mac Cúmhail in the third
century, or the elegy on Cuchorb to Mève, daughter of Conan, a
contemporary of Virgil and Horace. And yet all the history of these
people is known and recorded with much apparent plausibility and many
collateral circumstances connecting them with the men of their time.
How much of this is genuine historical tradition? How much is later
invention? It is difficult to decide at present.
[1] Pronounced "Taun Bo Hoo-il-n'ya." The "a" in Táin is pronounced
nearly like the "a" in the English word "Tarn."
[2] Cuilmenn--it has been remarked, I think, by Kuno Meyer--seems
cognate with Colmméne, glossed _nervus_, and Welsh _cwlm_, "a knot or
tie." It is found glossed _lebar--i.e._, leabhar, or "book."
[3] For the authorship of this book see above, p. 71.
[4] "At what time this book was lost," says O'Curry, "we have no
precise knowledge, but that it existed, though in a dilapidated state,
in the year 1454 is evident from the fact that there is in the Bodleian
Library at Oxford (Laud 610) a copy of such portions of it as could be
deciphered at that time, made by Shawn O'Clery for Mac Richard Butler.
From the contents of this copy and from the frequent references to the
original for history and genealogies found in the Books of Ballymote,
Lecan, and others, it must have been an historical and genealogical
compilation of large size and great diversity."
A legible copy of the Saltair appears, however, to have existed at a
much later date. I discovered a curious poem in an uncatalogued MS. in
the Royal Irish Academy by one David Condon, written apparently at some
time between the Cromwellian and Williamite wars, in which he says--
"Saltair Chaisill is dearbh gur léigheas-sa
Leabhar ghleanna-dá-locha gan gó ba léir dam,
Leabhar Buidhe Mhuigleann (?) obair aosta," &c.
_I.e._," Surely I have read the Saltair of Cashel, and the Book of
Glendaloch was certainly plain to me, and the Yellow Book of Mulling (?)
(_see_ above, p. 210), an ancient work, the Book of Molaga, and the
lessons of Cionnfaola, and many more (books) along with them which are
not (now) found in Ireland."
[5] Such, for example, is the fragment of a commentary on the Psalter
published by Kuno Meyer in "Hibernica Minora," from Rawlinson, B. 512.
The original is assigned by him, judging from its grammatical forms,
to about the year 750. It is very ample and diffuse, and tells about
the Shophetîm, or Sophtim, as the writer calls it, the Didne Haggamîm,
etc., and is an excellent example of the kind of Irish commentaries
used by the early ecclesiastics.
[6] "Gram. Celt.," p. 1004-7.
[7] Published by Zeuss in his "Grammatica Celtica."
[8] _See_ above, p. 175.
[9] "Keltische Studien," Heft i. p. 88.
[10] Preface to Loinges Mac n-Usnig, "Irische Texte," i. 61.
[11] "Irische Texte," i. p. 167.
[12] Preface to the list of contents of the _facsimile_ Book of
Leinster.
[13] With the exception of the ancient Irish prayers like Mairinn
Phádraig, preserved by tradition, which are for the most part not
intelligible to the reciters, but which owe their preservation to the
promise usually tacked on at the end that the reciters shall receive
some miraculous or heavenly blessing. _See_ my "Religious Songs of
Connacht."
[14] _See_ my note on the Story of Oscar au fléau, in "Revue Celtique,"
vol. xiii. p. 425.
[15] Cf. my note on Bran's colour, at p. 277 of my "Beside the Fire."
[16] In more modern Irish:--
"Dubhthach mise, mac do Lughaidh
Laoi-each lán-traith
Mé rug an bhreith idir Laoghaire
Agus Pádraig."
_I.e._, "I am Dubhthach, son of Lewy the lay-full, full-wise. It is I
who delivered judgment between Leary and Patrick." _Traith_ is the only
obsolete word here.
[17] In modern Irish, "Leathnuighidh folt fada fraoch," _i.e._,
"Leathnuighidh fraoch folt fada, foirbridh (fásaidh) canach
(ceannabhán) fann fionn," _i.e._, "Spreads heath its long hair,
flourishes the feeble, fair cotton-grass."
[18] Here is the first verse of this in the original. The Old Irish
is nearly unintelligible to a modern. I have here modernised the
spelling:--
"Mac Mogachoirb Cheileas CLÚ
Cun fearas CRÚ thar a gháibh
Ail uas a Ligi--budh LIACH---
Baslaide CHLIATH thar Cliú Máil."
The rhyming words do not make perfect rhyme as in English, but pretty
nearly so--_clu cru, liath cliath, gáibh máil_.