A Literary History of Ireland, from Earliest Times to the Present Day. Douglas Hyde

Indeed, it was only the other day that one of our ablest and best known professors protested publicly in the Contemporary Review against the enormity of an Irish bishop signing so moderate, and I am sure so reasonable a document, as a petition asking to have Irish children who knew no English, taught through the medium of the language which they spoke. Last year, too, another most learned professor of Dublin University went out of his way to declare that "the mass of material preserved [in the Irish manuscripts] is out of all proportion to its value as 'literature,'" and to insist that "in the enormous mass of Irish MSS. preserved, there is absolutely nothing that in the faintest degree rivals the splendours of the vernacular literatures of the Middle Ages," that "their value as literature is but small," and that "for educational purposes save in this limited sense [of linguistic study] they are wholly unsuited," winding up with the extraordinary assertion that "there is no solid ground for supposing that the tales current at the time of our earliest MSS. were much more numerous than the tales of which fragments have come down to us." As to the civilisation of the early Irish upon which Petrie insisted, there is no longer room for the very shadow of a doubt; but whether the literature which they produced is so utterly valueless as this, and so utterly devoid of all interest as "literature," the reader of this volume must judge for himself. I should be glad also if he were to institute a comparison between "the splendours of the vernacular literatures" of Germany, England, Spain, and even Italy and France, prior to the year 1000, and that of the Irish, for I am very much mistaken if in their early development of rhyme, alone, in their masterly treatment of sound, and in their absolutely unique and marvellous system of verse-forms, the Irish will not be found to have created for themselves a place alone and apart in the history of European literatures.

      I hardly know a sharper contrast in the history of human thought than the true traditional literary instinct which four years ago prompted fifty thousand poor hard-working Irishmen in the United States to contribute each a dollar towards the foundation of a Celtic chair in the Catholic University of Washington in the land of their adoption, choosing out a fit man and sending him to study under the great Celticists of Germany, in the hope that his scholarship might one day reflect credit upon the far-off country of their birth; while in that very country, by far the richest college in the British Isles, one of the wealthiest universities in the world, allows its so-called "Irish professorship" to be an adjunct of its Divinity School, founded and paid by a society for—the conversion of Irish Roman Catholics through the medium of their own language!

      This is the more to be regretted because had the unique manuscript treasures now shut up in cases in the underground room of Trinity College Library, been deposited in any other seat of learning in Europe, in Paris, Rome, Vienna, or Berlin, there would long ago have been trained up scholars to read them, a catalogue of them would have been published, and funds would have been found to edit them. At present the Celticists of Europe are placed under the great disadvantage of having to come over to Dublin University to do the work that it is not doing for itself.

      It is fortunate however that the spread of education within the last few years (due perhaps partly to the establishment of the Royal University, partly to the effects of Intermediate Education, and partly to the numerous literary societies which working upon more or less national lines have spontaneously sprung up amongst the Irish people themselves) has, by taking the prestige of literary monopoly out of the hands of Dublin University, to a great extent undone the damage which had so long been caused to native scholarship by its attitude. It was the more necessary to do this, because the very fact that it had never taken the trouble to publish even a printed catalogue of its Irish manuscripts—as the British Museum authorities have done—was by many people interpreted, I believe, as a sort of declaration of their worthlessness.

      In dealing with Irish proper names I have experienced the same difficulty as every one else who undertakes to treat of Irish history. Some native names, especially those with "mortified" or aspirated letters, look so unpronounceable as to prove highly disconcerting to an English reader. The system I have followed is to leave the Irish orthography untouched, but in cases where the true pronunciation differed appreciably from the sound which an English reader would give the letters, I have added a phonetic rendering of the Irish form in brackets, as "Muighmheadhon [Mwee-va-on], Lughaidh [Lewy]." There are a few names such as Ossian, Mève, Donough, Murrough and others, which have been almost adopted into English, and these forms I have generally retained—perhaps wrongly—but my desire has been to throw no unnecessary impediments in the way of an English reader; I have always given the true Irish form at least once. Where the word "mac" is not part of a proper name, but really means "son of" as in Finn mac Cúmhail, I have printed it with a small "m"; and in such names as "Cormac mac Art" I have usually not inflected the last word, but have written "Art" not "Airt," so as to avoid as far as possible confusing the English reader.

      I very much regret that I have found it impossible, owing to the brief space of time between printing and publication, to submit the following chapters to any of my friends for their advice and criticism. I beg, however, to here express my best thanks to my friend Father Edmund Hogan, S.J., for the numerous memoranda which he was kind enough to give me towards the last chapter of this book, that on the history of Irish as a spoken language, and also to express my regret that the valuable critical edition of the Book of Hymns by Dr. Atkinson and Dr. Bernard, M. Bertrand's "Religion Gauloise," and Miss Hull's interesting volume on "Cuchullin Saga," which should be read in connection with my chapters on the Red Branch cycle, appeared too late for me to make use of.

      RÁTH-TREAGH, OIDHCHE SAMHNA

      MDCCCXCIX.

      Literary History of Ireland

       Table of Contents

      CHAPTER I

      WHO WERE THE CELTS?

      Who were those Celts, of whose race the Irish are to-day perhaps the most striking representatives, and upon whose past the ancient literature of Ireland can best throw light?

      Like the Greeks, like the Romans, like the English, this great people, which once ruled over a fourth of Europe, sprang from a small beginning and from narrow confines. The earliest home of the race from which they spread their conquering arms may be said, roughly speaking, to have lain along both banks of the upper Danube, and in that portion of Europe comprised to-day in the kingdoms of Bavaria and Würtemberg and the Grand Duchy of Baden, with the country drained by the river Maine to the east of the Rhine basin. In other words, the Celtic race and the Celtic language sprang from the heart of what is to-day modern Germany, and issuing thence established for over two centuries a vast empire held together by the ties of political unity and a common language over all North-west and Central Europe.

The vast extent of the territory conquered and colonised by the Celts, and the unity of their speech, may be conjectured from an examination of the place-names of Celtic origin which either still exist or figure as having existed in European history.[1]

The Celts seem to have been first known to Greek—that is, to European history—under the semi-mythological name of the Hyperboreans,[2] an appellation which remained in force from the sixth to the fourth century before Christ. The name Celt or Kelt[3] first makes its appearance towards the year 500 B.C., in the geography of Hecatæus of Miletum, and is thereafter used successively by Herodotus, Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle, and from that time forward it seems to have been employed by the Greek scholars and historians as a generic term whereby to designate the Celts of the Continent.

Soon afterwards the word Galatian came also into use,[4] and was used as a synonym for Celt. In the first century B.C., however, the discovery was made that the Germans and the Celts, who had been hitherto confounded in the popular estimation, were really two different peoples, a fact which Julius Cæsar was almost the first to point out. Diodorus