Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 8.djvu/159

 IRELAND

121

IRELAND

it then, without any credulity on our part, that Irish history as recorded in the annals may be pretty well relied upon from the fourth century onward.

The first scholar whom we know to have written connected annals was Tighearnach, Abbot of Clon- macnoise, who died in lOSS. He begins in Latin with the founding of Rome, later on he makes occa- sional mention of Irish affairs, and lays it down that Irish history is not to be trusted before the reign of Cimbaed, that is, prior to about the year 300 b. c, " Omnia moniraenta Scottorum [the Irish were always called Scotti till into the late Middle Ages] usque Cimbaed incerta erant." In the fourth century B. c. the references to Ireland become fuller and more numerous, they are partly in Latin, partly in Irish, but towards the end of the work Latin gives way to the native speech. The greatest book of annals^ with a few trifling exceptions also the latest, is that known under the title of the " Four Masters" (q. v.). It is evident from the entries that the compilers of the "Annals of LTlster" and the rest copied from ancient originals. In the "Armals of Ulster", for instance, we read under the year 439 "Chronicon magnum scriptum est", at the years 467 and 468 the compiler writes "sic in libro Cuanach inveni", at 482, "ut Cuana scripsit ", at .507, " secundum librum Mochod ", at62S, "sicut in libro Dubhdaleithe narratur", etc. No nation in Europe can boast of so continuous and voluminous a history preserved in a vernacular lit- erature. The only surviving history of Ireland as distinguished from annals was written under great difficulties by Geoffrey Keating, a learned priest, in the first half of the seventeenth century; it also is taken, almost exclusively, from the old vellum manu- scripts then surviving, but which mostly perished, as Keating no doubt foresaw they would, in the cata- clysm of the Cromwellian wars.

Early Irish Poetry. — There is no other vernacular poetry in Europe which has gone through so long, so unbroken, and so interesting a period of develop- ment as that of the Irish. The oldest poems are ascribed to the early Milesians and are perhaps the most ancient pieces of vernacular literature existing. None of the early poems rhymed. There is little that we can see to distinguish them from prose except a strong tendency, as in the Teutonic languages, towards alliteration, and a leaning towards dissyl- lables. They are also so ancient as to be unintel- ligible without heavy glosses. It is a tremendous claim to make for the Celt that he taught Europe to rhyme, yet it has been often made for him, and not by himself, but by such men as Zeuss, the father of Celtic learning, Constantine Nigra, and others. Cer- tain it is that as early as the seventh century we find the Irish had brought the art of rhyming verses to a high pitch of perfection, that is, centuries before the rest of the vernacular literatures of Europe knew anj-thing at all about it. Nor are their rhymes only such as we are accustomed to in English, French, or German poetry, for they delighted not only in full rhymes, like these nations, but also in assonances, like the Spaniards, and they often thought more of a middle rhyme than of an end rhyme. The following Latin verses, written no doulit after his native models by Aengus Mac Tipraite some time prior to the year 704, will give the reader an idea of this middle or interlinear rhyming which the Irish have practised from the earliest times down to the present day: —

Martinus minis more

Ore laudavit Deum, Puro corde cantai'it

Atque amavit Eum.

.\ very curious and interesting peculiarity of a certain sort of Irish verse is a desire to end a .second line with a word of a syllable more than that which ends the first, the stre.ss of the voice being thrown

back a syllable in the last word of the second line. Thus, if the first line end with an accented monosylla- ble the second line will end with a dissyllal)ic word accented on its first syllable, or if the first line end in a dissyllable accented on its penultimate the second line will end with a trisyllable accented on its ante- penultimate. This is called aird-riiin in Irish, as; —

Fall'n the land of learned m^n The bardic band is fallen. None now learn a song to sing For long our fern is fading.

This metre, which from its popularity may be termed the hexameter of the Irish, is named Deibhidhe (D'yevvee), and well shows in the last two lines the internal rhjTnes to which we refer. If it be main- tained, as Thurneysen maintains, that the Irish derived their rhyming verses from the Latins, it seems necessary to account for the peculiar forms that so much of this verse assumed in Irish, for the merest glance will show that the earliest Irish verse is full of tours deforce, like this "aird-rinn", which cannot have been derived from Latin. After the seventh centurj' the Irish brought their rhjoning system to a pitch of perfection undreamt of by any nation in Europe, even at the present day, and it is no exaggeration to say that perhaps by no people was poetry so cultivated and, better still, so remu- nerated as in Ireland.

There were two kinds of poets known to the early Gael. The principal of these was called the fili (filla); there were seven grades of files, the most exalted being called an oUamh (ollav). These last were so highly esteemed that the annalists often give their obituaries, as though they were so many princes. It took from twelve to twenty years to arrive at this dignity. Some fragments of the old metrical text- books still exist, showing the courses recjuired from the various grades of poets, in pre-Norse times. One of these, in elucidation of the metric, gives the first lines of three hundred and fifty different poems, all no doubt well-known at the time of writing, but of which only about three have come down entire to our own time. If there were seven species of file there were sixteen grades of bards, each with a dif- ferent name, and each had his own peculiar metres (of which the Irish had over 300) allotted to him. During the wars with the Norsemen the bards suf- fered fearfully, and it must have been at this time, that is in the ninth and tenth centuries, that the finely-drawn distinction between the poets and bards seenis to have come to an end. So highly esteemed was the poetic art in Ireland that Keating in his history tells us that at one time no less than a third of the patrician families of Ireland followed that profession. These constituted a heavy drain on the resources of the country, and at three difTerent periods in Irish history the people tried to shake off their incubus. However, Columcille, who was a poet himself, befriended them; at the S>-nod of Drum Ceat, in the sixth centurj', their numbers were re- duced and they were shorn of many of their pre- rogatives; but, on the other hand, public lands were set apart for their colleges, and these continued until the later English conquest, when those who escaped the spear of Elizabeth fell beneath the sword of Cromwell.

Modern Irish Poetry. — Much of the ancient poetry of the schools was largely in the nature of a memoria technica, the frame in which valuable information was enshrined, but the bards attached to the great houses chanted a different strain. So numerous are the still surviving poems from the period of the Battle of Clontarf down to the sixteenth century that Meyer has remarked that the history of Ireland could be written out of them alone. When the great houses fell beneath the sword of Elizabeth, of Cromwell, and