Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/459

 jFolk^Xore.

TRANSACTIONS OF THE FOLK-LORE SOCIETY.

Vol. XXL] DECEMBER, 1910. [No. IV.

THE ANCIENT HYMN-CHARMS OF IRELAND.

BY MISS ELEANOR HULL.

{Read at Meeting, March i6th, 1910.)

The native hymns and eulogies of Irish saints are anriongst the oldest in western Europe, some of them, — such as Sechnall's poem in praise of St. Patrick, St. Patrick's Lorica, the poem of Ultan to St. Bridget, and the Alius Prosator of St. Columba, — belonging, by every test of language and sentiment that can be applied to them, to the period to which tradition has ascribed them {i.e. the fifth to the seventh century).^ Only a few of the Latin Church hymns of western Europe date so early as this, though those of Hilary of Poitiers (d. 368) and St. Ambrose (d. 397), who are reckoned by mediaeval writers to be the earliest

^The dates of the earliest Irish hymn-writers are, — St. Patrick, t 461 ; St. Sechnall, contemporary of St. Patrick ; St. Columba, t 597 5 St. Ultan, + 656; St. Broccan, +650; St. Cummain the Tall, t66i-2; St. Cuchuimne, t746 ; St. Colman mac Ui Cluasaigh, t 731 ; St. ^T.ngus mac Tipraite, t 745-

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