Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/460

 4i8 The Ancient Hymn-Charms of Ireland.

authors of Latin hymns, date from the middle and close of the fourth century. The use of hymns in the Offices of the Church was not encouraged by Rome ; it only began to be admitted reluctantly in the twelfth century, but Hraban Maur (786-856) tells us that in his time the custom of singing hymns was elsewhere universal in the West.^ In Irish monasteries the use of hymns in liturgical worship must have begun early, as we hear in Adamnan's Vita S. ColumbcB (Lib. ii. 9) of a Jiyvinorinn liber septi- manioruin sancti Cohunbce inami descriptus, or book of hymns for weekly use ; and in the same life we are told that, on the morning of St. Columba's death, hymns were sung in the Office at lona, Jiymiiis maUitinalibns ter- minatis (Lib. iii. 23) ; also a tradition connected with St. Columba's Altiis Prosator says that, in acknowledgment of the saint's gift to him of this fine hymn, Pope Gregory sent him in return, among other gifts, " a hymn for every night in the week." The story of Gregory's gift may be an invention, but the use of hymns in the daily Offices seems clear, and that it became the general custom of the Irish monastic Church we know from the hymns for the canonical hours in the eighth-century Antiphonary of Bangor and other early Irish service books.

But it is not of the use of hymns in Church worship that we have to speak here, but of hymns composed with quite another purpose and used in another way. Among the early hymns and religious songs that have come down to us are several composed as charms to ward off disease or plague, to protect the author or those who used the hymn from the perils of a journey, or in various ways to bring him good luck and freedom from danger. Among the twenty hymns or songs of Irish composition collected in the book known as the Liber Hyuinoruni^ (of which two copies,

^ In 563 the Council of Braga forbade the use of hymns, but this opposition

was broken down at the Council of Toledo in 633, and Spain used them largely.

^Edited by Barnard and Atkinson, 2 vols. (Henry Bradshaw Society, 1898).