Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/470

 428 The Ancient Hymn- Charms of Ireland.

which seem to connect it with St. Columba's Alius Prosator, where some of the same obscure terms are found; an Alphabetical Poem, {i.e. that found in the St. Omer Ms,, no. 666) ; and the Loricas of Gildas and St. Patrick.^^ Hence it may be looked upon as being confined in its use to poetic or oratorical flights, a sort of monastic euphuism or bearla feiniy^

To us it is more important to notice that the structure of these poems, (or of most of them), tends to fall into a fixed form. Four out of the six known to us begin in the same way, with an invocation of the Trinity ; after this opening, the Lorica of Gildas (or Lodgen, as it is also called), and the Lorica of Leyden proceed to a lengthy and extraordinarily minute enumeration of the parts of the human body, from head to foot, for which protection is invoked, and the pieces wind up by calling on angels, archangels, cherubim and seraphim, thrones, dominions, and powers, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, martyrs, virgins, and confessors to defend the reciter from all ills. The Lorica of the Royal Irish Academy replaces the list of the parts of the body by an enumeration of the perils from which the author prays to be preserved, and its list of saints whose aid is appealed to is simpler; it does not take the fixed form of the " 9 grades " of heavenly powers,^^

i^The Folium Luxemburgense fragment is an enlarged repetition of part of the Hisperica famina with a glossary of difficult Latin words.

"A poet named Teigue O'Rody wrote in the year 1700, — "Irish is the most difficult and copious language in the world, having five dialects, viz., the common Irish, the poetic, the lawyer's dialect, the abstractive and separative dialects : each of these five dialects being as copious as any other language, so that a man may be perfect in one, two, three, or four of these dialects and not understand even a word of the other " ; (see O'Reilly, Dictionary, Supplement, s.v. bearla f^ini).

1^ Eight of the nine grades are mentioned in each of these Loricas, one (different in each) being omitted. They are in the usual order. The idea of the nine orders of angels was adopted in the Western Church from the homilies of Gregory the Great (c. 600); it was originally introduced through the Greek mysticism of the writings of Dionysius in the fifth century.