It stands as one of the oldest vernacular literature in Western Europe, with its roots extending back to late antiquity, as evident from inscriptions utilizing both Irish and Latin found on Ogham stones dating as early as the 4th century.
[1] According to Professor Elva Johnston, "the Irish were apparently the first western European people to develop a full-scale vernacular written literature expressed in a range of literary genres.
This linguistic exchange is evidenced in texts like Sanas Cormaic, a glossary dating from the 9th century that illustrates the assimilation of foreign words into the Irish language.
[3] Two of the earliest examples of literature from an Irish perspective are Saint Patrick's Confessio[4] and Letter to Coroticus,[5] written in Latin some time in the 5th century, and preserved in the Book of Armagh.
The Latin alphabet was in use by 431, when the fifth century Gaulish chronicler Prosper of Aquitaine records that Palladius was sent by Pope Celestine I as the first bishop to the Irish believers in Christ.
Another important early writer in Latin is Columbanus (543-615), a missionary from Leinster who founded several monasteries in continental Europe, from whose hand survive sermons, letters and monastic rules, as well as poetry attributed to him whose authenticity is uncertain.
The earliest identifiable writer in the Irish language is Dallán Forgaill, who wrote Amra Coluim Chille, a poetic elegy to Colum Cille, shortly after the subject's death in 597.
"We find here", he writes, "a fully-formed learned prose style which allows even the finest shades of thought to be easily and perfectly expressed, from which we must conclude that there must have been a long previous culture [of the language] going back at the very least to the beginning of the sixth century".
From an examination of these books one may roughly calculate that the pieces catalogued would number about eight or ten thousand, varying from long epic sagas to single quatrains or stanzas, and yet there remains a great deal more to be indexed, a work which after a delay of very many years is happily now at last in process of accomplishment.
[19] After the substantially pagan efforts may come the early Christian literature, especially the lives of the saints, which are both numerous and valuable, visions, homilies, commentaries on the Scriptures, monastic rules, prayers, hymns, and all possible kinds of religious and didactic poetry.
Then follow the Brehon Laws and other legal treaties, and an enormous quantity of writings on Irish and Latin grammar, glossaries of words, metrical tracts, astronomical, geographical, and medical works.
Nor is there any lack of free translations from classical and medieval literature, such as Lucan's Bellum Civile, Bede's Historica Ecclesiastica, Mandeville's Travels, Arthurian romances and the like.
The manuscripts themselves divide these prime sagas into the following categories, from the very names of which we may get a glance of the genius of the early Gael, and form some conception of the tragic nature of his epic: Destruction of Fortified Places, Cow Spoils (i.e., cattle-raids), Courtships or Wooings, Battles, Stories of Caves, Navigations, Tragical Deaths, Feasts, Sieges, Adventures of Travel, Elopements, Slaughters, Water-eruptions, Expeditions, Progresses, and Visions.
It seems certain that—as soon as Christianity pervaded the island and bardic schools and colleges formed alongside the monasteries—no class of learning more popular than studying the great traditional doings, exploits, and tragedies of the various Irish tribes, families, and races.
The Northmen inflicted irrevocable losses on the Irish from the end of the 8th to the middle of the 11th century—followed by the ravages of the Norman invasion of Ireland, and the later and more ruthless destructions by the Elizabethan and Cromwellian English.
Her former husband of the Tuatha Dé Danann still loves her, follows her into life as a mortal, and tries to win her back by singing a captivating description of the glowing unseen land to which he would lure her.
Then the evidently pagan description of this land of the gods is made passable by an added verse that adroitly tells us that, though the inhabitants of this glorious country saw everyone, nobody saw them, "...because the cloud of Adam's wrongdoing has concealed us."
[21] When it is understood that the ancient Irish sagas record, even though it be in a more or less distorted fashion, in some cases reminiscences of a past mythology, and in others real historical events, dating from the pagan times, then it needs only a moment's reflection to realize their value.
For we believe that Méve, Conor MacNessa, Cuchulainn, and Fionn mac Cumhaill (Cool) are just as much historical personalities as Arminius or Dietrich of Berne or Etzel, and their date is just as well determined.
[24] "Ireland in fact," writes M. Darmesteter in his English Studies, which summarize conclusions he derives from the works of the great Celtic scholars, "...has the peculiar privilege of a history continuous from the earliest centuries of our era to the present days.
Without them we would have to view the past history of a great part of Europe through that distorting medium, the coloured glasses of the Greeks and Romans, to whom all outer nations were barbarians, into whose social life they had no motive for inquiring.
In matter of costume and weapons, eating and drinking, building and arrangement of the banqueting hall, manners observed at the feasts and much more, we find here the most valuable information."
The Ulster Cycle stories are set in and around the reign of King Conchobar mac Nessa, who rules the Ulaid from Emain Macha (now Navan Fort near Armagh).
Various parts of the Fionn saga seem to have developed in different quarters of the country, that about Diarmuid Ua Duibhne in South Munster, and that about Goll mac Morna in Connacht.
It developed also in a direction of its own, for though none of the heroic tales are wholly in verse, yet the number of Ossianic epopees, ballads, and poems is enormous, amounting to probably some 50,000 lines, mostly in the more modern language.
But already by the middle of the 8th century the native language had largely displaced it all over Ireland as a medium for religious thought, for homilies, for litanies, books of devotion, and the lives of saints.
One interesting development in this class of literature is the visions-literature beginning with the vision of St. Fursa, which is given at some length by Bede, and of which Sir Francis Palgrave states that, "Tracing the course of thought upwards we have no difficulty in deducing the poetic genealogy of Dante's Inferno to the Milesian Fursæus."
In the first half of the 17th century Brother Michael O'Cleary, a Franciscan, travelled round Ireland and made copies of between thirty and forty lives of Irish saints, which are still preserved in the Burgundian library at Brussels.
Owing to the nature of the case, and considering the isolation of Ireland, it is extremely difficult, or rather impossible, to procure independent foreign testimony, to the truth of Irish annals.
How impossible it is to keep such records unless written memoranda are made at the time by eyewitnesses is shown by the fact that Bede, born in 675, in recording the great solar eclipse that took place only eleven years before his own birth, is yet two days astray in his date; while on the other hand the Annals of Ulster give, not only the correct day, but the correct hour, thus showing that their compiler, Cathal Maguire, had access either to the original, or a copy of an original, account by an eyewitness.