CHAPTER XXI THE OLDEST BOOKS AND POEMS

The books of saga, poetry, and annals that have come down to our day, though so vastly more ancient and numerous than anything that the rest of Western Europe has to show, are yet an almost inappreciable fragment of the literature that at one time existed in Ireland. The great native scholar O'Curry, who possessed a unique and unrivalled knowledge of Irish literature in all its forms, has drawn up a list of lost books which may be supposed to have contained our earliest literature.

We find the poet Senchan Torpéist—according to the account in the Book of Leinster, a manuscript which dates from about the year 1150—complaining that the only perfect record of the great Irish epic, the Táin Bo Chuailgne[1] or Cattle-spoil of Cooley, had been taken to the East with the Cuilmenn,[2] or Great Skin Book. Now Zimmer, who made a special and minute study of this story, considers that the earliest redaction of the Táin dates from the seventh century.[Pg 264] This legend about Senchan—a real historical poet whose eulogy in praise of Columcille, whether genuine or not, was widely popular—is probably equally old, and points to the early existence of a great skin book in which pagan tales were written, but which was then lost. The next great book is the celebrated Saltair of Tara, which is alluded to in a genuine poem of Cuan O'Lochain about the year 1000, in which he says that Cormac mac Art drew up the Saltair of Tara. Cormac, being a pagan, could not have called the book a Saltair or Psalterium, but it may have got the name in later times from its being in metre. All that this really proves, however, is that there then existed a book about the prerogatives of Tara and the provincial kings so old that Cuan O'Lochain—no doubt following tradition—was not afraid to ascribe it to Cormac mac Art who lived in the third century. The next lost book is called the Book of the Uacongbhail, upon which both the O'Clerys in their Book of Invasions and Keating in his history drew, and which, according to O'Curry, still existed at Kildare so late as 1626. The next book is called the Cin of Drom Snechta. It is quoted in the Leabhar na h-Uidhre, or "Book of the Dun Cow"—a MS. of about the year 1100—and often in the Book of Ballymote and by Keating, who in quoting it says, "And it was before the coming of Patrick to Ireland that that book existed,"[3] and the Book of Leinster ascribes it to the son of a king of Connacht who died either in 379 or 499. The next books of which we find mention were said to have belonged to St. Longarad, a contemporary of St. Columcille. The scribe who wrote the glosses on the Féil?rè of Angus the Culdee, said that the books existed still in his day, but that nobody could read them; for which he accounts by the tale that Columcille once paid Longarad a visit in order to see his books, but that his host refused to show them, and that Columcille then said, "May your books be of no use after you, since[Pg 265] you have exercised inhospitality about them." On account of this the books became illegible after Longarad's death. Angus the Culdee lived about the year 800, but Stokes ascribes the Féil?rè to the tenth century; a view, however, which Mr. Strachan's studies on the Irish deponent verb, which is of such frequent occurrence in the Féil?rè, may perhaps modify. At what time the scholiast wrote his note on the text is uncertain, but it also is very old. It is plain, then, that at this time a number of illegible books—illegible no doubt from age—existed; and to account for this illegibility the story of Columcille's curse was invented. The Annals of Ulster quote another book at the year 527 under the name of the Book of St. Mochta, who was a disciple of St. Patrick. They also quote the Book of Cuana at the year 468 and repeatedly afterwards down to the year 610, while they record the death of Cuana, a scribe, at the year 738, after which no more quotations from Cuana's book occur.

The following volumes, almost all of which existed prior to the year 1100, are also alluded to in our old literature:—The Book of Dubhdaleithe; the Yellow Book of Slane; the original Leabhar na h-Uidhre, or "Book of the Dun Cow"; the Books of Eochaidh O'Flanagain; a certain volume known as the book eaten by the poor people in the desert; the Book of Inis an Dúin; the short Book of Monasterboice; the Books of Flann of Monasterboice; the Book of Flann of Dungiven; the Book of Downpatrick; the Book of Derry; the Book of Sábhal Patrick; the Black Book of St. Molaga; the Yellow Book of St. Molling; the Yellow Book of Mac Murrough; the Book of Armagh (not the one now so called); the Red Book of Mac Egan; the Long Book of Leithlin; the Books of O'Scoba of Clonmacnois; the "Duil" of Drom Ceat; the Book of Clonsost; the Book of Cluain Eidhneach (the ivy meadow) in Leix; and one of the most valuable and often quoted of all, Cormac's great Saltair of Cashel, compiled by Cormac mac Culinan, who was at once king of Munster[Pg 266] and archbishop of Cashel,[4] and who fell in battle in 903, according to the chronology of the "Four Masters." The above are certainly only a few of the books in which a large early literature was contained, one that has now perished almost to a page. Michael O'Clery, in the Preface to his Book of Invasions written in 1631, mentions the books from which he and his four antiquarian friends compiled their work—mostly now perished!—and adds:—

    "The histories and synchronisms of Erin were written and tested in the presence of those illustrious saints, as is manifest in the great books that are named after the saints themselves and from their great churches; for there was not an illustrious church in Erin that had not a great book of history named from it or from the saints who sanctified it. It would be easy, too, to know from the books which the saints wrote, and the songs of praise which they composed in Irish that they themselves and their churches were the centres of the true knowledge, and the archives and homes of the manuscripts of the authors of Erin in the elder times. But, alas! short was the time until dispersion and decay overtook the churches of the saints,[Pg 267] their relics, and their books; for there is not to be found of them now [1631] but a small remnant that has not been carried away into distant countries and foreign nations—carried away so that their fate is unknown from that time unto this."

As far as actual existing documents go, we have no specimens of Irish MSS. written in Irish before the eighth century. The chief remains of the old language that we have are mostly found on the Continent, whither the Irish carried their books in great numbers, and unfortunately they are not books of saga, but chiefly, with the exception of a few poems, glosses and explanations of books used evidently in the Irish ecclesiastical schools.[5] A list of the most remarkable is worth giving here, as it will help to show the extraordinary geographical diversity of the Irish settlements upon the Continent, and the keenness with which their relics have been studied by European scholars—French, German, and Italian. The most important are the glosses found in the Irish MSS. of Milan, published by Ascoli, Zeuss, Stokes, and Nigra; those in St. Gall—a monastery in Switzerland founded by St. Gall, an Irish friend of Columbanus, in the sixth century—published by Ascoli and Nigra; those in Wurtzburg, published by Zimmer and Zeuss; those in Carlsruhe, published by Zeuss; those in Turin, published by Zimmer, Nigra, and Stokes in his "Goidelica"; those in Vienna, published by Zimmer in his "Gloss? Hibernic?" and Stokes in his "Goidelica"; those in Berne, those in Leyden, those in Nancy, and the glosses on the Cambrai Sermon, published by Zeuss.[6] Next in antiquity to these are the Irish parts of the Book of Armagh, the poems in the MSS. of St.[Pg 268] Gall and Milan,[7] and some of the pieces published by Windisch in his "Irische Texte." Next to this is probably the Martyrology of Angus the Culdee. And then come the great Middle-Irish books—the Leabhar na h-Uidhre, the Book of Leinster, and the rest.

From a pal?ographic point of view the oldest books in Ireland are probably the "Domhnach Airgid," a copy of the Four Gospels in a triple shrine of yew, silver-plated copper, and gold-plated silver, which St. Patrick was believed to have given to St. Carthainn when he told that saint with a shrewd wisdom, which in later days aroused the admiration of Mr. Matthew Arnold, to build himself a church "that should not be too near to himself for familiarity nor too far from himself for intercourse." It probably dates from the fifth or sixth century. The Cathach supposed to have been surreptitiously written by Columcille from Finnian's book[8]—a Latin copy of the Gospels in Trinity College, Dublin; the Book of Durrow, a beautiful illuminated copy of the same; the Book of Dimma, containing the Four Gospels, ritual, and prayers, probably a work of the seventh century; the Book of Molling, of probably about the same date; the Gospels of Mac Regol, the largest of the Old Irish Gospel books, highly but not elegantly coloured, with an interlinear Anglo-Saxon version in a late hand carried through its pages; the Book of Kells, the unapproachable glory of Irish illumination, and some other ecclesiastical books. After them come the Leabhar na h-Uidre and the great books of poems and saga.

Although the language of these sagas and poems is not that of the glosses, but what is called "Middle-Irish," still it does not in the least follow that the poems and sagas belong to the Middle-Irish period. "The old Middle-Irish manuscripts," says Zimmer, "contain for the most part only Old Irish texts re-written."[9] "Unfortunately," says Windisch, "every new[Pg 269] copyist has given to the text more or less of the linguistic garb of his own day, so that as far as the language of Irish texts goes, it depends principally upon the age of the manuscript that contains them."[10] And again, in his preface to Adamnan's vision, he writes: "Since we know that Irish texts were rewritten by every fresh copyist more or less regularly in the speech of his own day, the real age or a prose text cannot possibly be determined by the linguistic forms of its language."[11] It is much easier to tell the age of poetry than prose, for the gradual modification of language, altering of words, shortening of inflexions, and so on, must interfere with the metre, so that when we find a poem in a twelfth-century manuscript written in Middle Irish and in a perfect metrical form, we may—no matter to what age it is ascribed—be pretty sure that it cannot be more than two or three centuries older than the manuscript that contains it. Yet even of the poems Dr. Atkinson writes: "The poem may be of the eighth century, but the forms are in the main of the twelfth."[12] Where poems that really are of ancient date have had their language modified in transcription so as to render them intelligible, the metre is bound to suffer, and this lends us a criterion whereby to gauge the age of verse, which is lacking to us when we come to deal with prose.

This modification of language is not uncommon in literature and takes place naturally, but I doubt if there ever was a literature in which it played the same important part as in Irish. Thus let us take the story of the Táin Bo Chuailgne, of which I shall have more to say later on. Zimmer, after long and careful study of the text as preserved to us in a manuscript of about the year 1100, came to the conclusion from the marks of Old Irish inflexion, and so forth, which still remain in the eleventh-century text, that there had been two recensions of[Pg 270] the story, a pre-Danish, that is, say, a seventh-century one, and a post-Danish, that is a tenth-or eleventh-century one. Thus the epic may have been originally committed to paper in the seventh century, modified in the tenth, transcribed into the manuscripts in which we have it in the eleventh and twelfth, and propagated from that down to the eighteenth century, in copies every one of which underwent more or less alteration in order to render it more intelligible; and it was in fact in an eighteenth-century manuscript, yet one that differed, as I subsequently discovered, in few essentials from the copy in the Book of Leinster that I first read it. As the bards lived to please so they had to please to live. The popular mind only receives with pleasure and transmits with readiness popular poetry upon the condition that it is intelligible,[13] and hence granting that Finn mac Cool was a real historical personage, it is perfectly possible that some of his poetry was handed down from generation to generation amongst the conservative Gael, and slightly altered or modified from time to time to make it more intelligible, according as words died out and inflexions became obsolete. The Oriental philologist, Max Müller, in attempting to explain how myths arose (according to his theory) from a disease of language, thinks that during the transition period of which he speaks, there would be many words "understood perhaps by the grandfather, familiar to the father, but strange to the son, and misunderstood by the grandson." This is exactly what is taking place over half Ireland at this very moment, and it is what has always been at work amongst a people whose language and literature go back with certainty for nearly 1,500 years. Accordingly before the art of writing became common, ere yet expensive vellum MSS. and a highly-paid[Pg 271] class of historians and schools of scribes to a certain extent stereotyped what they set down, it is altogether probable that people who trusted to the ear and to memory, modified and corrupted but still handed down, at least some famous poems, like those ascribed to Amergin or Finn mac Cool. That the Celtic memory for things unwritten is long I have often proved. I have heard from peasants stanzas composed by Donogha Mór O'Daly, of Boyle, in the thirteenth century; I have recovered from an illiterate peasant, in 1890 in Roscommon, verses which had been jotted down in phonetic spelling in Argyleshire by Macgregor, Dean of Lismore, in the year 1512, and which may have been sung for hundreds of years before it struck the fancy of the Highland divine to commit them to paper;[14] and I have again heard verses in which the measure and sense were preserved, but found on comparing them with MSS. that several obsolete words had been altered to others that rhymed with them and were intelligible.[15] For these reasons I should, in many cases, refuse absolutely to reject the authenticity of a poem simply because the language is more modern than that of the bard could have been to whom it is ascribed, and it seems to me equally uncritical either to accept or reject much of our earliest poetry, except what is in highly-developed metre, as a good deal of it may possibly be the actual (but linguistically modified) work of the supposed authors.

This modifying process is something akin to but very different in degree from Pope's rewriting of Donne's satires or Dryden's version of Chaucer, inasmuch as it was probably both unconscious and unintentional. To understand better how this modification may have taken place, let us examine a[Pg 272] few lines of the thirteenth-century English poem, the "Brut" of Layamon:—

"And swa ich habbe al niht
Of mine swevene swithe ithoht,
For ich what to iwisse
Agan is al my blisse."

These lines were, no doubt, intelligible to an ordinary Englishman at the time. Gradually they become a little modernised, thus:—

"And so I have all night
Of min-e sweeven swith ythought,
For I wat to ywiss
Agone is all my bliss."

Had these verses been preserved in folk-memory they must have undergone a still further modification as soon as the words sweeven (dream), swith (much), and ywiss (certainty) began to grow obsolete, and we should have the verse modified and mangled, perhaps something in this way:—

"And so I have all the night
Of my dream greatly thought,
For I wot and I wis
That gone is all my bliss."

The words "I wot and I wis," in the third line, represent just about as much archaism as the popular memory and taste will stand without rebelling. Some modification in the direction here hinted at may be found in, I should think, more than half the manuscripts in the Royal Irish Academy to-day, and just in the same sense as the lines,

"For I wot and I wis
That gone is my bliss,"

are Layamon's; so we may suppose,

"Dubthach missi mac do Lugaid
Laidech lantrait
[Pg 273]Mé ruc inmbreith etir Loegaire
Ocus Patraic,"[16]

to be the fifth century O'Lugair's, or

"Leathaid folt fada fraich,
Forbrid canach fann finn,"[17]

to be Finn mac Cúmhail's.

Of the many poems—as distinguished from sagas, which are a mixture of poetry and prose—said to have been produced from pagan times down to the eighth century, none can be properly called epics or even épopées. There are few continued efforts, and the majority of the pieces though interesting for a great many reasons to students, would hardly interest an English reader when translated. Unfortunately, such a great amount of our early literature being lost, we can only judge of what it was like through the shorter pieces which have been preserved, and even these short pieces read rather jejune and barren in English, partly because of the great condensation of the original, a condensation which was largely brought about by the necessity of versification in difficult metres. In order to see beauty in the most ancient Irish verse it is absolutely necessary to read it in the original so as to perceive and appreciate the alliteration and other tours de force which appear in every line. These verses, for instance, which Mève, daughter or Conan, is said to have pronounced over Cuchorb, her husband,[Pg 274] in the first century, appear bald enough in a literal translation:—

"Moghcorb's son whom fame conceals [covers]
Well sheds he blood by his spears,
A stone over his grave—'tis a pity—
Who carried battle over Cliú Máil.

My noble king, he spoke not falsehood,
His success was certain in every danger,
As black as a raven was his brow,
As sharp was his spear as a razor," etc.

One might read this kind of thing for ever in a translation without being struck by anything more than some occasional curiosa felicitas of phrase or picturesque expression, and one would never suspect that the original was so polished and complicated as it really is. Here are these two verses done into the exact versification of the original, in which interlinear vowel-rhymes, alliterations, and all the other requirements of the Irish are preserved and marked:—

"Mochorb's son of Fiercest FAME,
KNown his NAME for bloody toil,
To his Gory Grave is GONE,
He who SHONE o'er SHouting Moyle.

Kindly King, who Liked not LIES,
Rash to RISE to Fields of Fame,
Raven-Black his Brows of FEAR,
Razor-Sharp his SPEAR of flame," etc.[18]

This specimen of Irish metre may help to place much of our poetry in another light, for its beauty depends less upon the intrinsic substance of the thought than the external elegance[Pg 275] of the framework. We must understand this in order to do justice to our versified literature, for the student must not imagine that he will find long-sustained epics or interesting narrative poems after the manner of the Iliad or Odyssey, or even the Nibelungenlied, or the "Song of Roland;" none such now exist: if they did exist they are lost. The early poems consist rather of eulogies, elegies, historical pieces, and lyrics, few of them of any great length, and still fewer capable of interesting an English reader in a translation. Occasionally we meet with touches of nature poetry of which the Gael has always been supremely fond. Here is a tentative translation made by O'Donovan of a part of the first poem which Finn mac Cúmhail is said to have composed after his eating of the salmon of knowledge:—

    "May-Day, delightful time! How beautiful the colour; the blackbirds sing their full lay; would that Laighaig were here! The cuckoos sing in constant strains. How welcome is ever the noble brilliance of the seasons! On the margin of the branching woods the summer swallows skim the stream. The swift horses seek the pool. The heath spreads out its long hair, the weak, fair bog-down grows. Sudden consternation attacks the signs, the planets, in their courses running, exert an influence; the sea is lulled to rest, flowers cover the earth."

The language of this poem is so old as to be in parts unintelligible, and the broken metre points to the difficulties of transmission over a long period of time, yet he would be a bold man who would ascribe with certainty the authorship of it to Finn mac Cúmhail in the third century, or the elegy on Cuchorb to Mève, daughter of Conan, a contemporary of Virgil and Horace. And yet all the history of these people is known and recorded with much apparent plausibility and many collateral circumstances connecting them with the men of their time. How much of this is genuine historical tradition? How much is later invention? It is difficult to decide at present.
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[1] Pronounced "Taun Bo Hoo-il-n'ya." The "a" in Táin is pronounced nearly like the "a" in the English word "Tarn."

[2] Cuilmenn—it has been remarked, I think, by Kuno Meyer—seems cognate with Colmméne, glossed nervus, and Welsh cwlm, "a knot or tie." It is found glossed lebar—i.e., leabhar, or "book."

[3] For the authorship of this book see above, p. 71.

[4] "At what time this book was lost," says O'Curry, "we have no precise knowledge, but that it existed, though in a dilapidated state, in the year 1454 is evident from the fact that there is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (Laud 610) a copy of such portions of it as could be deciphered at that time, made by Shawn O'Clery for Mac Richard Butler. From the contents of this copy and from the frequent references to the original for history and genealogies found in the Books of Ballymote, Lecan, and others, it must have been an historical and genealogical compilation of large size and great diversity."

A legible copy of the Saltair appears, however, to have existed at a much later date. I discovered a curious poem in an uncatalogued MS. in the Royal Irish Academy by one David Condon, written apparently at some time between the Cromwellian and Williamite wars, in which he says—

"Saltair Chaisill is dearbh gur léigheas-sa
Leabhar ghleanna-dá-locha gan gó ba léir dam,
Leabhar Buidhe Mhuigleann (?) obair aosta," &c.

I.e.," Surely I have read the Saltair of Cashel, and the Book of Glendaloch was certainly plain to me, and the Yellow Book of Mulling (?) (see above, p. 210), an ancient work, the Book of Molaga, and the lessons of Cionnfaola, and many more (books) along with them which are not (now) found in Ireland."

[5] Such, for example, is the fragment of a commentary on the Psalter published by Kuno Meyer in "Hibernica Minora," from Rawlinson, B. 512. The original is assigned by him, judging from its grammatical forms, to about the year 750. It is very ample and diffuse, and tells about the Shophet?m, or Sophtim, as the writer calls it, the Didne Haggam?m, etc., and is an excellent example of the kind of Irish commentaries used by the early ecclesiastics.

[6] "Gram. Celt.," p. 1004-7.

[7] Published by Zeuss in his "Grammatica Celtica."

[8] See above, p. 175.

[9] "Keltische Studien," Heft i. p. 88.

[10] Preface to Loinges Mac n-Usnig, "Irische Texte," i. 61.

[11] "Irische Texte," i. p. 167.

[12] Preface to the list of contents of the facsimile Book of Leinster.

[13] With the exception of the ancient Irish prayers like Mairinn Phádraig, preserved by tradition, which are for the most part not intelligible to the reciters, but which owe their preservation to the promise usually tacked on at the end that the reciters shall receive some miraculous or heavenly blessing. See my "Religious Songs of Connacht."

[14] See my note on the Story of Oscar au fléau, in "Revue Celtique," vol. xiii. p. 425.

[15] Cf. my note on Bran's colour, at p. 277 of my "Beside the Fire."

[16] In more modern Irish:—

"Dubhthach mise, mac do Lughaidh
Laoi-each lán-traith
Mé rug an bhreith idir Laoghaire
Agus Pádraig."

I.e., "I am Dubhthach, son of Lewy the lay-full, full-wise. It is I who delivered judgment between Leary and Patrick." Traith is the only obsolete word here.

[17] In modern Irish, "Leathnuighidh folt fada fraoch," i.e., "Leathnuighidh fraoch folt fada, foirbridh (fásaidh) canach (ceannabhán) fann fionn," i.e., "Spreads heath its long hair, flourishes the feeble, fair cotton-grass."

[18] Here is the first verse of this in the original. The Old Irish is nearly unintelligible to a modern. I have here modernised the spelling:—

"Mac Mogachoirb Cheileas CLú
Cun fearas CRú thar a gháibh
Ail uas a Ligi—budh LIACH—-
Baslaide CHLIATH thar Cliú Máil."

The rhyming words do not make perfect rhyme as in English, but pretty nearly so—clu cru, liath cliath, gáibh máil.