The Origin of Irish Literature

Miss O'Farrelly commenced a series of lectures on the " Origin of Irish Literature," in Colaiste Laighean, the week before last. The following are extracts from the first lecture :—

Cairns, and stones, and mounds of clay, are of small importance as relics of a time long dead, when compared with the remains which tell of the thoughts, and the inner life of a people. An ancient poem is of more value than the most curiously wrought vase, dug out from a soil untouched for thousands of years. In one, the eternal that expressed itself in years gone by speaks to the eternal in us over all the intervening years, untrammelled, but by the limitation of words in touching the great primeval emotions of humanity.

In the other, we are brought face to face, physically, with a material, and ofttimes halting and imperfect, expression of thought, exposed to all the vagaries of time, and giving us but the vaguest glimpse of the real mind behind. Without a literature we are powerless to reconstruct the life of a people ; we may theorise, we may conjecture, but we speak in the air and without conviction. With regard to our literature, we are peculiarly happy in this—that it has been so consistently neglected for centuries, at a time when the storehouses of other literatures, often indeed meagre and bare enough, have been rifled of their contents to swell the boiling pot, and vary the literary fare of most civilised nations.

Our neglect in recent times, and our splendid isolation, in the classical ages, has left our literature almost intact — unique and well defined within clear and definite bounds — a native growth, free and scarcely touched, at least in its earlier forms. We may be thankful for having escaped the vandalism of modern authorship, which, from the time of Shakespeare downwards, has rifled the remains of a time when imagination was in its first strength and thought in its pristine vigour ; rifled it for the strong in fiction, and the wonderful in poetry.

Many of our gems are still uncut ; much of our gold is yet in the ore. Our gems and our gold have happened on a time when reverent workmen are prepared to handle them and set them before the world as the legacy of one sturdy Western race which neither bowed the knee before a Roman Caesar nor bent the head in homage of the classic tradition. The first thing to be borne in mind in connection with our literature is the fact that a large amount of it —not, perhaps, the most valuable, but still a considerable body of material among which remarkable finds are every day turning up — is still unedited, or, if edited, is published in such a scattered way among various periodicals as to be scarcely available to the ordinary worker.

Secondly, even where pieces, especially of the older literature, are carefully edited from a linguistic point of view, it often happens that this is done quite apart from the historical references and the side references to other portions of the literature. Until all our literary remains are fully examined and collated side by side with reference to the social and political history of the time, and with all the evidence that can be brought to bear on them from contemporary sources, the last word will not have been said on Irish literature.

There is still a delusion among us that the contents of our earliest manuscripts represent the earliest forms of our literature which have been preserved. This is not necessarily so by any means. The little poems on the marginal spaces of the Glosses date from the actual writing of the Glosses, whilst many pieces contained in such volumes as the " Leabhar na hUidhre," copied two or three or four centuries later, are avowedly taken from sources much older than the Glosses themselves.

Again, though the linguistic form of stories and poems contained in medimval or comparatively modern versions may be recent, the work in its original form may have been conceived many centuries before, and as a literary work, apart from language considerations, may be entitled to more considerations than its modern dress would seem to warrant. In the same volume, or scrap book of literary relics, we may find side by side pieces transcribed word for word from some older book without the variation of a letter, pieces brought up to date in appearance, though old in verse-form and conception ; pieces comparatively recent, and the actual work of contemporaries.

At the close of her lecture she referred to the wonder-tales of the old literature, and said that the present-day wonder-tales have come to us, some of them with literary distinction from the older ones. Semi-historical tales centred round the courts of the early kings and the Fianna, after which came the lives of the Saints. It is probable that we possess only a fragment of the Code of Laws in existence at the time of St. Patrick. For many centuries before the coming of Christianity the historical archives were well looked after.