OMNIUM SANCTORUM HIBERNIAE

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  • Early and Medieval Irish Literature

    This essay by Barbara Hillers introduces Irish literature in the early and later medieval period.
    Barbara Hillers
    Early Irish literature stands out for its richness and excellence, encompassing not only a wide range of religious and secular poetry but also—uniquely in early medieval Europe—a flourishing prose literature. Its range and breadth reveals a vibrant vernacular culture, unafraid of either its native roots or of the Latin Christian culture of the Continent.
    Pre-modern literature in Irish is divided into periods on the basis of linguistic criteria: Old Irish (600–900), Middle Irish (900–1200), and Early Modern (or “Classical”) Irish (1200–1650). The transition from the Old Irish to the Middle Irish period, generally associated with the upheavals in the aftermath of the Viking incursions, was, in literary terms, less abrupt than the transition from Middle Irish to Early Modern Irish in the wake of the Anglo-Norman invasion.
    THE EARLY CENTURIES
    Literacy came to Ireland through contact with the Romano-Christian world. The practice of Christianity brought with it a knowledge of Latin; however, Irish played a significant role as a literary language in the church from an early date. The monks glossing Priscian’s Latin grammar in Irish used a technical vocabulary suited to describe both Latin and Irish grammar, and the same literate bilingualism informs the Old Irish primer Auraicept na n-Éces. Along with the clergy’s adoption of the vernacular went other aspects of traditional culture. While it is impossible to reconstruct the real nature of the encounter between missionary Christianity and native pagan culture, it is significant that in later tradition it is often portrayed as a conciliatory compromise. According to the preface of the native law code Senchas Már, Saint Patrick endorses the native laws, as long as they did not conflict with church law. Such anecdotes express the need that medieval scholars felt to legitimize elements of native culture, to baptize, as it were, their pre-Christian gods and heroes. Modern critics have been particularly fascinated by the native culture with its roots in a pre-Christian Celtic past. However, the traditional view of the “secular” parts of Irish literature—especially saga and law—as representing pagan survivals has largely been replaced by a new scholarly consensus that regards the entire literary production as emanating directly or indirectly from the monasteries.
    PROSE
    Ireland has the earliest developed prose tradition in medieval Europe. The preference for prose as a vehicle for narrative was such that when the verse epics of Virgil, Lucan, and Statius were translated into Irish, they were rendered into prose rather than verse. Early Irish prose covers a number of genres, including hagiography and homily, history, and translated literature, as well as heroic epic and myth. The narrative prose is characterized by a distinctive style particularly associated with heroic saga but found equally in saints’ lives and historical tales. Quick-paced action is offset by colorful, if impressionistic description and punctuated by memorable, often laconic dialogue. The themes, motifs, and narrative style of the sagas are traditional and may hark back to preliterate storytelling. The sagas are without exception anonymous. Their authors clearly did not think that they were inventing; they were retelling traditional subject matter in a traditional manner. They thought of themselves as historians and of their subject as history, albeit history told with the flair and gusto of heroic epic.
    POETRY
    Although the modern reader may find the prose literature more accessible, poetry had a higher prestige. Poems were regarded as individually authored. While prose texts are anonymous, poems were often attributed, and scores of Early Irish poets are known to us by name. Irish metrics are of dazzling complexity and variety. Much of the earliest poetry is stressed and alliterative. This poetry, referred to as rosc or retoiric, is generally regarded as the original poetic mode. Stressed verse was eclipsed by syllabic verse, which soon became the dominant mode for poetry, although stressed poetry continued to be composed for several centuries, particularly in contexts that invited an archaizing treatment (Breatnach 1996). From 1200 on, the bardic schools maintained a standard literary language and a sophisticated system of metrics; the contemporary metrical tracts distinguish scores of individual meters. Syllabic poetry employs a variety of ornamentation, including alliteration, assonance, and rhyme. The definition of rhyme differs from other European traditions: Phonemes do not have to be identical in order to rhyme, but must belong to the same group of “rhyming” letters.
    Modern scholarship has focused on the origins and development of Irish metrics. The lyric is well represented in anthologies (see, for example, Murphy 1956) and has received critical attention, especially the so-called “hermit” or “nature” poetry of monastic provenance; longer narrative and didactic verse fares less well. After 1200 the bulk of poetry is encomiastic.
    THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD
    Two events made the twelfth century a watershed in Irish literary history: the introduction of the continental monastic orders, heralded by the foundation of the Cistercian abbey of Mellifont in 1142, and the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169. The two events combined to shift the locus of native literary production from the monasteries to the bardic schools maintained by the dozen or so families of hereditary poets that formed the Irish intelligentsia. The bardic schools oversaw a linguistic reform that created a new literary standard after the profound linguistic changes of the Middle Irish period. This new standard language, referred to as “Classical” or “Early Modern” Irish, was used by literati from Gaelic Scotland to the south of Ireland and remained essentially unchanged until the collapse of Gaelic rule in the seventeenth century.
    The foreigners introduced new literary fashions; entertainment plays a larger part in the composition of prose. Anglo-Norman tastes are reflected by the Irish adaptations of Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton, of the Travels of John Mandeville and the Grail Quest. Poetry, on the other hand, remained essentially unassimilated and maintained its distinctive metrics. But even in poetry, foreign fashions had an impact; the dánta grádha (courtly love poetry) are informed by European love poetry and often have direct models in contemporary English poems. The first amateur practitioner of syllabic verse, the Anglo-Norman Gerald Fitzgerald, earl of Kildare, is an example of the much-invoked tendency for Ireland’s invaders to “go native,” becoming Hibernis ipsis Hiberniores (“more Irish than the Irish”). While relations between the two cultures were by no means always amicable, a cultural regrouping beginning in the thirteenth century resulted in many Anglo-Norman lords patronizing native poets. One poet, Gofraidh Fionn Ó Dálaigh, explains in a poem how he flattered native and foreign nobility alike. The poets, themselves of the aristocracy, looked at their profession as an independent institution that endowed them with the right to counsel and censure as well as praise their lords. Nevertheless, in economic terms they were largely dependent on the bounty of their patrons, whose careers they celebrated and whose deaths they lamented. Such official eulogies were preserved in a duanaire (poem book). A good many poem books survive, and the contents of a number of these have been published, as have the repertoires of individual poets, such as the exemplary edition of the oeuvre of Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn (Knott 1922 and 1926).
    Throughout its long history, Irish literature weathered major political upheavals and successfully accommodated foreign influence, be it Latin, Norse, or Norman. It was only when the Anglo expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to the disestablishment of Gaelic rule that Irish ceased, for a couple of centuries, to be a literary language.
    Bibliography
    Breatnach, Liam. “Poets and Poetry.” In Progress in Medieval Irish Studies, edited by Kim McCone and Katharine Simms. 1996.
    Flower, Robin. The Irish Tradition. 1947.
    Knott, Eleanor. Irish Classical Poetry. 1957.
    Knott, Eleanor, ed. and trans. The Bardic Poems of Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn. 2 vols. 1922 and 1926.
    McCone, Kim, and Katharine Simms, eds. Progress in Medieval Irish Studies. 1996.
    Murphy, Gerard. Early Irish Lyrics. 1956.
    Williams, J. E. C., and Patrick Ford. The Irish Literary Tradition. 1992.

  • Latin and Old Irish Literacy

    This essay outlines the development of Hiberno-Latin culture and the part that literacy played in the growth of Irish Christianity.

    Anthony Harvey
    The oldest physically surviving examples of Irish-language literacy are a few hundred inscriptions written in the Morse code–like alphabet called ogham. Almost all of these simply record names of people. They are found carved on large stones across southern Ireland (particularly Cork and Kerry) and in Irish-influenced parts of western Britain, and they date from about the fourth century C.E. to the seventh. For the invention of the ogham alphabet itself, a dating only a little earlier than that of the first extant inscriptions has been proposed, but it is certain that only a fraction of the earliest evidence has survived, so the script may have originated as soon as the influences inspiring it began to be felt in Gaeldom. The main such influence is believed to have been the Roman alphabet. This was used primarily for writing Latin (some of the stones in Britain give a Roman-letter “translation” into Latin of the Irish name that appears in ogham). By the second century C.E. at the latest, the Roman invasion of Britain had brought Latin, as a potentially culture-affecting force, to the shores of the Irish Sea (and probably across it; there is known to have been Roman trade with Ireland and arguably some transient settlement). Although Ireland was and remained outside the Roman empire, it may therefore have been as early as this that educated but hitherto illiterate Irish-speaking circles first gained the fairly minimal access to Latinity that they needed for the ogham script to be devised.
    Whether or not some knowledge of Latin reached Ireland before the Christian gospel did, the language was necessarily involved in the establishment of the religion there: Irish churches could not have been part of Catholic Christendom, as they were, without using some Latin right from their foundation. Of Latin works known to have been written in early Ireland, the oldest that survive in terms of composition (not in physical terms; they are probably copies of copies) are two letters authored by the Briton Saint Patrick, probably in the fifth century. As Christianity was believed until recently to have been first introduced to Ireland by Patrick, he and his epistles have conventionally been seen as marking the necessary introduction of Latin literacy to the island as well. But not only does the ogham phenomenon precede his traditional dates, Irish Christianity is now recognized to do so too. So unless Patrick was actually active before the fifth century, Latin reached Ireland first.
    Weak as Latin culture still was in Ireland in Patrick’s day, his sixth-century successors established it firmly. The Latin of the writing tradition that they set up is known to have been pronounced in a markedly British fashion; thus they too were from Britain. These evangelists were doubtless inspired in many cases by the zeal that appears to have swept the larger island after the publication there of De excidio Britanniae (The ruin of Britain), a prophetic call for reformation in church and state by their compatriot Gildas. His ability to compose this erudite work a century or more after the fall of Rome shows that Latin learning was still strong in Britain at that time, and the prestige the work conferred probably played a major part in invigorating the stylish and productive British-Latin tradition that continued down to Norman times. Elements of that tradition surviving from the seventh century fall into a penitential genre, which spread to Ireland: We have Hiberno-Latin examples from the same century. By the year 700, Ireland had produced a significant body of Latin in other genres, too, that has come down to us, albeit preserved in later manuscripts.
    Accomplished authors responsible include Cummian (computistics), “Augustinus” Hibernicus (theology), Virgilius Maro Grammaticus (idiosyncratic philological discourse), and Cogitosus and Muirchú (hagiography), as well as anonymous writers of poetry and legal and historical works. Indeed, the debt of Hiberno-Latin culture to the outside world was being actively repaid during that period: Seventh-century English scholars frequently traveled to Ireland for further study, while influential Irishmen such as Saint Columbanus (d. 615) had begun to spearhead a continent-wide monastic movement that did much to keep Latin learning alive on a wider stage in troubled times.
    As soon as Celtic scribes began to write Latin texts on vellum, they probably included Latinized versions of Celtic names (Patrick and Gildas both did this). But the first extant manuscript material to constitute real Celtic-medium writing consists of explanatory glosses added in Irish to Latin texts penned from the early seventh century onwards. Given their ancillary nature, these physically earliest examples have been seen as reaching us from a stage not long after the actual beginning of the (manuscript) writing of Irish. However, Irish glosses in a famous Würzburg manuscript, though themselves of the eighth century, show traces of a spelling system whose invention must predate the introduction of British-Latin pronunciation by Saint Patrick’s successors. Indeed, this system shows links with ogham orthography. Can it have originated in the same period? Ogham on stone was formerly felt to have been a pagan phenomenon that gave way to the Christian practice of writing manuscripts in Roman letters on vellum. But some ogham stones also display Christian crosses. Since ogham’s straight strokes are ideally suited to carving, the choice of alphabet may actually have been determined more by the medium than by the culture. So the same people who carved inscriptions using ogham may also have written on vellum using the Roman alphabet. The ogham was Irish-language; any contemporary Roman-letter material will have been primarily Latin-medium, but may it have included Celtic as well? It is true that some of the stones survive while no physically contemporary manuscript texts do; but then, only ten manuscripts (in either language) went on to survive on Irish soil from even as late as 1000 C.E., and hundreds are known to have existed by then.
    At all events, once Irish-medium manuscript literacy was established in a form that comes down to us, it can be seen blossoming in a variety of genres, including theological tracts, saints’ lives, legal material, poetry, and ultimately the great prose tales. Early Irish literacy also displays an astonishing assurance. By the year 700 fully bilingual material was being written, showing that (uniquely for a vernacular) Irish-medium literacy was esteemed equally with Latin. It cannot be coincidence that, during the mainstream Old Irish period that followed, this literacy went on to constitute the earliest and, for its day, by far the largest body of nonclassical vernacular written material in Europe (a distinction often, but erroneously, claimed for Old English).
    Bibliography
    Harvey, Anthony. “Latin, Literacy, and the Celtic Vernaculars around the Year AD 500.” In Celtic Languages and Celtic Peoples, edited by Cyril J. Byrne, Margaret Harry, and Pádraig Ó Siadhail. 1992.
    Harvey, Anthony. “Problems in Dating the Origin of the Ogham Script.” In Roman, Runes, and Ogham, edited by John Higgitt, Katherine Forsyth, and David N. Parsons. 2001.
    Howlett, D. R. The Celtic Latin Tradition of Biblical Style. 1995.
    Jackson, Kenneth. Language and History in Early Britain. 1953. Reprint, 1994.
    Lapidge, Michael, and Richard Sharpe. A Bibliography of Celtic-Latin Literature, 400–1200. 1985.
    McManus, Damian. A Guide to Ogam. 1991.
    Stevenson, Jane. “The Beginnings of Literacy in Ireland.” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 89 C (1989): 127–165.

  • Hiberno-Latin Culture

    Dáibhí Ó Cróinín introduces the Hiberno-Latin culture of the Irish monasteries in this essay.

    The coming of Christianity to Ireland in the fifth century brought about many changes in Irish society, one of the most profound being the introduction of the Latin language. Ireland had never been a part of the Roman Empire and therefore had never acquired the apparatus of Roman government, which included Latin as the everyday lingua franca not only of administrators but also of the population at large. The Rome that Irishmen revered was, in the words of the great Irish missionary Saint Columbanus, not the Rome of the Caesars but the Rome of the Saints Peter and Paul. Within a century of receiving formal Christianity, however, Irish scholars had acquired a remarkable mastery of Latin, but it was the Latin of the Bible and the church fathers rather than of Virgil. The image of Ireland as a haven of classical Latin literature (and even of Greek) in the decades following the fall of the Roman Empire has been greatly exaggerated, but the reality, while more modest, is no less impressive in its own way. Whether the initial impetus owed anything to the activities of the first continental missionaries, led by Bishop Palladius, is impossible to say; that Gallican mission has left no traces, either in surviving manuscripts or in any texts associated with Palladius and his followers. The only fifth-century writings to survive, Patrick’s Confessio and letter, left no mark on later Irish writings in Latin, except insofar as Patrick’s works display a mastery of what has been called biblical style by its discoverer, David Howlett, and that biblical style was to become a distinguishing feature of later Hiberno-Latin prose compositions. It is reasonable to suppose that there was continuity of Latin literacy from the fifth century on, but the hymn in praise of Patrick traditionally attributed to his disciple Secundinus (Audite omnes amantes) is now believed to be late sixth-century in date, and the work of Colmán Alo (of Lynally, Co. Meath, d. 610) rather than the fifth-century Secundinus. It already attests to a respectable grasp of Latin language and metrics. A possible rival in terms of dating is the remarkable poem Altus prosator (Ancient creator), a sort of “Paradise Lost” ascribed to Columba (Colum Cille), founder of the monastery of Iona (d. 597). However, that work is believed by modern scholars to be of seventh-century date.
    It is only with the figure of Columbanus, originally of Bangor, Co. Down, later founder of monasteries in Gaul and Italy (d. 615), that the first real evidence emerges of substantial writings in Latin by Irishmen. Six of his letters survive, along with a number of poems, sermons, and two monastic rules. He mentions two mentors by name, the British writers Finnian (Uennianus) and Gildas; the latter’s De excidio Britanniae has left definite traces on Columbanus’s prose style. The evidence of surviving manuscripts makes clear the debt to British teachers in the formative stages of the Irish Church, but Columbanus’s complete mastery of Latin, in a variety of different prose styles, as well as his command of both quantitative and stressed meters, demonstrates for the first time the full range of native Hiberno-Latin skills. This range finds expression in prose and verse compositions throughout the seventh century: saints’ lives and instructional literature, biblical commentaries and Latin grammars, canon law and handbooks of penance, besides a rich variety of poems devoted to biblical learning and computistics (the mathematics required to calculate the date of Easter), devotional hymns, and hagiography. One of the earliest of these compositions in date, Cummian’s letter on the Paschal question (632/633), is remarkable for its rich patristic sources (i.e., the writings of the church fathers—some of them unique) and for the collection of ten different Easter tables (the mathematical tables used to calculate the date of Easter) on which its author was able to draw. Sometime in the mid-seventh century the arrival in Ireland of Isidore of Seville’s writings spurred a massive production of Hiberno-Latin writing on every imaginable subject, and across the full spectrum of the monastic curriculum. Newly acquired grammatical texts from late antiquity led to a surge of renewed interest in that field also, and Irish writers perfected a new type of instructional handbook, the elementary grammar, for use with beginners in Latin, which led in turn to more advanced study using exegetical grammars. By combining the methods of biblical exegetes and Latin grammarians in one text, Irish teachers perfected an instructional technique that was clearly very successful. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the remarkably uniform language of these different authors. Though scholars have happily used the term Hiberno-Latin to describe the language of Irish texts from this period; in fact, Irish Latin was indistinguishable in grammar and syntax from its continental counterpart—a testament to the efficacy of teaching in Irish schools.
    Alongside the ordinary expressions of Latin culture in Ireland, however, there was also the extraordinary: the so-called Hisperica famina (Western sayings) make their appearance in the mid-seventh century. A “culture fungus of decay” (as one scholar, Eoin Mac Neill, described them), these bizarre colloquies are a pastiche of the pedantic hypercorrectness of some of the grammarians, and they mock the high-falutin’ language and vocabulary of the schools. They are probably not to be taken too seriously (and may not be Irish at all in origin). Another exotic flowering of Irish Latin culture, however, definitely is a native concoction: The bizarre writings of Virgilius Maro “the Grammarian” are an extraordinary rodomontade (bluster) of mock learning that pokes glorious fun at the pomposities of the self-same schoolmen. The fun was probably well intended, but Virgilius Maro’s more exuberant pronouncements made their way into the works of seriously minded computists and biblical commentators, with the result that continental men of learning, when they came face to face with such oddities in the eighth century, tended to look askance at Irish learning.
    What most impresses, however, is the sheer quantity of Hiberno-Latin writings in the seventh and eighth centuries and the range of their subject-matter. Hiberno-Latin authors drew on a huge variety of Late Latin, biblical, and patristic sources, in addition to unorthodox writings like the commentaries of the heresiarch Pelagius, and a remarkable number of biblical apocrypha nowhere else available. They also began to gloss their Latin texts in the vernacular, very quickly passing to full texts in Old Irish. The most remarkable example of this phenomenon is the Cambrai Homily (probably mid-seventh century), a bilingual Latin-Irish text combining excerpts from the gospels, Pauline Epistles, and Gregory the Great’s gospel homilies, with a parallel text in Old Irish whose language is extraordinarily archaic. The oldest known manuscript with bilingual Latin-Irish glosses dates to about 700, but the most famous is the Würzburg codex of about 800 containing Pauline epistles with a huge number of glosses in both Latin and Old Irish. This probably belonged to Clemens Scottus, master of the palace school at Aachen in Charlemagne’s time, who ended his days at the shrine of the Irish saint Kilian in Würzburg.
    Hiberno-Latin scholars enjoyed a very good reputation when they traveled across Europe, following in the steps of Columbanus. The eighth century saw the appearance on the continent of men like Dicuil (author of a remarkable cosmographical work, Liber de mensura orbis terrae [Book on the measurement of the earth], as well as computistical and grammatical texts), Dungal of Pavia, Muredach Scottus “most learned of all men” (in his own estimation, at any rate), and Joseph Scottus, friend of Alcuin. Even more remarkable, however, was the generation of scholars that followed them in the ninth century, especially Sedulius Scottus of Liège and his circle of friends, and the most famous of them all, Iohannes Eriugena (“Irish-born”). These men were the superiors of their continental contemporaries not only in terms of Latin learning but also in their knowledge of Greek. Eriugena in particular was by common consent the finest intellect of his generation. In their Latin poetry (and Greek poetry too in Eriugena’s case) Sedulius and Eriugena demonstrated a complete mastery of the language. Sedulius too, with his “Handbook for Princes” (De rectoribus Christianis), also established a genre that was to have lasting influence in the area of political philosophy. In Eriugena’s case his philosophical works (especially the Periphyseon: On the Division of Nature) reveal a mind that had no equal in Europe in his time, and a unique grasp of Greek philosophy.
    Bibliography
    Bieler, Ludwig. Ireland, Harbinger of the Middle Ages. 1963.
    Kenney, James F. Ecclesiastical. Vol. 1 of The Sources for the Early History of Ireland. 1929.
    Ó Cróinín, Dáibhí. Early Medieval Ireland, 400–1200. 1995.
    Dáibhí Ó Cróinín