For four centuries after the Anglo-Norman, or more properly the Cambro-Norman invasion, the literature of Ireland seems to have been chiefly confined to the schools of the bards, and the bards themselves seem to have continued on the rather cut-and-dry lines of tribal genealogy, religious meditations, personal eulogium, clan history, and elegies for the dead. There reigns during this period a lack of imagination and of initiative in literature; no new ground is broken, no fresh paths entered on, no new saga-stuff unearthed, no new metres discovered. There is great technical skill exhibited, but little robust originality; great cleverness of execution, but little boldness of conception. How closely the bards ran in the groove of their predecessors is evident from the number of poems of doubtful authorship, ascribed by some authorities to bards of the pre-Norman or even Danish period, and by others to poets of the thirteenth, fourteenth, or even fifteenth centuries, the work of the later period being so very often both in style and language scarcely distinguishable from the earlier which it imitates.
Another characteristic of these four centuries is the number of hereditary bards of the same name and family which we find generation after generation, each one imitating his predecessor,[Pg 466] and producing his inauguration odes, his eulogies, and his elegies, for each succeeding race of chiefs and patrons.
This period is the post-epic, post-saga period. Probably not one of the Red Branch stories was even materially altered during it. Stories of the Fenian cycle, however, continued to be propagated and improved upon, and no doubt many new ones were invented. But there is little or no trace of the composition of fresh miscellaneous saga, and the only poetry that seems to have flourished beside the classic metres of the bards is the so-called "Ossianic," a good deal of which may, perhaps, have assumed something of its present form during this period.
Some attempt there was at the careful keeping of annals, but scarcely any at writing regular history, though the fifteenth century produced McCraith's "Exploits of Torlough," to be noticed further on. We shall now briefly glance at this period age by age.
The thirteenth century, that succeeding the coming of the Normans, is far more barren in literature than the one which preceded them. Only five or six poets are mentioned as belonging to it, and their surviving poems amount to only a few hundred lines, with the exception of those of the great religious bard Donogha Mór O'Daly, who died in 1244 "a poet," record the "Four Masters," "who never was and never shall be surpassed." All his poems extant are of a religious character. He was buried in the abbey of Boyle, in the county of Roscommon, in which county I have heard, up to a few years ago, verses ascribed to him repeated by more than one old peasant. It is usually believed that he was a cleric and abbot of the beautiful monastery of Boyle, but there is no evidence for this, and he may have been in fact a layman. Thirty-one poems of his, containing in all some four thousand two hundred lines, have been preserved, and for their great smoothness have earned for their author the not very happy title of the Ovid of Ireland. Here is a specimen of one of his shorter pieces, written on his unexpectedly finding himself[Pg 467] unable to shed a tear after his arriving at Loch Derg on a pilgrimage:
"Alas, for my journey to Loch Derg, O King of the churches and the bells; 'I have come' to weep thy bruises and thy wound, and yet from my eye there cometh not a tear.[1]
"With an eye that moistens not its pupil, after doing every evil, no matter how great, with a heart that seeketh only (its own) peace, alas! O king, what shall I do?
"Without sorrowfulness of heart, without softening, without contrition, or weeping for my faults,—Patrick head of the clergy, he never thought that he could gain God in this way.
"The one son of Calphurn, since we are speaking of him, 'alas! O Virgin, sad my state!' he was never seen whilst alive without the trace of tears in his eye.
"In (this) hard, narrow stone-walled (cell), after all the evil I have done, all the pride I have felt. Alas! my pity! that I find no tear, and I buried alive in the grave.
"O one-Son, by whom all were created, and who didst not shun the death of the three thorns, with a heart than which stone is not more hard, 'tis pity my journey to Loch Derg."
Here is another specimen, a good deal of which I once heard from a poor beggarman in the County Mayo, but it is also preserved in numerous manuscripts:
"My son, remember what I say,
That on the Day of Judgment's shock,
When men go stumbling down the Mount,
The sheep may count thee of their flock.[2]
And narrow though thou find the path
To Heaven's high rath, and hard to gain,
I warn thee shun yon broad white road
That leads to the abode of pain.
[Pg 468]
For us is many a snare designed,
To fill our mind with doubts and fears.
Far from the land where lurks no sin,
We dwell within our Vale of Tears.
Not on the world thy love bestow,
Passing as flowers that blow and die;
Follow not thou the specious track
That turns the back on God most high.
But oh! let faith, let hope, let love,
Soar far above this cold world's way,
Patience, humility, and awe—
Make them thy law from day to day.
And love thy neighbour as thyself,
(Not for his pelf thy love should be),
But a greater love than every love
Give God above who loveth thee.
* * * * *
The seven shafts wherewith the Unjust
Shoots hard to thrust us from our home,
Canst thou avoid their fiery path,
Dread not the wrath that is to come.
Shun sloth, shun greed, shun sensual fires,
(Eager desires of men enslaved)
Anger and pride and hatred shun,
Till heaven be won, till man be saved.
To Him, our King, to Mary's son
Who did not shun the evil death,
Since He our hope is, He alone,
Commit thy body, soul, and breath.
Since Hell each man pursues each day,
Cleric and lay, till life be done,
Be not deceived as others may,
Remember what I say, my son."[3]
[Pg 469]
The fourteenth century possesses exactly the same characteristics as the thirteenth, only the poets are more numerous. O'Reilly mentions over a score of them whose verses amount to nearly seven thousand lines. Of these the best known is probably John Mór O'Dúgan of whom about 2,600 lines survive—important rather for the information they convey than for their poetry. His greatest, or at least his most valuable piece, is about the tribes and territories of the various districts in Meath, Ulster, and Connacht, on the arrival of the Normans, and the names of the chiefs who ruled them.[4] In this poem he devotes 152 lines to Meath, 354 to Ulster, 328 to Connacht, and only 56 to Leinster, death having apparently carried him off (in the year 1372) before he had finished his researches into the tribes and territories of that district. But luckily for us his younger contemporary—Gilla-na-naomh O'Huidhrin [Heerin]—took it up and completed it,[5] so that the two poems, usually copied together, form a single piece of 1,660 lines in deibhidh [d'y?vee] metre, which has thrown[Pg 470] more light upon names and territories than perhaps any other of the same extent. It is, despite the difficult and recondite verse, a work mainly of research and not of poetry. The same may be said of nearly all O'Dugan's poems, another of which called the "Forus Focal," is really a vocabulary in verse of obsolete words, which though of similar orthography have different or even contrary meanings. It was in this century the great miscellaneous collection called the Book of Ballymote was compiled.
The fifteenth century differs very little in character from the preceding one. We find about the same number of poets with about the same amount of verses—between six and seven thousand lines, according to O'Reilly—still surviving, or as O'Reilly underrates the number, probably about ten thousand lines. The poets were now beginning to feel the rude weight of the prosaic Saxon, and Fergal O'Daly chief poet of Corcamroe, Maurice O'Daly a poet of Breffhy, Dermot O'Daly of Meath, Hugh óg Mac Curtin, and Dubhthach [Duffach] son of Eochaidh [Yohee] "the learned," with several more, are mentioned as having been cruelly plundered and oppressed by Lord Furnival and the English. It was in this century that those most valuable annals usually called the Annals of Ulster were compiled from ancient books now lost, by Cathal Maguire who was born in 1438. The great collection called the Book of Lecan was copied at the beginning of this century, and another most important work the "Caithréim, or warlike exploits of Turlough O'Brien," was written about the year 1459 by John Mac Craith, chief historian of North Munster. This though composed in a far more exaggerated and inflated style than even the "War of the Gael with the Gaill," which it resembles, yet gives the most accurate account we have of the struggles of the Irish against the English in Munster from the landing of Henry II. till the death of Lord de Clare in 1318. It was at the very beginning of this century the hagiographical collection called the Leabhar Breac was made.
[Pg 471]
The sixteenth century cannot properly be said to mark a transition period in Irish literature, as it does in the literature of so many other European countries. It has, indeed, left far more numerous documents behind it than the preceding one, but this is mainly due to the fact that less time has elapsed during which they could be lost. Their style and general contents differ little, until the very close of the century, from those of their predecessors. O'Reilly chronicles the names of about forty poets whose surviving pieces amount to over ten thousand lines. But so many MSS. which were in O'Reilly's time in private hands, or which, like the Stowe MSS., were unapproachable by students, have since been deposited in public libraries or become otherwise accessible, that it would, I think, be safe to add at least half as much again to O'Reilly's computation. I have even in my own possession poems by nearly a dozen writers belonging to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries whose names are not mentioned at all by O'Reilly; and the O'Conor Don has shown me a manuscript copied at Ostend, in Belgium, in 1631, for one Captain Alexander Mac Donnell, from which O'Curry transcribed a thousand pages of poems "of which with a very few exceptions," he writes, "no copies are known to me elsewhere in Ireland." A considerable number of these poems, nearly all of them unknown to O'Reilly, were composed in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, so that this one manuscript alone would largely swell O'Reilly's estimate for this period.
Enormous quantities of books however, belonging to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, have been lost, and are still being lost every day. It is an accident that Friar O'Gara's[6] and the O'Conor Don's collection—both compiled abroad—have escaped. If, during the middle of the sixteenth[Pg 472] century, a collector of poetry had gone round transcribing the classical poems of that age, he would have found large collections preserved in the houses of almost every scion of the old Gaelic nobility, with scarcely an exception. On the break-up of the houses of the Irish chiefs the archives of their families and their manuscript libraries were lost or carried abroad. An excellent example of what may be called tribal poetry, such as every great Gaelic house possessed, is contained in a manuscript in Trinity College, which a Fellow of the last century, called O'Sullivan, luckily got transcribed for himself, and which is now in the college library.[7] The collection thus made, from about 1570 to 1615, goes under the title of the "Book of the O'Byrnes," and contains sixty or seventy poems made by their own family bards and by several of the leading bards of Ireland, for the various members of the O'Byrnes of Ranelagh near Dublin, and of the O'Byrnes of Wicklow, who for three generations maintained their struggle with the English, only succumbing in the beginning of the seventeenth century.
Other family records of this nature, which were once possessed in every county by the bardic families and by the chiefs, have perished by the score. A glance at a few typical poems belonging to the O'Byrnes will give a good idea of the functions of the sixteenth-century bards, and the nature of their poems. They are composed on all kinds of subjects[Pg 473] connected with the wars, genealogy, and history of the tribe and its chiefs. Many are eulogiums, some warnings, some political poems, some elegies. Here are two or three specimens; the first a poem of fifty-six lines, by Angus O'Daly, on the head of one of the chiefs of the clan spiked on the battlements of Dublin.
"O body which I see without a head,
It is the sight of thee which has withered up my strength,
Divided and impaled in Ath-cliath [Dublin],
The learned of Banba [Ireland] will feel its loss.[8]
Who will relieve the wants of the poor?
Who will bestow cattle on th............