This eBook was produced by John B. Hare and Carrie Lorenz.
At a time like the present, when in the opinion of many the greatliteratures of Greece and Rome are ceasing to hold the influence thatthey have so long exerted upon human thought, and when the study of thegreatest works of the ancient world is derided as "useless," it may betoo sanguine to hope that any attention can be paid to a literaturethat is quite as useless as the Greek; which deals with a time, which,if not actually as far removed from ours as are classical times, is yetfurther removed in ideas; a literature which is known to few and hasyet to win its way to favour, while the far superior literature ofGreece finds it hard to defend the position that it long ago won. Itmay be that reasons like these have weighed with those scholars whohave opened up for us the long-hidden treasures of Celtic literature;despairing of the effort to obtain for that literature its rightfulcrown, and the homage due to it from those who can appreciate literarywork for itself, they have been contented to ask for the support ofthat smaller body who from philological, antiquarian, or, strange as itmay appear, from political reasons, are prepared to take a modifiedinterest in what should be universally regarded as in its way one ofthe most interesting literatures of the world.
The literary aspect of the ancient literature of Ireland has not indeedbeen altogether neglected. It has been used to furnish themes on whichmodern poems can be written; ancient authority has been found in it forwhat is essentially modern thought: modern English and Irish poets haveclaimed the old Irish romances as inspirers, but the romancesthemselves have been left to the scholars and the antiquarians.
This is not the position that Irish literature ought to fill. It doesundoubtedly tell us much of the most ancient legends of modern Europewhich could not have been known without it; but this is not its sole,or even its chief claim to be heard. It is itself the connecting-linkbetween the Old World and the New, written, so far as can beascertained, at the time when the literary energies of the ancientworld were dead, when the literatures of modern Europe had not beenborn,[FN#1] in a country that had no share in the ancient civilisationof Rome, among a people which still retained many legends and possiblya rudimentary literature drawn from ancient Celtic sources, and wasproducing the men who were the earliest classical scholars of themodern world.
[FN#1] The only possible exceptions to this, assuming the latestpossible date for the Irish work, and the earliest date for others, arethe kindred Welsh literature and that of the Anglo-Saxon invaders ofBritain.
The exact extent of the direct influence of Irish literature upon thedevelopment of other nations is hard to trace, chiefly because theinfluence of Ireland upon the Continent was at its height at the timewhen none of the languages of modern Europe except Welsh andAnglo-Saxon had reached a stage at which they might be used forliterary purposes, and a Continental literature on which the Irish onemight have influence simply did not exist. Its subsequent influence,in the tenth and eleventh centuries, upon Welsh, and through Welsh uponthe early Breton liter