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Heroic Romances of Ireland By: Arthur Herbert Leahy (1857-1928) |
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HEROIC ROMANCES OF IRELAND
TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH PROSE AND VERSE, WITH PREFACE, SPECIAL
INTRODUCTIONS AND NOTES BY A. H. LEAHY
IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. I PREFACE
At a time like the present, when in the opinion of many the great
literatures of Greece and Rome are ceasing to hold the influence that
they have so long exerted upon human thought, and when the study of the
greatest works of the ancient world is derided as "useless," it may be
too sanguine to hope that any attention can be paid to a literature
that 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 yet
further removed in ideas; a literature which is known to few and has
yet to win its way to favour, while the far superior literature of
Greece finds it hard to defend the position that it long ago won. It
may be that reasons like these have weighed with those scholars who
have opened up for us the long hidden treasures of Celtic literature;
despairing of the effort to obtain for that literature its rightful
crown, and the homage due to it from those who can appreciate literary
work for itself, they have been contented to ask for the support of
that smaller body who from philological, antiquarian, or, strange as it
may appear, from political reasons, are prepared to take a modified
interest in what should be universally regarded as in its way one of
the most interesting literatures of the world. The literary aspect of the ancient literature of Ireland has not indeed
been altogether neglected. It has been used to furnish themes on which
modern poems can be written; ancient authority has been found in it for
what is essentially modern thought: modern English and Irish poets have
claimed the old Irish romances as inspirers, but the romances
themselves have been left to the scholars and the antiquarians. This is not the position that Irish literature ought to fill. It does
undoubtedly tell us much of the most ancient legends of modern Europe
which 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 link
between the Old World and the New, written, so far as can be
ascertained, at the time when the literary energies of the ancient
world were dead, when the literatures of modern Europe had not been
born,[FN1] in a country that had no share in the ancient civilisation
of Rome, among a people which still retained many legends and possibly
a rudimentary literature drawn from ancient Celtic sources, and was
producing the men who were the earliest classical scholars of the
modern world.
[FN1] The only possible exceptions to this, assuming the latest
possible date for the Irish work, and the earliest date for others, are
the kindred Welsh literature and that of the Anglo Saxon invaders of
Britain.
The exact extent of the direct influence of Irish literature upon the
development of other nations is hard to trace, chiefly because the
influence of Ireland upon the Continent was at its height at the time
when none of the languages of modern Europe except Welsh and
Anglo Saxon had reached a stage at which they might be used for
literary purposes, and a Continental literature on which the Irish one
might have influence simply did not exist. Its subsequent influence,
in the tenth and eleventh centuries, upon Welsh, and through Welsh upon
the early Breton literature (now lost) appears to be established; it is
usually supposed that its action upon the earliest French compositions
was only through the medium of these languages, but it is at least
possible that its influence in this case also was more direct. In
Merovingian and early Carlovingian times, when French songs were
composed, which are now lost but must have preceded the extant chansons
de geste, the Irish schools were attracting scholars from the
neighbouring countries of Europe; Ireland was sending out a steady
stream of "learned men" to France, Germany, and Italy; and it is at
least possible that some who knew the Irish teachers realized the merit
of the literary works with which some of these teachers must have been
familiar... Continue reading book >>
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