Literature in Southern Ireland

IRISH LITERATURE

LIBER FLAVUS FERGUSIORUM
courtesy  of the  Royal Irish Academy

With a manuscript tradition dating to the 6^th century, the Irish literature, the oldest vernacular literature in Western Europe is remarkable for its range: law texts, genealogies, scholarly treatises, devotional tracts, and especially imaginative literature. We will cover the history of Irish literature.

The Irish people have a proud and well-earned reputation as lovers of the word, spoken and written. This characteristic has resulted in a small nation making an out of proportion contribution to the culture of the world in the field of literature. The literature of Ireland, as of all countries, is almost a mirror reflection of the times, currents, moods and emotions of the era.

Ireland is extraordinarily rich in many of the expressions of literature, including the legends upon which storytellers recall an event or a place. Myths and legends are replete in Irish history. As always such myths and legends contain a certain amount of truth, and a certain amount of creative thinking, or in some cases, wishful thinking. There are tales of fairies, mystical gods, Druids, Celts, and of St. Patrick -the founder saint of Christianity in Ireland. According to legend, St. Patrick drove all of the snakes from Ireland and banished them from its shores. No one knows if there were even snakes in Ireland. Prior to the arrival of St. Patrick (432A.D.) Ireland was a Pagan land. The Vikings began to invade Ireland in eight century A.D.

After Greek and Latin literatures, Irish has one of the oldest vernacular literatures in Western Europe. Before the Irish became literate after Christianity in the fifth century, they used a simple writing system called “ogham” that was used to make inscriptions. After the introduction of Latin and the adaption of the Latin alphabet into the Irish language, the result was a rise of a small literate class, clerical and lay.

The earliest Irish literature consisted in lyric poetry and versions of ancient prose tales. In the 6^th century, the poetry illustrated the religious faith or described the world of nature. These works were linguistically archaic.

           

The early Irish poetry speaks of the sorrow of exile: first, the self-imposed exile of such early monks as St. Columcille, who left Ireland in the 6^th century to found a monastery at Iona; later, involuntary political or economic exile. Love is tragic, being variously unlucky, unrealized or unfulfilled. Scholars have commented on the freshness, intensity and compression of Early Irish poetry. Many of the little poems found in the margin of manuscripts were written by monks who looked up from copying scripture to celebrate their surroundings. The importance of landscape, embracing at once nature, place and mythology, comes from the old hermit poets to the medieval ones, and later to modern and contemporary Irish poetry. 

After the Old Irish period, there is plenty of poetry from Medieval and Renaissance times. The Irish continued to use Latin but they created a classical tradition in their own language. The main literary expression was the verse. By the 12^th century, it was settled the questions of form and style with little change until the 17^th century.

           

The literary language, known as Classical Irish, was a sophisticated medium with elaborate verse forms. It was taught in bardic schools, academies of higher learning. These schools produced historians, lawyers and professional literary class and all depended of aristocracy patronage. The writing produced in this period was conventional in character, but the best of it was of exceptionally high quality and included poetry of a personal nature. Every noble family had manuscripts with genealogical and other material, the work of the best poets was used for teaching purposes in bardic schools. In a hierarchical society, like the Irish, the best trained poets belonged to the highest stratum; they were court officials but were thought to have ancient magical powers.

           

Women were excluded from the official literature. In the 15^th century, a certain number of women were literate; some of them were contributors to an unofficial corpus of courtly love poetry known as dánta grádha.

           

At this time, prose was still cultivated in the form of tales. The Norman invasion in the 12^th century introduced new influences to the Irish tradition. In this period, the translations from English started.

In the 17^th century the English control over Ireland was higher suppressing the Irish traditional aristocracy. In consequence, the literary class lost its patrons because the new English nobility did not have sympathy for the Irish culture.

           

The consequences of these changes were appreciated in the 18^th century, when the sophistication of the old high tradition reappeared at a popular level. Poetry was still the dominant literary medium done by poor scholars educated in obscure local schools. A certain number of patrons could still be found, even in the early 19^th century, especially among the few surviving families of the Gaelic aristocracy.

           

The Irish was still an urban language even in the 19^th century. In the first half of the 18^th century, Dublin was the home of an Irish language literary circle connected to the Ó Neachtin family, a group with highly continental connections.

           

Women were of great importance in the oral tradition in this period. They were the mainly composers of traditional laments that contained some of the most intense poetry. These compositions were not in writing until collected in the 19^th century.

After the introduction of printing in Ireland in the 1500s and the 1600s the works continued to be in manuscript form.

           

The printing was introduced in 1500, but the first Irish version of the Bible was published in the 17^th century. Many popular works were printed in the 19^th century, but the manuscript was still the most affordable means of transmission until the end of the century. Most of these manuscripts were taken abroad to America specially and collected by individuals or cultural institutions.

Although English was becoming dominant in the 19^th century, Irish was still used in large areas of the south-west, west and north-west. The great famine of the 1840s fastened the retreat of the Irish language. Many of its speakers died of hunger or fever, and many more emigrated. The hedge schools that helped maintain the native culture were supplanted by National Schools where only English was allowed, leaving Irish restricted to a very few.

           

Now, the dominant cultural force was an English-speaking middle class, but some took an interest in the literature of the Irish language. Like the young protestant scholar Samuel Ferguson who studied secretly and discovered the Irish poetry, and began to translate it. James Hardiman attempted to collect popular Irish poetry in 1831. These attempts tried to bridge the gap between the two languages.

The Gaelic Journal (1882-1909)
courtesy of the Royal Irish Academy 

One of the first earliest writers in English was Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), a powerful and versatile satirist born in Ireland but that spend much of his life in England. Someone who founded an Anglo-Irish literary tradition was Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849), she came to live in Ireland very young and identified with it, and she was a pioneer in the realistic novel. Other Irish novelists to emerge during the 19^th century included John Banim, Gerald Griffin, Charles Kickham and William Carleton. Their works tended to reflect the views of the middle class or aristocracy and they wrote "novels of the big house". Carleton was the exception, and his Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry showed life on the other side of the social divide. Bram Stoker, the Anglican author of Dracula, was outside both traditions. One of the premier ghost story writers of the 19^th century was Sheridan Le Fanu, whose works include Uncle Silas and Carmilla. Oscar Wilde, though born and raised in Ireland, spent the greater part of his life in England. Despite this, he is usually claimed to be an Irish writer. His plays are distinguished for their wit, and he was also a poet. This growth of Irish cultural nationalism towards the end of the 19^th century, culminating in the Gaelic Revival, had a marked influence on Irish writing in English. This can be seen in the plays of J.M. Synge, who spent some time in the Irish-speaking Aran Islands, and in the early poetry of William Butler Yeats, where Irish mythology is used in a personal and idiosyncratic way.

In 1899 it was founded the Gaelic League, it insisted that the identity of Ireland was bound up with the Irish language, which should be modernized and used as a vehicle of contemporary culture. This led to the publication of thousands of books and pamphlets in Irish, starting a foundation of new literature in the coming decades. This period saw remarkable autobiographies from Tomás Ó Criomhthain, Peig Sayers and Muiris Ó Súilleabháin. Writing in Irish now covers a broad range of subjects and genres, with more attention being directed to younger readers. The traditional Irish-speaking areas are now less important as a source of authors and themes. Urban Irish speakers are in the ascendance, and it is likely that this will determine the nature of the literature.

In the beginning of the 20^th century, Yeats was a prominent writer who changed his style because of the influence of modernism. The generation of Irish poets who followed Yeats, were divided between those who were influenced by his early Celtic style and those who followed his modern style like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, both wrote poetry, fiction and drama.

           

Joyce is known as the father of literary genre “stream of consciousness”, exemplified in Ulysses, considered one of the 20^th century's greatest literary achievements. It has been described as “a demonstration and summation of the entire (Modernist) movement”.

           

The big house novel prospered into the 20th century, and Aidan Higgins' first novel Langrishe, Go Down is an experimental example of the genre. More conventional exponents include Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane (writing as M.J. Farrell).

           

With the rise of the Irish Free State and the Republic of Ireland, more novelists from the lower social classes began to emerge. Frequently, these authors wrote of the narrow, circumscribed lives of the lower-middle classes and small farmers. Exponents of this style range from Brinsley McNamara to John McGahern.

           

The Irish short story has proved a popular genre, with well-known professionals including Frank O'Connor, William Trevor and Sean O'Faolain.

The Irish literature is one of the oldest in Western Europe. The Irish literature started in manuscripts, mainly talking about landscapes or mythology. All of these as reflection of what it was going on in those times. The literature was first Pagan, then Christian. They mainly expressed themselves through verses, poetry. As always, literacy was allowed for some only. Women were mainly excluded until the 15th century. In the 17th century, the English had control, leaving no patrons for Irish literacy. In the end of the 18th century women are protagonist in the oral tradition, composed by intensive poetry. All these were collected in writing in the 19th century. The main reason of the retreat of the Irish language in literature was the great famine and emigration. Leaving English as the dominant force. The Gaelic revival started in 1899, where thousands of books and pamphlets were published in Irish, starting a new literature for the next decades. With Independence, writers from lower social classes appeared.