Irish Literature Vol II Author:Justin Mccarthy EARLY IRISH LITERATURE - THE editors of IRISH LITERATURE have very wisely decided to represent in their volumes, so far as literal translations will allow them, the real autochthonous literature of Ireland as i t existed both before any of the modern langua-ges of Europe had made their appearance as literary vehicles, and since that time. The gr... more »eat and revivifying movement which is at present pulsing through Ireland, and creating, wherever it is felt, new hopes and a new spirit, has indeed rendered it impossible to produce a n orlc upon Irish literature in which, as has happened too often before, the real Irish element was calmly ignored, and the scope of Irish literature narrowed to the productions of English-Irish writers, who after all were, for the most part, too often only imitations of Englishmen. For the literature of Ireland does not begin with Ware or with Swift, with Molyneux or with Sheridan. Hundreds of years before the English language had risen out of a conglomeration of Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French, hundreds of years before the la tgite dJo il and the langue doc struggled for mastery upon the plains of France, hundreds of years before the language of the Nibelungen Lied had risen upon the ruins of Gothic, Ireland swarmed with bards, scholars, poets, saga-tellers, and saga-writers while the countless hosts of the illuminated books of the men of Erin as Angus the Culdee had called them more than two centuries before the birth of William the Conqueror filled the island from shore to shore and Erin, at that time civilizer and Christianizer of the western world, was universally known as the Island of Saints and Scholars. There are two points about the native literature of Ireland which entirely differentiate it from the rest of the vernacular literatures of Europe, Greek excepted. The first of these is the extraordinarily early period at which it took its rise, and the enormous length of time during which it flourished...« less