Apples and Pears

 

Everybody knows the Celtic languages exist out there in some hidden place, mountainous or seaside, not really part of the ordinary world. Same with the people who speak them” both are really part of some romantic, mystical other realm. Or something like that.

That is maybe accurate in 2026, in an odd way, but also obviously inaccurate and silly,

Most of the Celtic languages are/were old-fashioned and rooted in the earth because they were spoken in places that are/were “out there” on geographical or social margins until recently. They are ordinary languages for all that, and the people who speak/spoke them are/were ordinary people trying to get along in an often difficult world. The languages are about to die not because they are too fine or mystical for this crass time, but because the modern world (post maybe 1540?) has ground them out, like it has ground out many other things.

People in absolutely boring unmystical, unromantic but definitely Irish county Offaly only stopped speaking Irish in the 1830s, most often because they had been incorporated in an English-owned and administered estate and big farm system that had no place for Irish or for anything  old or in the way. The Famine removed  probably a million Irish-speaking people from the island  in the 1840s in a five-year-long living Hell. but a lot of southern and western Ireland spoke Irish until the 1880s. (For more details, see the post Irish, the Inside Story on the blog Irish Love Songs, Irish Language,  (on Blogger).

Most of the geographic Scottish Highlands spoke Gaelic until the 1880s/1890s, but only parts of the western seaboard, and the Outer Hebrides had large enough concentrations of people still to make it a viable language there and to outweigh the fact that Highland communities  also existed within an estate system that offered very limited opportunities for making a living: a system that despised Gaelic. (The Clearances of the late 18^th and then 19^th centuries had already removed the majority of people from everywhere else and sent them to Glasgow or Canada etc.) See Scottish Gaelic, the Inside Story on Irish Love Songs, Irish Language for details.

All Wales (except Gower south Pembroke (English-settled): far east Gwent: a border  strip of Brecknock and Montgomeryshire: and Maelor Saesneg) spoke Welsh until the 1930s when the effects of the English-language industrial system in the heavily-populated Valleys combined with English and Irish in-migration there and the Depression broke apart communities in the Valleys and removed the basis of a separate Welsh national society. English society absorbed  increasing areas on the borders, and then in the 1950s , with increasing economic, educational  and media integration with England, areas of the rural south and touristy north east coast turned to English. (There is a Welsh, and also Breton Inside Story on Blogger too.)

There were parts of central and eastern Brittany that were mixed Breton and French (Breton mostly in the nobility?) until the Middle Ages, then monoglot French, but after this, the Breton/French border was stable for many hundred of years after until really the 1950s, when greatly increased economic and media integration with France, combined with many years of French-only schooling, and then the post-WWII Patriotic French orgy and casting out of all things not patriotic French, and the destruction of peasant agriculture and shift to Big Farming, meant that parents in many places started speaking French to their children.

Manx lost ground for similar reasons to Scottish Gaelic in the late 19^th century. Cornish…Well, Cornish is really the only Celtic language that fits the Mystical Celtic model, and only then because the language was lost in the 16^th and 17^th centuries when nobody much was paying attention, so not a lot is known about anything.

Today, things are bleak. The 1950s, then again the late 1970s, saw most remaining Celtic-speaking communities turn to English, often because of closer and closer integration into larger societies, the end of old ways of life and because of TV and radio.

What’s left? Where are Celtic languages spoken as community languages?

In Ireland, it’s mostly Tory Island and a small strip of mainland opposite (though a lot of that is summer houses now), maybe Inis Meain (though that is losing its native Irish-speaking population), maybe a small area around Screeb etc.

In the Highlands, it’s Grimsay island with less than 200 people, and that will go eventually.

In Wales, it’s the area west of Caernarfon town (Eifionydd, Lleyn, etc.), plus bits of Meirionydd, maybe Llanbrynmair, maybe a few tiny bits of Cardiganshire: the upper Gwaun valley in Pembrokeshire, and the semi-industrial highland area on the borders of Carmarthenshire and Glamorgan.

In Brittany, it’s the village of Plounevez-Moedac and to a much lesser extent, Sein island.

In Ireland in former Gaeltacht, there are small networks of families that still speak Irish to each other. There are people in lots of places like Belfast, Rennes, Cardiff and Glasgow who have learned the language, but they often speak an impoverished version that is really based on English.

Wait…So am I just some elitist yearning for some  distant, idealized past, and dumping on the vigorous living language of the people who are actually doing the work?

One of the things about the Celtic languages, besides the old stuff, is the fact that they are/were very rich and earthy languages that reflected two thousand years of human and natural interaction. Someone described them as “Medieval.” Given the contemporary associations of that word, that is neither accurate or useful, but the languages do rise from another world.

On the other hand, modern English and French are pretty much Standard Official and Media languages that reflect…something else. 

People who’ve learnt a Celtic language in classes or books or online usually do not have access to the traditional language and are often not even aware of it, or even care that there is such a thing. They often speak a Celtic language that is a translation of their English or French, and I’m not referring to word order

Last week, an online discussion of an Irish grammatical feature produced some sample sentences (“an duine ab eagraithe etc.) that while not formally incorrect, struck me as awkward. In the end, I think that the problem is not that the grammatical structures are “wrong”, but that an Irish speaker would not use that construction to express the thought. She would not even start from that same place.

She could say , for example,  something like “an duine ab fhearr”  (the best person), but might also come at that from an entirely different direction. And just because in English you use the same approach and thus construction to say “the best person” and “the most organized person”  (“an duine ab eagraithe”) doesn’t mean that this is how you do it in Irish.

 I think that a traditional Irish speaker would approach the utterance differently, using other structures that reflect other ways of looking at people and experience: other ways of categorizing, organizing and expressing experience: structures that reflect maybe older, less “theoretical”  analyses of experience: structures that arise from thousands of years of face-to-face experience.

That is very vague, isn’t it, and it doesn’t really make sense. Hadn’t I better approach this in a more logical, precise way?

Let me try.

Irish would not start with a concept of “organized” that is good across all types of experience. Books might be “curtha i dtoll a chéile.” Another group of objects (with moving parts etc.)might be “ar inneall”, or “i ngleas, as might metaphorically, a person. A person might be said to “have everything (needed) “under his hand”, and so on. The word “eagar” suggests “things in a row or arrangement” (according to Dineen’s (old) dictionary.

So Irish acknowledges that different situations and types of objects arise out of different contexts. They have different trajectories and natures, and the language acknowledges that in conceptualizing how they might be  made ready to be used or put in “order”, you don’t start from the same place. The specifics must be seen, and they cannot cannot be subsumed in one abstract concept of order that is good no matter if you’re referring to tools or houses or cows or people or businesses.  

Irish and the other languages acknowledge the way the physical world actually is. It perceives more truly and accurately in this way. The languages are “softer” ad more “human” and I would argue that they offer people in our abstract, machine-driven, space capsule life something valuable. They offer a wild apple with, each one, its own indescribable complex taste that tells about time and place and circumstance: and this in place of the modern standard “fizzy soda”  apple.

 

You can hear (very near) Plounevez Breton on Youtube by looking for  Maurice Prigent or  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jdi54Zhl-4A .  Probably better if you don’t understand him. It’s a little, um, risque.

You can hear a whole hour of a Grimsay storyteller if you buy Peter Morrison’s recording from The School of Scottish Studies or look for him on Tobar a’ Dualchais.  Or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGgk70mtyew#ddg-play

I don’t know where you can hear Tory Island Irish, but probably Youtube somewhere.  Well, here, but the people the film maker chose of course don’t have teeth…  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCkl1jxheGs  Or at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcuxN8_dbks  These people, when the narrator, shuts up, do have teeth.

 You can hear far northwestern Welsh (Caernarfon town, then near Swansea in the south) at. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFyLcEuYqvU#ddg-play

East Carmarthen/west Glamorgan Welsh (as mentioned above) is at   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2hPg-SkVcE.

 

 

Kings and Queens

Ireland is unique among probably all European countries in that traditions concerning pre-Christian sacred places persisted into the late 19th and early 20th centuries in some parts.

(Wales and the Highlands of Scotland and Brittany have much, much less)

There are reasons for this: yes, the places and personages and traditions were considered locally important for various reasons, and were closely integrated with local life, but there are regions of Ireland where this once true, but where such traditions disappeared, In other areas, they continued.

For example, in the province of Munster, traditions survived strongly. This might have been linked to the fact the sacred figures (“fairy queens”) associated with the places were important in the 18th century Irish language poetic tradition that is strongly associated with the area. On the other hand, the “fairy queens” were not central to the almost equally strong 18th century south Ulster poetic tradition, and local traditions did not survive at all as well there. (A contributing factor might have been the strong clerical opposition in south Ulster to the Irish language and traditions associated with it: an animosity engendered by strong Irish language Protestant religious proselytization that taught literacy in Irish in the early 19th century.)

It’s possible to recover information about some now lost traditions outside the core west Munster area, but for Tipperary and Waterford, for example, you need to search. In Offaly and Wexford, etc., it is even more difficult. East Galway traditions about Finnbhar did survive more strongly, though, again, many extraneous elements may enter into survival, like the fact that Irish language folklore collection happened in the early 20th century there. On the other hand, it is a tall hill not far from water (Loch Corrib), and this was a strongly traditional area.

Very little information survived in areas where Irish was lost, by the way: linguistic change was not just linguistic but a signifier of profound social change and not in the direction of strengthened old tradition.

Traditions about Áine (east Limerick, Loch Gur), Aoibheall (east Clare), Donn (west Clare, central Limerick), Gearóid Iarla (east Clare) and Clíona (north and west Cork) are well-documented, but since Aindrias Mac Cruitín’s poem given here last week mentioned Donn, that’s what I will talk about.

It does not hurt that Kate Miller-Lisowski published the results of her research in the mid 1940s in Béaloideas #21.

She was interested in establishing an outline of beliefs about an old God, Donn, and therefore in my opinion, tried to fit disparate material into a consistent picture in ways maybe not profitable. 19th and 20th century folktales and belief, ancient manuscript traditions, manuscript tales etc. all served different social functions and often therefore emphasized different aspects of tradition, Stories and traditions were sometimes even  “captured”  by unrelated streams of tradition, developing thereafter in directions that have little to do with Donn.

What do I mean? 

A story featuring Donn might contain elements that also exist in other specific story traditions, so that a Donn story or anecdote might switch onto another track and to another separate tradition through a narrator's confusion. This confusion might replace older tradition depending on circumstances. Fir example, a particular storyteller lives a long time and is heard by many people, or a narrator has a strong personality or is an important person etc etc, and other traditions gradually face into the background and new traditions take their place: traditions not originally associated with Donn at all.

In west Munster and in old llterary and historical tradition, Donn was associated with a small island off south Kerry where all the dead were thought to go...or at least that’s what some sources say. Tales focusing on this Donn are fairly different from those in west Clare and Limerick tradition.

In those places, Donn was thought of as the local “fairy king” dwelling in the hill and ruling certain aspects of land and life. For example, in one story of a man who unintentionally goes into the hill, the man sees dead relatives there. In another, a man out at night meets Donn riding the road. In another, people establishing potato fields up on the sides of Donn's hill (Knocjfeerina) are directed not to do that. Women in the area left presents every year for Donn, not because they were women, necessarily, but because women were considered custodians of human settlement and life. In another tale, Donn and his people play a hurley match across country against the fairies of Áine (east Limerick) for good crops.

All these traditions are consistent with Aindrias’s attitude and his plea to be taken into the Otherworld hill.

There are very similar traditions about the other kings and queens I mentioned above and I could go on a lot longer, but there is a lot to do today.

Máire O’Neill’s book The Festival of Lughnasa does provide a lot of information about local traditions similar to the ones I’ve mentioned here, but from all over Ireland. They do all relate to the old harvest festival and stories connected to it: stories originally linked to beliefs about the old god Lugh, but then transferred to St. Patrick etc. These same concerns were behind a lot of the types of traditions discussed above and I don't know of any other one place where such things are gathered. She did her research in a good time (1930s and 1940s) when older people remembered such things at least vaguely, but it is a great and unusual (and out of print) book and a model of scholarship.

She was daughter of Eoin MacNeill, by the way,

And by the way, I fixed the problems with the www.crannfis.com site, and there is a lot of new material un the book, music and website reviews, and it's being added to daily.  An Irish language text and learning section will be added soon,

Bog Irish

 

Most recent Irish historiography has taken the loss of the Irish language in large areas of Ireland during the 19th century too much for granted, and has failed to examine the circumstances of this loss and its implications for our understanding of modern Irish society. One gets the impression, in reading many contemporary general works on Irish history, that most Irishmen and women somehow simply woke up on some unspecified morning between the Flight of the Earls in 1609 and the onset of the 18th century and decided to speak English instead of Irish--except, of course, for the Aran Islanders – and the death of the Irish language is commonly treated in the historiography as a minor and not very relevant occurrence, with few important implications for the development of Irish society, as though it were a mere change of wardrobe. The Great Famine is one of the few real landmarks in this vague landscape, in that it killed off the remnant Irish-speaking hordes in the West. Writings on pre-famine society should thus consequently include a perfunctory discussion of the existence of the Irish language, but such a discussion is no longer relevant in works dealing with post-famine society.

 

              These standard views often associate Irish in post-17th-century Ireland specifically with the west of Ireland and with the fecund, sweaty, picturesque masses toiling there in a primitive Celtic half-light  in an ignorance born of simple isolation from the modern world. English and modernity together, these views assume, flowed westwards from the areas closest to Dublin and the Irish Sea, but hadn't yet reached the distant western bogs, when the famine gave those remote Gaelic realm their death blow. Language use, whether English or Irish, was thus a simple function of distance from England or from Dublin, and Irish survived simply as one aspect of a stagnant, unchanging, primitive society, like a slug under a rock in the middle of a bog destined to wither when exposed to light.

 

The truth is rather different.  Much of the older generation in flat and fertile north county Meath, 30 miles from Dublin, was still Irish-speaking in 1890. Many older people in northeastern county Louth, 45 miles from Dublin, were still Irish-speaking in the early 20th century. At the same time, very remote areas like southwestern Mayo, and even Clare island in Mayo, were already English-speaking in the mid-19th century. Irish did not disappear in some mysterious overnight vague fashion, nor was its 19th-century existence associated simply with distance from the Irish Channel. It did not survive due to simple isolation or poverty. The process of language loss is very closely related to the profound changes that occurred Irish society in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and an understanding of this process has much to add to our understanding of the genesis of contemporary Irish society. 

(To be continued)

             

Proverbs

 Roinnt sean-fhocail ó Shráid na Cathrach, Co an Chláir. Foilsíodh in Irisleabhar na Gaidhilge, Seám Ó Briain ó’n mbaile sin a chnuasaigh circa 1910. Táid coitianta go maith, ach ní raibh, b’fhéidir, an tráth sin.

Some proverbs from Miltown Malbay, Clare. They were published in the Gaelic League Journal and Seán I’Brian from Miltown Malbay collected them around 1900. They’re common ones, but maybe they weren’t that common at that point.

(Spelling as in the original)

Is fear greim de choinín ná dhá ghreim de chat.

(Better a one hand grip on a rabbit than two hands on a cat.)

Nuair is gainne den bhia, sé is cirte a roinnt.

O)When the food is scarcest, it’s then it’s most proper to share.

Galar na náire at tart ach bhain an tochras an bárr cfe.

(Thirst is a shameless disease/need, but the need to scratch an itch beats it.)

Eist le fuaim na habhann agus geobhaidh tú breac

(Listen to the sound of the river and you’ll catch a trout.)

Ag lord go mhadra agus gan fhios a dhátth agat.

)Searching (everywhere) for your dog and you don’t know what color he is.)

Ní hionnan dul go dtí an baile mór agus teacht as.

(It’s one thing to go to the city: it’s another to get out of it.)

  

As an obair a gheibhtear an fhoghluim.

)One learns from doing the work.)

Up the Hill and Down the Other Side

 

To Dháibhí Ó hIarlaithe (mid-18^th century)

\

 Muinntear Uí hIarlaithe were, if I remember correctly, hereditary airchinnigh of the church of St Gobnait in Ballyvourney, west of Macroom, Co Cork, and so were not only responsible for maintaining the shrine and church etc., but were expected to provide hospitality in general. (Line 7 of the poem refers to this aspect of their role.)

Aircheannach was a traditional role in Ireland, originally ecclesiastic, but over the centuries it became laicized and hereditary, The families were still associated with learning and poetry even in later years, though lay learning rather than ecclesiastical. A well-known example was Tadhg Ó Rodaigh in central Leitrim, and he was a very important link in that area in carrying on and transmitting the old learning,

Ballyvourney.Ballingeary etc. was in 1700 an out-of-the-way place and it wasn’t until about 1718 that it got a powerful English landlord determined to make as much money as possible from the place. The old system was dismantled and the Uí hIarlaithe lost their land.

Dáibhí mac Phádraig, the subject of this poem, fled the area and married Doireann Ní Dhonnchú of the family of the lords of Gleann Fleisce, an even more remote place just over the border in Kerrty.

This poem tranmslated here laments that things have really gone to hell in Ballyvourney and the poet (Séamas Ó Muimhneacháin) wishes Dáibhí mac Pádraig was still around and things were back the way they used to be.

A little bit of Gleann Fleisce

 Ursa den Iarl’fhuil riamh do’b acmhainne bang,

Ba churanta triall i ngliadhaibh cath faobhair-lann,

Nár cuireadfh i ndiaidh a riain gur neartaigh dlí Gall,

Lenar clipeadh gach triath i gcian tar fairrigí fann.

 

Is é chruinnigh am liach so i’m chliabh, dá leamaimis labhairt,

Gan duine den triabh in bhur ndiaidh ag seasamh  tís teann,

In ionad na mbiatach bhfiala bhfairsing bhí i bhfabhar,

Conairt dá riar, is fiach ag gasraibh Gall.

 

Tuilleadh le’r liath mo chiabh, tú thaistil faoin nGleann,

Le’r hitheadh na triatha I’d dhiaidh do’b aithnid díbh ann,

Más miste leat iad dá gciapadh in anaithibh namhad,

Lig cumas do bhriathran I’m thriall go dtagair faoin mball.

 

Séamas Ó Muimneacháin (flourished around 1770).

 

Extremely literal and awkward translation

 

“Oh, “supporting beam” of lordly blood whose words were capable.

(also pun om “Iarlaith”)

Who was hero-like in struggle in sharp-edged battle,

Who was not forced back/out of his track until the foreign law became strong,

With which every lord was harassed far over the seas, weak.

 

What gathered sorrow into my breast, if I may speak,

Is that there’s no one of your kin after to stand hospitality for those in hardship,

In the place of the very generous hospitallers who were in favor.

Now dogs are being reared, and the English do hunt.

 

Another reason my hair has greyed, that you have fled to the Gleann,

As a result of which the strong you knew here are now eaten (to the bone).

If you care that they are harassed in terror of the foreigners,

 Set free your skilled words for me, until you come back to the place.

 

Well, that sounds really stupid. It is a very literal translation, but it’s more than that: it is the difference between languages and different traditions.

In Irish, it is very effective poem though. The cadence not only swings hard, but the language is concise and effective, and there is a satisfaction in the skill with which syntax is used to make music and meaning.

It is amhrán. and for the sound pattern in the first verse, I get ú, ia, ia, a, a, Remember that only accented syllables count.

I translate from Cois an Ghaorthaigh, edited by Diarmaid Ó Muirithe for An Clóchomar in 1987. It’s a collection of 18^th and 19 century poetry from the Ballyvourney area, a place that was overrun with poets of many families. The last of Muinntear Uí hIarlaithe was probably Pádraig Ó Crualaoi (1864 – 1949), a tailer in Macroom, one of whose grandparents (great-grandparents?) married a woman of that family.

He composed lots of poetry himself and carried in his head lots and lots more that had been passed down to him. Most of it was of poets from the area, so the book provides a portrait of the literary tradition in one small area. (Very little of this poetry was ever written into manuscript, so that’s not where he got it. A lot of the poems in Cois an Ghairthaidh was obtained from oral tradition from other people besides Pádraig.) Some of Pádraig’s own lore was written down in 1942 and ater published in a big book (Seanchas Phádraig í Chrualaoi) by Comhairle Bhéaloideas Éireann in 1982.l

Sometimes modern people assume that if it wasn’t for writing and computers etc, everything that happened in the past would have soon been forgotten, but that was not  at all true in traditional societies.

Pádraig, for example, knew details of the lives of people (relatives, admittedly) who lived around 1700, and he knew the works of poets who flourished 150 years before he was born, and stories about them. People in the area still remembered in the 1940s the exact location where people dropped and died during the Famine. People in Ballinskelligs, which was also still Irish-speaking in the 1940s, knew details of the battle that happened in the early 17^th century when an English warship unexpectedly  appeared there.

People remembered.

Place names helped, of course, and in many parts of Ireland, a walk to the top of the hill was a walk through local history as recorded in very local place names. That rock is where Seán encountered the púca; that hillock is where Máire (my great-grandmother’s cousin) used to sit: over there was very good for rushes: Ó Súilleabháin Beara passed in the valley there long ago.

Fewer and fewer people walk to the top of the hill today, of course, and the local place names and thus the history and links between place and people are falling away into darkness, as is so much else, including Dáibhí Mac Pádraig, this poem etc. etc.

Irritated, Sometimes Hysterical Englishmen

 

Quite a few Englishmen wrote long, passionate descriptions of Ireland in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. There was Spenser the poet, of course, and world-traveler Fynes Moryson: Stanyhurst of Dubli: the Catholic priest William Good: Barnaby Rich: Harrington: Bodley:Dunton and so on. 

Descriptions of Ireland…a reader would expect to learn a good bit about Ireland from them, or at least about the writer. Information about Irish society would be very useful because no Irishman or woman wrote a description of their own society or any aspects of it. Irish literature is helpful, of course, but limited.

The descriptions and essays in fact  tell us probably more about English society than Irish society because most of the writers were absolutely horrified by the Irish and their ways. What was it in  contemporary English society and the English psyche produced that reaction?

To begin why were they even in Ireland? 

Well, the Queen was supposedly Queen of Ireland as well as of England and Wales, though most of the Irish did not recognize her or her government as having any authority there. That had been the situation for many generations, though. Irish unwillingness to recognize their authority tended to upset English officials when the fact was brought to their attention, mostly they were not looking west at all.

A lot happened in English society in the early 16th century, though, and the  end result was (as I wrote somewhere else) an extremely manic, aggressive and efficient expanding economy and state. Ireland’s bad luck was that it was right there and not only was it not a competitor like France or Spain, it was easy pickings.

English society  in the late 16th century was characterized by, for the first time in its history:

A landowning class, many of them newly ascended to that position and beholden to the government for their wealth. Wealth was now gained through business, law and government position.

Very few great lords were in any position to challenge the Crown or had any interest in doing so.

A new Church whose property was at the disposal of the government and whose clergy were willing to act as agents of the state.

A social structure based on an absolute right to property precluding all other previous hereditary rights of access or claims on resources of land. 

For ordinary people, individual and family survival was dependent on adherence to practices that certified one was a good and remunerative farm tenant.

Every man has a master/superior responsible for his good behavior.

There was a network of officials resident throughout the country charged with enforcing the law. They were backed by force. Many of them were also the local landlords.

English was sole official language,

Most of the men who wrote about Ireland were not there on holiday. They were government officials, soldiers or entrepreneurs there because they wanted the Irish to do what they were supposed to do: or there were there to get rich on the wild frontier.

The same things tended to horrify them, and they can be summed up under a few headings.

Ireland was: disorganized: messy: confusing: different: they didn’t speak English and didn’t want to: they liked butter, milk, oatmeal, plants and spiced whiskey (actually the whiskey was about the only thing the writers were enthusiastic about because herbs and spices made it soothing and pleasant.): they didn’t live the way we do, the way they should too.

It’s normal to think that people whose land or service or resources you want are stupid, primitive and are wasting the land and its resources  and that it’s simply a natural law that people who will use the land more efficiently and productively should push them aside. The intensity of the English reaction to the Irish partly arises from that, but was mainly the reaction of a newly anal society to a society that was still pretty relaxed. I won’t go into the specifics of practices that induced horror, disgust and disapproval here. Some of them tell us something about the Irish, some tell us about the English writers, and others just tell us about a repetoire of stock European travelers’ tales meant to disgust. 

If  you are interested, I will point you toward the sources.

Many of these writings have been printed in various journals, but the only place I know of where some of them are collected in in:

1) Quinn, David Beers,  The Elizabethans and The Irish, Folger Shakespeare Library. Cornell University Press, (about 1965)

2) Myers, James (editor), Elizabethan Ireland: A Selection of Writings by Writers on Ireland Archon Books, 1983

Quin was a Shakespeare scholar and didn’t know much about Ireland. He tries to compare what the writers said and put it in context but doesn’t supply texts. He has a chapter comparing contemporary English writers on Native Americans. 

Myers has a limited selection but prints the texts.

Some of the writers summarized the Irish character, and I will finish with that. Some of what they describe is still accurate about the Irish, but a lot of it is not

William Good: “And to speak in general of them all, the nation is strong of body, and passing (fairly) nimble, stout and haughty in heart: for wit, quick: martial, prodigal  and careless of their lives: enduring travail, cold and hunger: given to fleshly lust: kind and courteous to strangers: constant in love: in enmity implacable: light of belief (i.e. they are gullible), greedy of glory, impatient of abuse and injury, and as (Gerald of Wales) said in old times, in all affections vehement and passionate.  If they be bad, you shall nowhere meet with worse: if they be good, you can hardly find better.”

Stanyhurst: “The people are thus inclined: religious, frank, amorous, ireful, sufferable of infinite pains, very (vain)glorious; many sorcerers, excellent horsemen, delighted with wars, great almsgivers, passing in hospitality. The lewder (i.e. common) sort both clerks and laymen, are sensual and overloose in living. The same, being virtuously bred up or reformed, are such mirrors of holiness and austerity that other nations retain but a shadow of devotion in comparison to them…Greedy of praise they be and fearful of dishonor.”

The Irish society that resulted from the success of the English project was very different from what preceded it, and the  Irish people that society produced are very different. The Gaelic Revival of the 1890s etc. was very consciously a project to reclaim a lot of the old stuff and to reconnect with what was before. For a while, it looked like it might succeed, but by 1920, it was clear that they would not.

It is a shame.