History of Irish literature 15-HLIRL-CE-11

This module will provide a survey of Irish poetry and prose literature in Irish from the earliest Irish Sagas to the modern period. It will show how literature has been inescapably allied to historical interpretation and political allegiance. Ireland’s rich literary tradition, the oldest in Western Europe, has undergone a series of revivals and collapses, all of them centred on the idea of Ireland. The arrival of Christianity in the fifth century, and particularly the foundation of new monastic communities in the following two hundred years, fused a vibrant Romano-Latin culture with Gaelic Ireland’s rich oral tradition. This vigorous hybrid flowered until the ninth centuries at a time when Irish Christian missionaries played a key role in converting the Germanic peoples of Europe to Christianity, earning Ireland its title of ‘The Island of Saints and Scholars’. By this time, the onset of the Viking invasions, internal dynastic strife and increased secularisation had begun to weaken Irish monasticism. While a hereditary literary caste of poets, genealogists, brehons and leeches continued to preserve traditional lore in relation to places, families, customs and laws, the monastic scribes incorporated it into established systems of Christian beliefs. They recorded Ireland’s origin myths, pre-Christian beliefs, deities and place-lore in three cycles; the Ruraíocht, tales of Cúchulainn, the Irish Achilles, and the Red Branch Knights; Fionn Mac Cumhaill, Oisín and the Fianna, as well as the King Cycle of Mad Sweeny, The Voyages and the 1st and 2nd Battles of Maigh Tuiread between the Fir Bolgs, Tuatha De Dannann and the Gaels, the ultimate victors in the Leabhar Gabála. After the end of the Viking Age and the onset of the Anglo-Norman invasion in 1169, secular bardic schools began to flourish under the patronage of Gaelic and Anglo-Norman lords. A hereditary, mandarin class of Irish poets produced a large corpus of Irish verse, much of which is recorded in family poem-books (dunairí). Up to the late sixteenth century, Gaelic civilization retained a phenomenal capacity to accommodate to the political and military disruptions which had characterized the country’s history. However, with the onset of the Protestant Reformation, the Tudor re-conquest and the arrival of large numbers of English and later Scottish Protestant settlers, Irish literature would become detached from its socio-economic and cultural anchorage in the independent Gaelic and Gaelicised Anglo-Normal lordships. It is only in the seventeenth century that the Gaelic tradition began to organize itself against this powerful new military, political and cultural aggressor. Many Irish scholars made their way into the ranks of the counter-Reformation Catholic clergy, and they effected a Catholic revival through the medium of Irish. This initiative spawned a whole corpus of theological, historical and annalistic writings designed to reach the Catholic laity through a literate clergy, thereby preserving them from Protestantism. The collapse of the Gaelic order proceeded apace during the seventeenth century, as a consequence of successive wars, conquests, plantations. Its demise effectively democratised Irish literature and enhanced a vibrant scribal, manuscript and oral tradition to which revivalists would turn at the end of the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as the language continued to decline, the Irish poet, novelist and short-story writer has continued to produce some of the best writings in either language on the island, as well as fulfilled their time-honoured role as commentator, reflector and moulder of public opinion in both the Gaeltacht and Galltacht.