CELTIC LITERATURES. We have no information as to the literature of the Gauls, if they ever had one, which is not likely, since writing was forbidden to the Druids, who were the repositories of lore and learning among the ancient Celts on the continent of Europe. If they had a national alphabet, it must have resembled the runic characters employed in north European countries. In Caesar's time the Greek alphabet was used to some extent amongst them.
Among the insular Celts the oldest sources of the native language are Irish inscriptions written in ogham, which consist of lines hori zontally or slantingly cut, and dots below and above a line made of the edge of an upright stone pillar. Of course this cumbrous method of writing was not used for literary purposes but merely to commemorate the name of the dead. There is no doubt that in Celtic coun tries, as elsewhere, the native tradition was originally and for ages only oral. The very earliest literature of Ireland, which dates from the period of the conversion of the country in the 4th century, is in Latin. The national litera ture, in Gaelic, first appears in the 8th century at the time of the foundation of the great schools and the activities of the Irish mission aries and scholars on the continent.
I. Irish Gaelic literature of Ireland is vast in extent and rich in quality, and in many respects it is one of the most fascinating literatures of Europe. Yet in spite of its interest and value and of the fact that ((it is the oldest existing literature of any of the peoples living to the north of the Alps)) such has been the neglect with which it has been treated that even to this day no satisfactory history of it has been or indeed can be written. Though the quantity of this literature that has been published is enormous, it is only a frag ment in comparison with what still lies hidden in manuscript. There are thousands of unpublished Irish manuscripts of all kinds ranging from the 11th to the early 19th century, but often con taining material much more ancient, and per haps as many more have perished. These manu scripts have to be collated and the vast material edited and explained and questions of age and source settled, before anything like a complete history of Celtic literature can be written. The oldest monuments of Celtic, next to some scanty remains of Gaulish and the ogham inscriptions, are thousands of Irish glosses which date from the 8th and 9th centuries. These glosses are found between the lines or on the margins of several Latin manuscripts which are kept, for the most part, in continental libraries at 1Viirz burg, Karlsruhe, Milan and Turin. Texts and glosses show a profound theological and gram matical training and wide reading on the part of the scribes, not only in biblical and patristic literature but also in the classics of pagan antiquity. This gloss material is of scarcely any literary value, however, and is valuable only for the history of theology and the struc ture of Celtic grammar. In no country did
Christianity penetrate more profoundly than in the Island of Saints, and on no literature did it leave a deeper impression than on Irish. The oldest texts in the language are religious, such as the glosses to the commentaries on Saint Paul and to the Psalms, already referred to, a homily and a tractate on the Mass. Only a few of the hymns in honor of the saints of Ireland have been published. Some of these works are translations or imitations of Latin texts but most of them are genuinely Irish and include popular lives, passions and miracles of saints, pious stories and anecdotes, prophecies, prayers, homilies, hymns called lorica, ((corselet or defense,)) and antra, ((eulogies)); in a word, religious compositions of the most varied kind and of the greatest value for the history of hagiology and liturgiology and of western Christianity in general. The apocalyptic visions are a peculiarly Irish product, although some of them, those of Fursa and Tnugdal, have been preserved only in Latin. The most celebrated is attributed to Adamnan, a monk of Iona who died in the year 703. Another original creation and one of the few specimens of the comic in old Irish literature is the burlesque epic, 'The Vision of MacConglinne.> The Mire is a kind of long martyrology arranged in the order of the ecclesiastical calendar. The most important is known as the Felire of Oengus. In modern times the best known religious compositions are the moral essays, 'The Three Shafts of Death) and 'The Key Shield of the Mass,) by the 17th century priest-historian, Geoffrey Keating, whose works are regarded as the model of modern Irish prose. But the scholars of early Christian Ireland, most of whom were religious, were also interested in preserving the secular literature of their country. It is to them that we owe the compilation of the great collections known as Leabhar na hUidhre, 'The Book of the Dun Cow,) dating from the 11th century, the Book of Leinster, dating from the 12th, the Yellow Book of Lecan, from the 15th, the Leabhar Breac or ((Speckled Book, from the 14th, the Book of Ballymote, and other manuscripts of miscellaneous contents which, though some of them are as late as the 18th century, contain , material which can be traced back without a break to the 8th or 9th century. The early non-religious literature of Ireland was in the hands of a class of trained narrators, historians or poets called find, whom the kings and chieftains of Ireland supported at their courts to sing their exploits, write their annals and. preserve the legal tradition. They fol lowed a regular curriculum extending over a dozen years and were organized into classes, each rank enjoying certain privileges and mo nopolizing a certain number and variety of stories. Their chief, the ollamh, was supposed to know 250 prime tales and 100 of secondary importance.