THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 60

THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

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for three of which the Danes are answerable, and for the rest the successors of Strongbow, have weighed upon the Gaelic intellect since the days of our native universities; yet there has survived to us from the wreckage of our ten dark ages a body of laws, of records, of arts and sciences and romances, for which, so far as I know, there is no rival to be found in any contemporary nation, even within the sphere of Roman culture. In the Brehon law tracts alone—in the singularly attractive, though faulty, tribal system which bound the population of a whole territory into one family—in the laws of hospitality and of poor relief—in the ancient Celtic land system, so permeated with what is best in modern theories of Christian socialism, so very much more ingenious than the modern doctrine of dual ownership—in the study of the manners of the ancient Irish alone—their homes, and food, and pastimes—there is material more fascinating, even for a lazy reader, than in a modern book of travel.

Nor need even the most insatiable seeker after the fiction of the circulating libraries turn away unsatisfied. Side by side with historical records which no European scholar will now dispute, we have tales, voyages, courtships, and hairbreadth adventures, even yet unpublished, sufficient, it is estimated, to cover more than twenty thousand quarto pages of print—tales of magic, tales of chivalry, tales of love, and, I am sorry to say, not always true love. The very blemishes of the Gaelic romance have their charm of rugged truth-telling. The three-volume novel reader would like to close the story of Grainne with some deed of sublime vengeance for the murder of her hero. We resent the notion of her being won over to wed his elderly murderer. But such triumphs of masculine insistence there be, as witness the crooked King Richard's … continue reading »

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