THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE
From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893
Page 61
THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE
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conquering the hand of the Lady Anne in a single scene; and the Celtic dramaturgist proceeds to tell the truth and shame the devil, and rings down the curtain with a chorus of contemptuous laughter from the warriors. Woman's constancy, on the other hand, is vindicated in the soft, clinging affection, stronger than death, of Deirdre for her lost Naisi; and for the matter of friendship between man and man—the friendship that loves with all but a woman's softness, yet smites with the dutiful valour of a hero—I know of no episode in human history, not even the history of David and Jonathan, more beautiful, more touching, or more true than that of Cuchullin's fight with the comrade of his boyhood at the Ford of Ardee.
One of the standing reproaches against our race is that the Celtic imagination has never invented an Epic. No more ignorant charge could be selected, even out of the litany of calumnies which insolent conquerors appended to the Irish name. The Gaelic genius had brought forth two great Epics—that which gathers around Queen Maev's name, and that which gathers around the name of Finn—centuries before any of the modern Romance languages had produced anything better than a village rhyme. It is true, we cannot point out our particular Homer or Dante turning out an immortal poem complete in all its parts, and transmitting it to us in a faultless Elzevir edition, with a portrait of the author. For Oisin. indeed, as the creator of Fenian romance, we have as good historical evidence as we have for Homer as the composer of all the ballads of the 'Iliad'; but the man or men who sang the glories of the Red Branch Knights are lost to us in the twilight, all but as utterly as the men who built the tumulus of Dowth, or who set up the Cromlechs. But that such men there were in ancient Erin, not merely … continue reading »
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