Gaelic Writing from 1607 to 1800

Seventeenth-century Gaelic literature registers the response of the traditional learned classes to the English colonial enterprise. The insecurity of the professional poets, for example, is evident in an increasing tendency to address poems to one another rather than to patrons. In the decade following the Flight of the Earls (1607), their political differences provide the subtext for the "Contention of the Bards" (Iomarbháigh na bhFileadh), a poetic debate on the respective historical claims of the two halves of Ireland. Originating in a vituperative exchange between the Clare poet Tadhg mac Dáire Mac Bruaideadha (c. 1570–c. 1652), a supporter of the English interest, and Lughaidh Ó Cléirigh (c. 1580–c. 1640) of Donegal, it drew many prominent contemporaries into the fray.

The social reorientation of poetic activity was also reflected in the abandonment of the old syllabic meters and the gradual adoption of amhrán, a popular metrical form based on repeated patterns of stressed vowel sounds.

In this period, poets began to address the political situation faced by Ireland as a whole. Notable among these are two Tipperary-born clerics: Seathrún Céitinn (c. 1580–c. 1644), whose Óm sceol ar ardmhagh Fáil ní chodlaim oídhche (With this news of Ireland's pain I cannot sleep) lamented the disappearance of the old nobility who might have defended Ireland from "the litter of every foreign sow," and Pádraigín Haicéad (c. 1600–1654), whose impassioned verse reflected his hopes and disappointments as an active supporter of the Gaelic Party during the Confederate War. The disastrous events of the period between 1640 and 1660 were also detailed in six lengthy political poems, the most well known being the anonymous An Síogaí Rómhánach (The Roman fairy, c. 1650).

Keating and his contemporaries were the first to develop the aisling, or dream-vision motif, as an elegiac mode with political undertones. In an aisling the poet meets an otherworldly female—a personification of the locality or the nation—who laments the loss of her spouse, the deceased. Insofar as the conceit of this genre is that of a supernatural confrontation, it may be seen as a popularizing strategy whereby the poets exploit grass-roots cultural symbols connected with the traditional death ritual.

In the last quarter of the seventeenth century the personal plight of the traditional poet and the sociopolitical "shipwreck" (longbhriseadh) of Ireland after the Treaty of Limerick (1691) were powerfully expressed in the acerbic verse of Dáibhí Ó Bruadair (c. 1625–1698).

Seventeenth-Century Prose

By the beginning of the seventeenth century many younger members of the learned classes had chosen ecclesiastical over secular patronage and entered holy orders. Established in 1606, the Franciscan College of St. Anthony of Padua in Louvain soon became a major center of Irish recusant scholarship and publishing. As part of a general Counter-Reformation strategy, the devotional works produced there were written in a simple, natural Irish and designed for popular appeal. Among the most notable first-generation Louvain scholars were Flaithrí Ó Maolchonaire (1560–1620), whose Desiderius (Louvain, 1616) is an expanded translation of a Catalan devotional work; Bonaventura Ó Heodhasa (d. 1614), whose catechism in prose and verse An Teagasg Criosdaidhe (Antwerp, 1611), was the first Catholic work to be printed in Irish; and Aodh Mac Aingil (1571–1626), author of Sgáthán Shacramuinte na hAithridhe (Mirror of the sacrament of repentance, Louvain, 1618), a devotional work with strong political undertones.

A project in Irish historical research was established at Louvain, and it was there that Brother Micheál Ó Cléirigh (c. 1590–1643) organized a team of scholars who returned to Ireland and produced between 1632 and 1636 Annála Ríoghachta Éireann, a massive compendium of Irish chronicles popularly known as the Annals of the Four Masters.

The most influential historical work of the period, however, was Seathrún Céitinn's Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (The basis for a knowledge of Ireland), an elegantly written narrative that promoted the concept of a Catholic Irish nation and established the framework in which the Irish viewed their own history for the next 250 years. Céitinn also produced important devotional works, the most important being Trí Biorghaoithe an Bháis (The three shafts of death), a lengthy treatise on sin, death, and judgment.

Protestant scholars were also active throughout the century. William Daniel's Irish translation of the Book of Common Prayer was published 1609. In 1634 William Bedell (1571–1642), the bishop of Kilmore, assembled a team of scholars to translate the Old Testament into Irish. The work was finally published in 1685, and in 1690 it was printed along with Daniel's translation of the New Testament (1603) as An Bíobla Naomhtha.

Popular prose at this time consisted mostly of short heroic romances and the reworking of traditional tales. Nevertheless, there were some very good works in a comical or satirical vein, the most notable being the anonymous Parliament Chloinne Tomáis (The parliament of Thomas's clan), a burlesque satire on the upstart peasantry, which once again registered the insecurity of the learned class.

A shift toward parody and mock-heroism had already been evident in the late Fionn-cycle literature, and it was used to full comic effect toward the end of the century in the anonymous Siabhradh Mhic na Míchomhairle (The hallucination of the Son of Ill-Counsel), a skillful reworking of traditional material narrated in the first person.

Eighteenth-Century Poetry and Prose

In the south of Ireland the strange mix of collegiality and factionalism that had manifested itself in the "Contention of the Bards" reemerged in the poetry of the cúirteanna éigse, or "courts of poetry," local poetical associations that upheld formal standards, encouraged the composition and dissemination of new verse, and saw to the preservation and copying of manuscripts. Typical of this milieu were extended displays of repartee in which poets respond in verse to one another's compositions, as for example in the work of Seán Ó Tuama (c. 1708–1775) and Aindrias Mac Craith (c. 1708–1795). Typical also was the satirical barántas, or "warrant poem," a parody of a legal document in which "bailiffs" were called upon to apprehend and punish someone who had offended the court by some misdeed or minor theft.

The aisling, however, is the poetic genre most associated with eighteenth-century Ireland. From its roots in the elegiac verse of the previous century, it was developed as a mode of presenting political allegory. The most successful examples were probably those composed by Aogán Ó Rathaille (c. 1670–1729) at the end of the first decade of the century, when there existed a genuine hope for a Jacobite invasion of Ireland. The aisling eventually became the conventional genre for the expression of political aspiration and was indelibly associated with the Stuart cause. Many of the later aislings, like those of Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin (1748–1784), are admired more for their musicality and technical perfection than for their emotive power or sincerity.

The extemporaneous composition of a lament, or caoineadh (the English keen) was an essential feature of the funeral ritual in eighteenth-century Ireland. A particularly fine example that was preserved in oral tradition is Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoire ("The Lament for Art O'Leary"), composed by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill in 1773 after the occasion of her husband's murder.

The most original and brilliant example of narrative verse from this period is undoubtedly Brian Merriman's Cúirt an Mheán Oíche ("The Midnight Court," written in 1780), a poem of over one thousand lines in which the dreaming author, representing the men of Ireland, is forcibly brought before the fairy-queen of Thomond and put on trial for neglecting women and failing to marry. This work is an extraordinary blend of genres, successfully combining elements of the aisling with those of the barántas, and sparkling with technical virtuosity.

Prose composition did not fare so well in this century, and the most exciting experimentation occurred early on with the work of Seán Ó Neachtain (c. 1648-1729). A native of Roscommon, he eventually settled in Dublin where he and his son Tadhg were the central figures in an extremely productive circle of Irish scholars, scribes, and poets. Although he was a capable poet himself, Ó Neachtain's best work was his prose, and he is primarily admired for Stair Éamainn Uí Chléire (The History of Éamonn Ó Clery, c. 1710), a comical and picaresque moral allegory on the dangers of alcohol.

Bibliography

Cunningham, Bernadette. The World of Geoffrey Keating. 2000.

Leersen, Joseph Th. Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its Development, and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century. 1996.

Ó Tuama, Seán, and Thomas Kinsella. An Duanaire, 1600–1900: Poems of the Dispossessed. 1981.

William J. Mahon

Literature: Gaelic Writing from 1607 to 1800

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