'■i0'2 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



Irish of the MSS. ; and that while the Irish of the.MSS. represents a Christian 

 tradition, dating from the earliest ages of Christianity in the country, the 

 Ogham inscriptions represent a pagan tradition. It follows beyond the 

 possibility of question that there must necessarily have been a certain 

 amount of literary culture in the country for at least a century or two 

 before the coining of the Christian missionaries. As I have said in a paper 

 already published by the Academy, 1 "the ground-work of this literary cul- 

 ture was, no doubt, the [»»-ins which according to Caesar were committed to 

 memory by the pupils in the druidic schools* — mosl likely Veda-like sacred 

 and semi-magical hymns and formulae of various kinds." The analogy with 

 the Vol [ j in the above quotation is exact, and explains several 



otherwise inexplicable phenomena in Irish literature. These traditional 

 hymns, like the Vedas al the beginning of their existence, were never written 

 down, as Caei l - on to tell ub: it follows thai they would preserve in 

 memory an archaic form of language, just as the Vedas preserve Old Sanskrit, 

 and as the ritual of the / drvaia enshrines an archaic form of Latin. 



Aiiei this we are uol surprised to learn that the study of these poems 

 ipied no n twentj years; at the end of which time the literati 



would be ped in the sacred language that they would naturally use it 



as the basis of literary composition. To the large illiterate majority this 

 archaic I _ would 1«> totally unintelligible — as much bo as Latin would 



be to an illitei chman or Italian. 



When the Christian mi- - arrived in Ireland, they found much 



the sine condition of thii _ modern missionaries have found in 



china. The current lang daily intercourse was a colloquial, which 



• r written: while the language used for writing, by those few who 

 possessed the - an archaic form . familiar to the "mandarins," 



but incomprehens the unlearned. To instruct those whom they bail 



reach, the m bs in ancient Ireland solved the problem thus 



pi nted to i hem as the missionaries in modem China have solved it. They 



the colloquial speech to the level of a literary language, writing it 



m ; and they created a literature by 

 uto it such of the ancient traditions as moral or religious expe- 

 diency permitted them to translate I' need hardlj that no archaic, 

 pre-Christian, literature in vellum postulated'; tablets of wood, 



1 Pr»r€e-i\)\gs, vol. xxxii, section 0, p. 231. 

 • I, xiv. 3. 



' Though possibly the books of Longarad were written ill this archaic dialect. 'J'hey 

 ■arrived till the time of the writing of the annotations I Bradahaw edn., 



p. 198); but were unintelligible. "Win.', tradition Mid, to n curse uttered by Coluni 

 Cille. 



