Literature: Gaelic Literature in the Nineteenth Century

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Gaelic Literature in the Nineteenth Century

Nineteenth-century Gaelic literature falls into two distinct and complex phases: The first extends from the revolutionary era of the 1790s to the Great Famine, and the second from the famine to the end of the century. In the first period written materials were principally transmitted via a robust manuscript tradition, as had been the case in the previous millennium. Some 2,000 documents from the period have survived, but much cataloging and editorial work has yet to be completed on these codices (de Brún 1987 and 1988). The scribal culture that persisted in Irish-speaking Ireland is reminiscent of those of other societies marginalized on geographic, ideological, or sociopolitical grounds. Ireland's output in the early nineteenth century merits comparison with the handwritten production of medieval writings in contemporary Iceland, the manuscript circulation of clandestine philosophical compositions in early eighteenth-century France, and the surviving documentation of central European Judaica.

Gaelic copyists were active throughout much of Ireland. Manuscript writing was strong in the south in counties such as Cork, Limerick, and Waterford. Parts of Leinster, notably Kilkenny, were also productive. There is also evidence of the tradition in the north midlands, the northeast (especially Belfast), and distinctively, though less vigorously, the west. It was an urban as well as a rural phenomenon. We know of writers operating in or near towns and villages in County Clare, for example, including Conchúr Ó Maoilriain and Donnchadh Ulf from Sixmilebridge, Micheál Ó hAllúráin from Kilrush, and Micheál Ó Raghallaigh from Ennistymon.

The manuscripts include business accounts, legal agreements, personal biographical details, and other records of their compilers' everyday lives, as well as literary compositions. There are two types of prefamine creative writings. The first are texts from medieval times and from the innovative seventeenth century that were recopied in the early nineteenth century, including sagas and bardic poetry as well as historical and devotional matter. The transmission of pre-1700 writings was not simply a passive, repetitive exercise. Nineteenth-century annotation of compositions such as the Deirdre story (Mac Giolla Léith 1993) reveals their compilers' thoughts about character or motivation in this and other legends. Material from the past continued to furnish literary allusions in works from the early nineteenth century. Medieval writings, especially those of the seventeenth-century chronicler and Catholic polemicist Geoffrey Keating, set standards of language and style. This holds true especially for scribes trained in reading and reproducing Gaelic script and spelling.

Original prefamine writings constitute the second strand of materials. Both verse and prose works have survived. Topics in the lives of the composers themselves feature in the compositions. The north Kerry poet Seán Ó Braonáin (de Brún 1972) was occupied with sectarian issues, millenarian hopes of delivery from English rule, the career of Daniel O'Connell, poverty, relations with his fellow scribes such as the Cork-based 1798 insurgent Micheál Óg Ó Longáin (1766–1837), and a range of other subjects. His output has particular value as the unmediated voice of the community for which he wrote; in this regard it resembles the work of other composers such as Antaine Raiftearaí (Anthony Raftery), whose texts are more obviously molded by oral culture. The compositions of Ó Braonáin and his counterparts are traditionalist in other ways. The meter of the poetry is accentual, reflecting ordinary speech patterns, but highly wrought. His verse demonstrates a continuation of poetic practices that came to fruition in the seventeenth century and were in full force throughout the eighteenth century. Prose works that are rooted in the past, though less common than poetry, are also found in this period. The prolific County Cork writer Dáibhí de Barra (d. 1851) recast the story of his neighbors' defeat of officials levying Anglican tithes in the 1830s to make it read like a heroic saga (Ó Cuív 1960).

Other intriguing innovations in early nineteenth-century verse and prose writing deserve closer attention than they have received. One of these is the absorption into Irish poetry of the themes, style, and diction of near-contemporary literature in English, particularly various manifestations of romanticism. The works of County Louth-based Nioclás Ó Cearnaigh are a case in point. He translated pieces by Robert Burns such as "Sweet Afton" and "Highland Mary" into Irish (Ó Dufaigh and Ó Doibhlin 1989), and the process resulted in his Gaelic text having a convoluted syntax and a sentimental tone. These features resurface in the contorted language and phraseology of his own original Irish versification on topics such as love and politics. The scribe Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin is best known for his diary of everyday life in Callan, Co. Kilkenny, in the years 1827 to 1835. He also completed in manuscript form a tale entitled Tóruigheacht Chalmair (The pursuit of Calmar) (McGrath 1937). It is in effect a short Gothic novel about economic distress. Ó Súilleabháin and Ó Cearnaigh's works typify the writings of other, mostly urban-based bilingual writers who had access to printed sources. Although awkward in style, their material has relevance in cultural terms. Irish politics were edging toward an accommodation with British authority, particularly through the parliamentary tradition; similarly, new experimental Gaelic literature appears to have consciously established a rapprochement with a linguistic medium set to dominate not only in Ireland but also internationally as the nineteenth century advanced.

How far this modernizing tendency might have developed organically after the 1840s is uncertain; its development was interrupted by the devastating events of the decade, which ushered in the second phase of Irish-language writing in the nineteenth century. The Great Famine had as damaging an impact on Gaelic literature as on other aspects of Irish life. As it swept away speakers of the language, it also undermined scribal culture, which completely died out in certain regions and was attenuated in other locations. There were some critically important survivors, however, including Kilkenny-born John O'Donovan (1809–1861), who had worked with the Ordnance Survey (the branch of the British administration charged with producing up-to-date maps of Ireland on a county basis between 1825 and 1841) in the 1830s and translated some of the works of the philosopher John Locke into Irish, and his colleague Eugene O'Curry (1796–1862), who had trained as a traditional copyist in his native Clare. In 1848 to 1851, O'Donovan issued his monumental edition and translation of the Annals of the Four Masters, one of the first authoritative large-scale works offering insights into life in Ireland before 1600. O'Curry became a professor of Irish history and archaeology at Newman's Catholic University in 1854. His teaching formed the basis for his Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History (1861). In another example of the persistence of the scribal tradition, younger members of the Ó Longáin scribal family recopied some of the codices of the Royal Irish Academy in the 1860s and 1870s, establishing bridges between the prefamine past and subsequent generations who would draw on the earlier works in creating new forms of Irish writing in the late nineteenth century. This mutually reinforcing symbiosis between scholarship and literature has existed throughout the history of Irish civilization.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century Irish-language enthusiasts adopted an organizational approach to the promotion of Gaelic culture. The Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language was established in 1876 to arrest the decline of Irish. A recent study (Ó Murchú 2001) has shown that its program of teaching Irish in schools and supplying textbooks was very successful in encouraging writing at a basic level. An offshoot body, the Gaelic Union, set up in 1880, produced the first successful printed periodical devoted to the modern Irish language in Ireland, the Gaelic Journal/Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge (1882). It became a vehicle for the creation of new verse and prose (O'Leary 1994). By far the most influential organization, however, was the Gaelic League, established in 1893 (Ó Ríordáin 2000). The League set up elaborate branch networks and sponsored cultural events featuring evenings of song, storytelling, and dance. It developed competitions in music and literature at both local (feis) and national (Oireachtas) levels. These contests produced many writings, from essays to short stories and novels, some of which were conservative (for instance, those based on folk narrative), and others that were more adventurous, particularly when translations from European literature were used as exemplars. Infrequent publishing of key periodicals had an adverse effect on the strength of the material (Nic Pháidín 1998). Another, no less important result of the competitions was the formation of a readership for the new works. The principal achievement of the revivalists was the establishment of a platform on which a fully fledged modern Gaelic literature would be built, a process due to bear fruit throughout the twentieth century.