THE IRISH ANNALS

New Zealand Tablet, 27 April 1916, Page 43

THE IRISH ANNALS

\V ■ , • SKETCH OF ANCIENT HISTORICAL ... LITERATURE. - -

q »By no means the . least interesting of ; the fine volumes which compose th & New Irish Library is Dr. Douglas-Hyde’s Story of Early ; Gaelic Literature. It is from that book that we take the following, which deals at some length with the Annals of the Four Masters, and gives one an idea of how Michael O’Clery and his colleagues compiled the greatest of Irish historical works :—• \

No sketch of Irish . literature should omit some mention ,of the Annals, dry and unliterary as most of them are. The Irish Annals, . however, are too important, from their value, age, and number, to be overlooked. The greatest— almost the , youngestof them all is the much-renowned Annals of the Four Masters. . This mighty work is chiefly duetto the herculean labors of the,learned Franciscan,, Brother, Michael O’Clery, a native of' Donegal, born about the year 1580, who was himself descended from a long line of - scholars. He and another scion of Donegal, Aedh Mac an Bhaird, then guardian of St. Anthony’s in Louvain, contemplated the compilation and publication of a great collection of the lives of the Irish saints. : In furtherance of this idea, Michael O’Clery, with the leave and approbation of his superiors, set out from Louvain, and, coming to Ireland, travelled through the whole length and breadth of it, from abbey to abbey and friary to friary. Up and down, high and low, he hunted for the ancient vellum books and timestained manuscripts, whose safety was even then threatened by the ever- thickening political shocks and spasms of that most distracted 'age. These, wherever he found, he copied in an accurate and beautiful handwriting, and transmitted safely to Louvain to his friend, Mac an Bhaird, or ‘ Ward,’ as the name is now in English. Ward, unfortunately, died before he could make use ,of the material thus collected by O’Clei'y, but it was taken up by another great Franciscan, Father John Colgan, who utilised the work of his friend O’Clery by producing in 1645 two huge and splendid Latin quartos, the first called the Trias Thaumaturyus, containing the lives of Saints Patrick, Brigid, and Columkille, the second containing all the lives which could be found of all .the Irish saints whose festivals fell between the Ist of January .and the last of March. - i ii ■T :

I Before O’Clery ever entered the Franciscan Order he had been by profession an historian or antiquary, and now, in his, eager quest for ecclesiastical writings and the lives of saints, his trained eye fell upon many other documents which he* could not neglect. These were the ancient books and secular annals of the nation, and the'historical poems of ; the ancient bards. He indulged himself to the full in} this unique opportunity to become acquainted with so much valuable material,'' and the results of his labors are two valuable books, the Eeim Ribghrdiclhe (pronounced ‘ Rain Ree-ree-a,’) or Succession of Kings in Ireland, which gives the ' name, succession ,’ and genealogy of' the Kings of Ireland from the earliest times down to' the death of Malachy the Great in 1022, giving at the same, time the genealogies of the early saints of Ireland, down to the eighth century; and the Leahhar Gabhdla - (pronounced ‘ L’yowar Gow-aul-a’), or Book of Invasions, ■which . contains an ample account of the successive colonisations of Ireland which were made by Partholan, the Nemedians, the Tuatha de Danaans, etc., all drawn from ancient booksfor the most part now lost—and digested and put together by the friar. f ■lt was probably while engaged on this work that the great scheme of compiling the annals of Ireland Occurred to him. He found a patron and protector in Fergal. O’Gara, lord of Moy-Gara and Coolavin, and .with*the assistance of five or six other antiquaries s he set about his task, in the secluded Convent of . Donegal, at that time governed by his own brother. , r He began

his work on i the 22nd of January, r 1632, . and finished it on the 10th of August, 1636; having had, during all this ‘ time, his expenses and the expenses of his fellow laborers defrayed by the patriotic lord of MoyGara., i " ' { . f'A f PkftVi H 111 ■

It was Father Colgan who first ■ gave this great work the title under;which it is now always spoken of Annals- of the Four Masters. .1 Father Colgan, in the preface to his Acta Sanctorum Hibernia:, after recounting O’Clery’s labors and his previous books, goes on to give an account of this last one also, and adds : ‘As in the three works before mentioned, so in this fourth one, three (helpers of his) are eminently to be praised namely, Farfassa O’Mulconry, Peregrine . O’Clery, and Peregrine' O’Duigenarr, ■ men of consummate learning in the antiquities of the country, and of approved faith. And to these were subsequently added the co-operation of other distinguished antiquarians, as Maurice O’Mulconry, who for one month, and 'Conary O’Clery, who for many months labored in its promotion. . But since those Annals, which we shall very frequently have occasion to quote in this ' volume and ,in others following, have been collected and compiled by the assistance and separate study of so many authors, neither the desire of brevity- would permit us always to quote them individually, nor would justice permit ■us to attribute the labor of many to one, hence it sometimes seemed best to call them the ‘Annals of Donegal,’, for in pur Convent of Donegal they were commenced and concluded. But afterwards,, for other reasons, chiefly for the sake of the compilers* themselves, who were four most eminent masters Jin antiquarian lore, we have been led to call them the Annals-of the F-our Masters. Yet we said just now that more than four assisted in their preparation ; however, as their meeting was irregular, .and but two of them during a short time labored in the unimportant and later part of the work, while the other four were engaged on the entire production at ; least up to the year 1267 (from which the first part, and the most necessary one for us, is closed), we quote it under their name.’ . ’ | ‘ I explained .to you,’ says Michael O’Clery in his dedication to Fergal O’Gara, after setting forth the scope of the work, , ‘ that -I thought .1 could , get the assistance of the chroniclers for whom I had the most esteem in writing a book of annals, in which these matters might be put on record, and that, should the writing of them be neglected at present, they would not again be found to be put on record or commemorated even to the end of the world. All the best and; most copious books of - annals that I could find through^ 1 out all Ireland were collected by methough it was difficult for me to collect them into one place—to write this book in your name and to your honor, r for it was you who gave the reward ,of the labor to the chroniclers, by whom it was written, and it was the friars of : Donegal who supplied them with food and attendance. ’2; ■The .hook' is also ; provided with V a kind of testimonium from the Franciscan Fathers of the monastery where it was written, stating who the compilers wete, and how Tong they had worked "under their •own ’;; eyes, - and what old books they had seen with them, etc. In addition to this, Michael O’Clery carried it to the two historians of the greatest : eminence in the South of Ireland, Flann mac Egan, of Ballymacegan, in the County of Tipperary, and Conor mac Brody, of the County of Clare, /and obtained their written approbation and signatures, as well as those of the Primate of •Ireland and some others ; and thus provided he launched his book upon the world. (|

It has been published, at least in part,, three times first down to the year 1171, the year, of the Norman Invasion, by the Rev, Charles O’Conor, grandson of Charles O’Conor of Belanagare, Carolan’s patron, with a Latin translation ; and, secondly, in English by Owen Connell an from the year 1171 to the end. But the third - publication of , itthat - by ? O’Donovan—was the greatest work that any modern Irish' scholar ever accomplished. In it the Irish text, with accurate English translation, and an enormous’ quantity of notes, topo-

graphical, ...genealogical, j and historical, are given, 5 and the whole is contained in'- seven huge quarto volumes—a work of which any age or country might be proud. So long as Irish history exists, the Annals of the Four Masters will be read in O’Donovan’s translation, and the name of O’Donovan be inseparably connected with those of the O’Clerys. ; We have left ’ourselves but little space to notice the contents of these Annals. Suffice it to say that, like so many other compilations of the same kind, they begin with the Deluge; and they end up in the year 1616. They give from the I,old - books the reigns, deaths, genealogies, etc., not only of the High Kings but also of the provincial kings, or chiefs, or heads of distinguished families, men of science, and poets, with their ; respective dates, going as near as they can- go. ‘ They record deaths and successions of saints, abbots. bishops, and ecclesiastical dignitaries. - They tell of the foundation and occasionally of the overthrow of countless. churches, castles, abbeys, convents, and ; religious institutions. They give meagre details of . battles and political changes, and occasionally quote ancient verses in proof of facts. : Towards the end the dry summary of events becomes more garnished, and in parts elaborate details take the place of meagre facts. There is no event in Irish history, from' the birth of Christ to the beginning of the seventeenth century, that the first inquiry of the student will not be, ‘ What do the Four Masters say about it?’ for the great value of the work consists in this, that we have there, in condensed form, the pith and substance of the old books of Ireland which, were then in existence but which— the Four Masters foresaw they would— long since perished. The facts and dates of the Four Masters are not their own facts and dates. From confused masses of very ancient matter they with labor and much sifting drew forth their dates and synchronisms, and harmonised their facts.

• As if to emphasis© the truth that they were only redacting the annals of Ireland from the most ancient sources at their command; the Masters wrote .in an ancient bardic dialect full of such idioms and words as were unintelligible even to the men of their own day unless they had received a bardic training. In , fact they were learned men writing for the learned, and this work was one of the last efforts of the esprit de corps of the school-bred shannachie which always prompted him to keep bardic and historical learning a close monopoly amongst his own class; Keating was Michael O’Clery’s contemporary, but he —and I consider him the first Irish historian and trained scholar who did —for the masses not for the and he had his reward in the thousands of copies of his popular history made • and read throughout all Ireland, while the copies made of the Annals were quite few in comparison, and after the end of the 17th century little read.