Text dating ireland
To this catalogue may perhaps be added the unwritten folk-lore of the island both in prose and verse which has only lately begun to be collected, but of which considerable collections have already been made.Such, then, is a brief and bald résumé of what the student will find before him in the Irish language.Only a little later, in the early 7th century, Luccreth moccu Chiara, a Kerryman, wrote poems recording the legendary origins of Munster dynasties, including Conailla Medb michuru ("Medb enjoined illegal contracts"), which contains the oldest surviving reference to characters and events from the Ulster Cycle.
After this may come the bardic poetry of Ireland, the poetry of the hereditary poets attached to the great Gaelic families and the provincial kings, from the 9th century down to the 17th.From what we know of the contents of the existing manuscripts we may set down as follows a rough classification of the literature contained in them.We may well begin with the ancient epics dating substantially from pagan times, probably first written down in the seventh century or even earlier.The glosses are to be found in manuscripts from Würzburg, St.
Gallen, Karlsruhe, Milan, Turin, Sankt Paul im Lavanttal, and elsewhere.
Two works written by Saint Patrick, his Confessio and Letter to Coroticus were written in Latin some time in the 5th century, and preserved in the Book of Armagh. The earliest Irish writings are inscriptions, mostly simple memorials, on stone in the ogham alphabet, the earliest of which date to the 4th century.