The pre-1600 situation

Ireland's senior language is Irish-Gaelic, one of the Celtic languages: closely related to Scots-Gaelic (the two did not start to diverge meaningfully until the seventeenth century), more distantly to Welsh and Breton. Literacy was introduced together with Christianity in the fifth century, and the coexistence of Gaelic with Latin throughout the Middle Ages has left many lexical traces (leabhair, ‘book’ < liber, to name but one significant example).

Ireland's medieval literary tradition was bilingually Gaelic and Latin, with Latin used for religious, Gaelic more for secular purposes. We encounter the usual genres: chronicles, genealogies, learned tracts, poetry. In addition, some epic-heroic materials reflecting pre-Christian antiquity were written down, most importantly the Ulster Cycle around the Cattle Raid of Cuailgne (Táin Bó Cuailgne) and the hero tales around the warrior Fionn Mac Cumhaill. The dominant secular poetic mode of the Middle Ages was the encomium on clan chiefs. This type of learned verse was entrusted to a hereditary class of literati whom I shall here call ‘bards’, and whose responsibilities ranged from the recall of past glories to the rehearsing of genealogical lines of descent and the almost-liturgical legitimation of the ruler by means of their poetic praise. (As a result, the medieval poem books were often kept by their addressees, and organized, not by author but by subject.) The bards used a highly recondite form of prosody and diction in a somewhat analogous form to Skaldic verse in the Nordic tradition. Their function was wholly embedded in the structure of Gaelic society, divided into rival clans with some sense of a common Irish cultural framework.