World Literature - Irish Literatures

The characteristics of the Irish people are well known and on the whole, admirable. An emotional, poetical strain is quite the ordinary thing and generosity is a common trait to the point of improvidence. The Irish love nature, there is no moment on their literature when this sentiment is not warm and sincere. It is part of their Gaelic heritage to retain the feeling for the supernatural, to hold to old beliefs and customs and to the charming world of the faeries, - the “good people,’ – the link between the visible and the invisible universe.

Early Irish literature is glorified by the mass of heroic and legendary tales known as saga- romances, dealing with events and characters of the pre –Christian age. The authorship is quite unknown, and the transcription of the stories, though made perhaps as early as the seventh or eighth century was merely a written record of tales current for hundreds of years.

There are three great cycles of these stories; the Mythological, the Red Branch, and the Fenian. Of these the first deals with conflicts of the pagan gods; the second (by far the best) with Culchulain, the great heroic figure in ancient Irish literature, and with Deirdre, the Helen of Ireland; and the third with teo warriors, father and son, the center of the Fenian group constituting a kind of Irish Round Table.