irishpoetry.ie

a curated directory of Irish poetry · by Simon James Brady

Early Irish poetry

Monastic and early vernacular verse, and the lyrics that survive without authors.

Poetry in Irish is among the oldest continuously attested vernacular literatures in Western Europe. What survives from the early period comes mostly through monastic scriptoria, where scribes copying Latin texts wrote verse in the margins — on a cat, on a blackbird, on the weather — and in doing so left some of the most durable lyric poetry in the language.

Much of the surviving work is anonymous. Pangur Bán, The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare and the verse embedded in Buile Shuibhne have no authors, and are central to the tradition anyway. Where names do survive — Dallán Forgaill, Blathmac, Líadain — they often come attached to a single poem or a single story.

This is also the period of Hiberno-Latin, when Irish scholars wrote verse across Carolingian Europe, and of the first named woman poet in the record.

54 poets, earliest first.

Last checked