Anonymous (Old Irish)

The early Irish poems gathered here were composed in Old and Middle Irish between roughly the eighth and the twelfth centuries, mostly by unnamed monks, scribes, hermits and court poets. They survive in medieval manuscripts such as the Book of Leinster and Lebor na hUidre, and many are tied by tradition to figures such as St Patrick, Colum Cille, Moling or King Cormac, though those attributions are legendary and the poems are treated here as anonymous.

The selection runs from sagas and the otherworld voyage of Bran to hymns, hermit songs, nature lyrics, love poems, bardic laments and the quatrains scribes wrote in the margins of their books, among them the poem of the monk and his cat Pangur. The English versions are by the Celtic scholar Kuno Meyer, from Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry (London, 1911).