Pangur Bán is a white cat. His owner was an Irish monk, working in a scriptorium some time in the ninth century, and one night instead of copying scripture he wrote a poem comparing his own hunt for meaning to the cat’s hunt for mice. Both of them, he decided, were doing the same work. Neither was better at it than the other.
That poem survives. So do a few hundred others like it, and in 1911 the German scholar Kuno Meyer gathered the best of them into one small book. We have put it back into print as part of the Irish Culture Project. If you want the argument for why Meyer’s translations still matter, we made it at length elsewhere. This is the book itself.
What is in Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry?
Forty-nine poems, arranged in seven sections, plus the Triads of Ireland and selections from the Instructions of King Cormac.
They are short. That is the first thing to say, because it is the thing most people get wrong about early Irish literature. The reputation is all vast prose sagas and cattle raids. The lyric tradition running alongside them is compressed to the point of severity, and a great deal of it fits on a single page.
These were often written in the margins of manuscripts the scribe was supposed to be copying. That is not a charming detail. It is the reason they survive at all.
Four you will remember
- Pangur Bán. The scholar and his cat, each perfectly content in his own trade. Probably the most translated poem in Old Irish and still the least sentimental.
- The Old Woman of Beare. An aged woman on the Beara peninsula counting what she has outlived. Seven youths. Her own beauty. The sea itself is still going and she is not. It is bleak and entirely without self-pity.
- Colum Cille’s greeting to Ireland. Written in exile on Iona, naming every place he cannot go back to. Homesickness as an inventory.
- The Hermit’s Song. A man in a wooded shieling listing the birds and berries that keep him company. It reads like contentment and it is really an argument about what a life needs.
Also here: Deirdre’s farewell to Scotland, Liadin’s lament for Curithir, Eve remembering the apple, and a ninth-century monk complaining that his pen is worn out.
Why these poems sound modern and are not
Readers coming to this book from twentieth-century poetry usually notice the same thing. The nature writing has no moral attached. A poem about a blackbird is about a blackbird.
That is not modernism arriving nine hundred years early. It is a different tradition with different assumptions, and the resemblance is a coincidence that happens to make the poems easy to love. Early Irish nature poetry observes closely because observing closely is a religious act, not because the poet is refusing to editorialise.
The laments work the same way. Irish poetry has a long formal tradition of grief, and we wrote about the caoineadh as its most developed form. The laments in this book are earlier and barer, and they sit alongside the place-poetry tradition that gives so much Irish verse its geography.
Who was Kuno Meyer?
A German philologist who did more for Old and Middle Irish than almost any Irish scholar of his generation, and who is not much read now outside Celtic studies.
His method was plain. He translated into exact, unshowy English and refused to improve the originals. Where a line is flat in Old Irish it is flat in Meyer. This makes him less quotable than later translators and much more trustworthy, and it is why his versions have outlasted the more decorative ones.
He also dedicated the 1911 volume to his Liverpool patron, which tells you something about how this scholarship was actually funded.
What we restored, and what we added
Our source was the first edition, Constable and Co., London, 1911.
The governing decision on a poetry collection is lineation, and ours was to change nothing. Line breaks, stanza breaks and indentation are exactly as Meyer printed them. Digital extraction routinely collapses verse into prose, and repairing that without silently reformatting the poet is most of the work.
Meyer’s own Introduction is preserved in full, and so are his source notes at the back, which identify the manuscript behind every poem. Those notes are the most useful pages in the book for anyone who wants to go further, and they are the first thing a modern reprint tends to drop.
We added an About This Edition page, a Note on the Text, and a glossary of fifteen names and terms drawn from our Irish gazetteer. One prose passage, the dialogue between Moling and the Devil, had come through extraction as a single wall of text and was split at speaker changes into eighteen paragraphs. That is the only structural change we made to the body.
The edition carries four public-domain plates: Ingres’s The Dream of Ossian, John Duncan’s Saint Bride, and carpet pages from the Books of Durrow and Kells. Our editorial standards set out how the method works and how it gets checked.
Read a sample
The first thirty pages are readable in full, free, in Rosmerta’s Library. No account and no email. The original text is public domain and free to read elsewhere, and we link it. What you pay for is the edition.
Watch the trailer
Where to buy
Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry, translated by Kuno Meyer. Paperback, 6×9, 158 pages. ISBN 9798240812538.
- Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookshops.
The Bookshop.org link is an affiliate link. We earn a commission if you buy through it, at no extra cost to you. It does not change what we choose to publish or what we say about it.