History of the Irish state to 1014 - National Library of Scotland

;IX IRISH LEARNING i8iintercourse with ever^ part of Europe through theirtraders, artists, scholars, missionaries, and travellers :but neither foreign communications nor the variety oftheir own states confused the fundamental sense ofnational unity and love of country. Monasteries andschools of learning drew together the scholarship of theold world and the new in the beginnings of Irish literature ;and became centres of a teaching dominated by the consciousnessof a national life, and of the unity of thecountry. The kingly supremacy, often wavering irregularlyamong four chief branches of the race of Niall,steadied down to a settled order from the middle of theeighth century between the northern stock of CenelnEogain and the midland princes of Clann Cholmainand in the ninth century the Lebhor ?ia g-Ceart (the Bookof Rights) gathered into one system the grouping of thevarious races and their obligations to the over-kings. Freefrom external danger, hospitable to strangers, themselvesgreat travellers, a people increasing in wealth, they usedthe opportunities of their time with an extraordinaryactivity which we can now see only in part. During theNorse invasions and later centuries of wars of conquest,the violent destruction of Irish schools, the exile of theirprofessors, and the proscription of their learning, a vastmass of material has been irretrievably lost. Wholelegendary cycles are now known only by casual references,a number of the tales by the bare titles which survive,and many hundreds of poems from mere fragments, oreven from the initial lines which have been preserved.Out of what seemed hopeless confusion modern scholarshave shown the way to lines of research by which we mayreach to some true idea of Old Irish civilization.The amazing energy of the Irish in these centuries oftheir free self-government was not confined to their ownland. We must add to it the most remarkable missionaryeffort known in Europe for the variety and vivacity of its