GUAEDON MACCI MENUEH," they are all contemporary with or
later than the Old Irish glosses. With regard to the Ogam inscriptions
we cannot make any confident assertions. Owing to the lack of criteria
for dating certain Irish sound-changes accurately it is impossible to
assign chronological limits for the earlier stones. The latter cannot be
later than the 5th century, but there is nothing to show whether they
are Christian or not, and if pagan they may be a century or two earlier.
It is true that the heroes and druids of the older epics are represented
in the stories as making constant use of Ogam letters on wood and stone,
and as the state of civilization described in the oldest versions of the
Ulster sagas seems largely to go back to the beginning of the Christian
era, it is not impossible that this peculiar system of writing had been
framed by them. The Ogam system is certainly based on the Latin and not
the Greek alphabet, and was probably invented by some person from the
south of Ireland who received his knowledge of the Roman letters from
traders from the mouth of the Loire. It may, however, be regarded as
certain that the Ogam script was never employed in early times for
literary purposes. We are told that the Gaulish druids disdained to
commit their lore to writing, although they were familiar with the use
of Greek letters, and their Irish confreres probably resembled them in
this respect. Tradition connects the codification of the Brehon Laws
with the name of Patrick, and there is reason for believing, as we shall
see later, that the greatest Irish epic was first committed to writing
in the 7th century.

Old Irish MSS.

Hymns.

The great bulk of Irish literature is contained in MSS. belonging to the
Middle Irish period (1100-1550), and in order to be able to treat this
literature as a whole it will be convenient for us to deal first with
those documents which are termed Old Irish, especially as the
contemporary remains of the literature of the earlier period are almost
exclusively of a religious nature. Most of the Old Irish documents have
been printed by Stokes and Strachan in the _Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus_,
and where no reference is given the reader is referred to that
monumental work. The extraordinary outburst of intellectual activity in
Ireland from the 6th to the 9th centuries and the compositions of
Irishmen in the Latin language, belong to the history of medieval
European literature and fall o