Project Gutenberg's Early Bardic Literature, Ireland, by Standish O'Grady

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Title: Early Bardic Literature, Ireland

Author: Standish O'Grady

Release Date: May, 2005 [EBook #8109]
Release Date: August 4, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EARLY BARDIC LITERATURE, IRELAND ***

Produced by Ar dTeanga Fein

EARLY BARDIC LITERATURE, IRELAND.

By Standish O'Grady

11 Lower Fitzwilliam Street, Dublin

Scattered over the surface of every country in Europe may be found
sepulchral monuments, the remains of pre-historic times and nations, and
of a phase of life will civilisation which has long since passed away.
No country in Europe is without its cromlechs and dolmens, huge earthen
tumuli, great flagged sepulchres, and enclosures of tall pillar-stones.
The men by whom these works were made, so interesting in themselves, and
so different from anything of the kind erected since, were not strangers
and aliens, but our own ancestors, and out of their rude civilisation
our own has slowly grown. Of that elder phase of European civilisation
no record or tradition has been anywhere bequeathed to us. Of its
nature, and the ideas and sentiments whereby it was sustained, nought
may now be learned save by an examination of those tombs themselves, and
of the dumb remnants, from time to time exhumed out of their soil--rude
instruments of clay, flint, brass, and gold, and by speculations and
reasonings founded upon these archaeological gleanings, meagre and
sapless.

For after the explorer has broken up, certainly desecrated, and perhaps
destroyed, those noble sepulchral raths; after he has disinterred
the bones laid there once by pious hands, and the urn with its
unrecognisable ashes of king or warrior, and by the industrious labour
of years hoarded his fruitless treasure of stone celt and arrow-head, of
brazen sword and gold fibula and torque; and after the savant has rammed
many skulls with sawdust, measuring their capacity, and has adorned them
with some obscure label, and has tabulated and arranged the implements
and decorations of flint and metal in the glazed cases of the cold gaunt
museum,