A Literary History of Ireland, from Earliest Times to the Present DayHyde, Douglas
History
A Literary History of Ireland, from Earliest Times to the Present Day
Hyde, Douglas
Civilization, Celtic, in literature; Irish literature -- History and criticism; Language and culture -- Ireland
If it is genuine the earliest life of Patrick ever written would
probably be the brief metrical life ascribed to Fiacc of Sletty, the
sixth or seventh in descent from Cáthaoir [Cauheer] Mór, who was
king of Leinster at the close of the second century.[33] His mother
was a sister of Dubhthach's [Duv-hach], the chief poet and Brehon of
Ireland, who, we are told, helped St. Patrick to review and revise the
Brehon Laws. Fiacc was a youthful poet in Dubhthach's train at Tara.
Afterwards he was tonsured by St. Patrick, became Bishop of Sletty, and
on Patrick's death is said to have written his life, and not forgetful
of his former training, to have written it in elaborate verse.[34] So
famous a critic as Zimmer believed half the poem to be genuine, but
Thurneysen rejects it because it does not fall in with his theories of
Irish metre.[35]
But the longest and most important life of St. Patrick is that known
as the Tripartite, or Triply-divided Life, which is really a series
of three semi-historical homilies, or discourses, which were probably
delivered in honour of the saint on the three festival days devoted to
his memory, that is, the Vigil, the Feast itself, on March 17th, and
the day after, or else the Octave. This Tripartite life, which is a
fairly complete one, is written in ancient Irish, with many passages
of Latin interspersed. The monk Jocelin, who wrote a life of the
saint in the twelfth century, tells us that St. Evin[36]--from whom
Monasterevin, in Queen's County, is called, a saint of the early sixth
century--wrote a life of Patrick partly in Latin and partly in Gaelic,
and Colgan, the learned Franciscan who translated the Tripartite in his
"Trias Thaumaturga,"[37] believed that this was the very life which
St. Evin wrote. Colgan found the Tripartite life in three very ancient
Gaelic MSS., procured for him, no doubt, by the unwearied research of
Brother Michael O'Clery in the early part of the seventeenth century,
which he collated one with the other, and of which he gives the
following noteworthy account:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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