Credit: Ar dTeanga Fein (www.adft.org)



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,