Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry

In 1911 Kuno Meyer, the great German scholar of Old and Middle Irish, gathered his finest verse translations into a single small book and dedicated it to his Liverpool patron. The result is one of the most important slim volumes in Celtic studies: the lyric voice of early Christian Ireland rendered into plain, exact English.

These are not epics. They are the quiet, sharp, perfect utterances of seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh century Irish poets, monks, scribes, hermits, an…