Ebook: A historical reader of Old Irish

Halle (Saale) : M. Niemeyer, 1923.Introduction.The scope of this little book is to provide students of Old Irish with more interesting texts than were hitherto at their disposal.
Except the Glosses and the Cambray Homily none of the texts given below have been preserved in Old Irish manuscripts. It is well known that many fine tales and poems composed during the Old Irish period have come down in later Middle Irish MSS., often only very slightly corrupted and modernised by the transcribers, so that it seemed worth while to make an attempt at restoring their original form. It is quite evident that owing to the fluctuating character of Irish orthography it is quite impossible to restore a text with certainty as it stood in the original MS., but it is quite possible to restore a text as it might have stood in the original, which for our purpose is the same thing, since the differences which might arise in this case are mostly insignificant.
The principles which I have made use of in the reconstruction of Old Irish texts are as follows:
Whenever a word or an independent part of a word occurs in several places in different versions of a certain text, I have not adhered to a single MS. but have selected the oldest and most regular form and restored it throughout.
When no MS. has preserved the correct Old Irish form of a word, but when it was possible, with the help of the variants to restore the contemporary form with certainty, I have done so. Where this was only possible by comparing the language of other Old Irish documents I have given the MS. forms in the foot-notes. Mere orthographical and other trifling corruptions have been silently corrected.
In cases where it was impossible to make out whether certain letters stood in the original or not, round brackets have been used. Forms and letters supplied by the editor are given between square brackets.
In reproducing the Cambray Homily and the Würzburg Glosses a makron has been used to denote long vowels which are not marked as such in the MSS. In- all other cases the makron is only used to denote long vowels in prehistoric forms.
Latin words and rhyming syllables have been printed in small italics.
The pronunciation of every word can easily be inferred from the glossary, where I have made use of a normalised orthography.
Students will do best to begin with text V and to proceed with III, VII, VIII, IX, I and II. For the benefit of beginners a full commentary to the first paragraphs of V has been added, together with a tentative phonetic transcript of the whole story.'
Until the appearance of my Historical Old Irish Grammar Strachans Selections from the Old Irish Glosses and Paradigms may be used instead.
The archaic period of Old Irish extends from about 650 to 770 A.D., Old Irish proper from about 770 to 920 A.D.
I have to thank Professor Osborn Bergin and my pupil Mr. Micheál Ó Bríain for reading the proofs and some useful suggestions.