The Irish Liber Hymnorum: Translations and Notes
by Robert Atkinson (9780217084314)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Irish Prefaces. The Prefaces which are found to nearly all the pieces in the Liber Hymnorum, in its original form, are a noteworthy feature of the book. They are evidently of a later date than the pieces to which they are prefixed, and were probably composed by scribes who were desirous to place on record the legendary beliefs current in their day as to the composition of the hymns. In the earliest of our manuscript authorities, the Antiphonary of Bangor (A), there are no prefaces; and we might therefore suppose that the practice of compiling them did not arise until after the close of the seventh century at earliest. On the other hand the same recension of several of our Prefaces is found in more than one of our MSS. There are only minute variations between the Prefaces in T and F to the pieces numbered 3, 6, 9, 12, 14, 19, 20, 22, and 23; and the same is true of the Prefaces in FB to No. 10, in TFB to No. 11, and in TFL to No. 21. This shows that these prefaces assumed their present form prior to the transcription of any of these manuscripts, that is, before the eleventh century. On the whole we shall not be far wrong if we conclude that the prefaces in T represent the stories current in the tenth century as to the authors of the various hymns. They are all composed on the same plan, in a rude mixture of Irish and Latin,?and set forth the time, place, author, and occasion of the composition of the pieces which they precede. More than one legend is often recorded, from which it would appear that the scribes did not consider themselves possessed of any certain knowledge on these historical points; and in some instances the subject matter is trivial enough, although in others the information they offer cannot be lightly set aside. Dr. Todd has remarked1 that the care t...

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