Génair Pátraicc: Old Irish between print and manuscript, 1647–1853

Abstract:The ninth-century Old Irish poem Génair Pátraicc was printed with a Latin translation by Fr John Colgan at Louvain in 1647 from one of the manuscripts of the Irish Liber Hymnorum, a collection of the late tenth or early eleventh century. Its early entry into print made it, alongside Ní car Brigit, one of the first pieces of Old Irish to be widely available. This produced, in the first instance, a secondary transmission in manuscript, as it re-entered the native tradition; this was followed by numerous reprints, often with translations based on Colgan's Latin. In the late eighteenth century a Modern Irish translation was made and printed on facing pages by Richard Plunket in 1791, which in turn seems to have entered manuscript transmission. Until J.C. Zeuss revealed the grammar of the Old Irish glosses, this poem was the most widely known example of Old Irish, and it was studied as soon as Zeuss's work became available: it provided Whitley Stokes with an early test for Zeuss's results on a work transmitted down the centuries in Ireland, revealed in his letters to John O'Donovan from 1857. Since Stokes's fifth re-editing of the poem in 1903, it has been largely unstudied.