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Audiobook edition · 2 h 3 minPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
A cat hunts beside a scholar’s desk, while a blackbird sings above a monk writing in the woods.
Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry gathers short poems from early Ireland, brought together by Kuno Meyer. Monks, hermits, scribes, lovers and poets turn their attention to small things. A bird’s song, a scholar’s work and the food in a hermit’s hut become reasons to pause and look closer.
Nature poems, hermit verses, scribes’ reflections and poems of love and loss form the heart of this collection. Forests, seas, chapels and kings share its world with an old woman remembering her youth. Many voices have no surviving name, yet their pleasures, work and grief feel close.
What you’ll discover
- Nature at close range Listen to birds, wind and stormy seas through poems that linger over the world outside.
- A hut in the forest Enter the quiet world of hermits, where food, water and shelter fill a poem.
- Life at the desk Meet scribes whose verses notice the hand, the eye and long hours of work.
- Love and passing years Hear voices of love, loss and age alongside the collection’s quieter pleasures.
- Small poems worth lingering over Read slowly and aloud, then return to a few lines that hold your attention.
Who will love it
This book will delight lovers of nature poetry, Celtic myth and early Christian prayer, and anyone who enjoys short pieces to read aloud.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A strange visitor invites a voyage
- One sea holds two different worlds
- Love speaks close to death
- Prayer speaks with a personal voice
- Small pictures make nature present
- Women give loss its own voice
- Bards turn loyalty into lasting song
- Everyday life has room for wisdom
- Distinct voices share a common world
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Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry in 25 languages, side by side, paragraph by paragraph, once the book texts are online: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry
by Kuno Meyer
A woman with an apple branch appears in Bran's hall and sings of an island where no one dies.
Medium levelUnder 2 hours to read16 languages
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In short
A woman in strange clothes stands inside a closed fort. No one saw her come in, because the ramparts are shut.
Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry at a glance
- Reading time
- About 1 h 10 min55 min fast, 1 h 25 min slow
- Length
- 16,700 words
- Library level
- Medium longer sentences, everyday words
Reading time at 238 words a minute (fast 300, slow 200). How long the classics take to read · Updated
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Irish poetry grew outside the reach of Rome
Meyer opens with a bold claim. He says the old Irish language holds the earliest voice of Western European civilization, and that it kept its own literature because Rome never ruled the island. Gaul fell to Rome, and by the fifth century the Gaulish tongue had vanished, leaving no record of its poetry. Britain kept only a little. Ireland kept its words.
Christianity reached Ireland far from the centre of Roman power, so the Church there grew along local lines. Monks wrote in Irish as well as Latin, for teaching, for prayer and even for scholarship. Meyer calls the sixth century and those after it the Golden Age of Irish civilization.
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Cite this edition
Meyer, Kuno. Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry. Library of Alexandria, 2026, libraryofalexandria.com/products/selections-from-ancient-irish-poetry.
Meyer, K. (2026). Selections from ancient Irish poetry. Library of Alexandria. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/selections-from-ancient-irish-poetry
Meyer, Kuno. Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry. Library of Alexandria, 2026. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/selections-from-ancient-irish-poetry.
@book{meyer2026selections,
author = {Meyer, Kuno},
title = {Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry},
publisher = {Library of Alexandria},
year = {2026},
url = {https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/selections-from-ancient-irish-poetry}
}
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What is Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry about?
It is a collection of short Irish poems and prose pieces gathered from early manuscripts. They cover myth, saints and hermits, nature, love, bards and wise sayings, and each piece is a small voice from early Ireland.
Who wrote the poems in Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry?
Most are anonymous. Some are credited by tradition to saints such as Patrick and Colum Cille, or to named bards. Kuno Meyer is the scholar who collected them and wrote the preface explaining their background.
When were these Irish poems written?
Meyer says many were first composed in the eighth century and a few perhaps in the seventh. Most survive in manuscripts copied from the eleventh century onward, after early manuscripts were lost in Viking raids.
The author
Kuno Meyer
1858–1919 · German Celtic scholar
Kuno Meyer was a German scholar of Celtic languages and literature. He was born in Hamburg in 1858. He taught at the University of Liverpool and later at the University of Berlin. He edited and translated early Irish writings. His Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry appeared in 1911. He died in Leipzig in 1919.
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