| During my time in Oxford as a visiting student, I spent two years studying the Old Irish language and its literature. The ancient Irish people appear to have been proud warriors who had a highly complex social system. Their literature was sophisticated, although it is not so well known because of the very difficult language structure. The Irish language is one of the oldest Indo-European languages and is a sister language of Latin and Sanskrit, which are the mother bodies for the Indo-European languages of today. The oldest Irish vernacular literature was written down only after the introduction of Christianity in the fifth century A.D., when Latin writing was brought into Ireland. The language changed its form into so-called Middle Irish and then into the Modern Irish, which is still spoken in some parts of Ireland today. The Irish vernacular literature reveals much about the traditions and social functions of the ancient Irish Celts. They were a brave and proud people who had great respect for tradition. They are famous for their oral tradition which was handed down from generation to generation, mainly through druids and poets. Unlike the Greeks or the Romans, they had a unique style of literature where prose and verse are combined in one literary work. Poets had special social status and a hierarchy that was similar to that of the clergy, but it was strictly a family business. No matter how much talent a person might have, he would not be recognised as a proper poet unless both his father and grandfather had been poets. The more I studied the Irish Celts, the more similarities I noticed between the Celts and the Japanese. One of the more interesting aspects I found was the warrior mentality. The tale of the death of Cu Chulainn, one of the most well-known of the Irish heroes, reminded me a great deal of some of the death stories of Japanese heroes. They all cherished their fame and their reputation. The expression "to lose one's face" has been used in Old Irish since long before the term was introduced into the English language. This expression, however, is used in literally the same manner in Japan. Both Irish and Japanese considered it as the worst possible disgrace. Another interesting feature that I realised was common to both cultures was the usage of verse in prose tales. Although it is rather a unique feature for Indo-European literature, it is a very common style in Japanese literature. Poetry was the most common form of courtship in Japan until very recently. In Japanese literary works, verses are used to express emotion or to describe the beauty of nature. The degree of sophistication of the poems was also important for both the Irish and the Japanese. A noticeable difference, however, is in the status of the poets and the matter of who was allowed to compose verses and how they composed them. Verses in Irish literature were composed by professional poets, whereas the verses in Japanese literature were composed by people from all walks of life. Some evidence shows that the Irish poets composed their verses carefully in certain conditions, such as in dark rooms, and to spontaneously compose verses just anywhere was considered improper. The Japanese, on the contrary, appreciated spontaneity and a person who could compose and recite verses as soon as they were given a title was considered to be much more sophisticated than one who had to spend some time thinking about it. Also, the Japanese prose tales which contain verse often take the form of an anthology and the emphasis is on verse rather than the stories themselves, whereas in Irish prose tales verse is used to emphasise the heightening of one's emotions and the story itself has significance. I would very much like to compare the similarities and differences of the meanings of the verses and the status and methods of the poets between the Irish and Japanese literatures and societies. Although the ways the verses are composed are so different from each other, the ways in which verses are presented in the literary works in both cultures are so similar. In both cultures, a vernacular literature started to appear round about the sixth or seventh centuries. In two different cultures so far apart from each other, very similar sorts of literature style developed at more or less the same time. It is difficult to speculate that there were any physical connections between the two cultures, but the similarities are striking. |
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