This chapter provides an overview of the main distinguishing features of the Celtic branch of Indo-European. It furthermore discussses the internal relationship between the branches of Celtic, specifically the position of Brittonic. The main arguments in favour of Gallo-Brittonic and Insular Celtic are evaluated.

Irish and Welsh have divergent literary beginnings. Irish, the first western vernacular to achieve literary status, produced hundreds of works by 1100, whereas Welsh literature is hard to quantify before then. Starting with the oldest vernacular manuscripts – Lebor na hUidre (late eleventh/early twelfth century) and the Black Book of Carmarthen (ca. 1250) – the chapter addresses the difficulties of reconstructing earlier literary activity. In Ireland, well-founded dating strategies reveal literature forming in the seventh century with legal and religious writing, and blossoming in the eighth with original narratives such as ‘The Voyage of Bran’. Church schools created a vernacular literary system closely modelled on Latin Christian learning, including a metatextual tradition which canonized Irish-language texts through commentary and glossing. This activity was promoted by professional users of the vernacular – lawyers, poets, historians – who entered into a close relationship with the church. In Wales the picture is far harder to discern. Some aspects of the Irish story – the professional orders, the church schools – are comparable, but chronology eludes us and by the time the literature becomes fully describable, in the twelfth century, it appears to be an amalgam of older traditions and Anglo-Norman influences.

For W. B. Yeats, George Berkeley’s youthful reference to ‘We Irish’ marked the beginning of a national intellect based on a perceived distinction between Irish philosophical idealism and the materialism supposedly characteristic of the English. Upon this enigmatic remark of Berkeley’s, Yeats erected a system that offered to illuminate the national characteristics of eighteenth-century authors – most importantly, Swift, Goldsmith, and Burke – including a profound suspicion of abstract ideas. The wealth of eighteenth-century Irish writing, still in the process of recuperation, is not easily accommodated within Yeats’s scheme, however, more readily revealing diversity than similarity. Yet the fact of Irish birth, education, or employment, as much as their subject matter, did mark out writers as Irish, whether the identification was self-willed or imposed by those outside the island. The ways in which national identity manifested itself between 1700 and 1780 are explored through examples of prose, verse, and drama written or published both in Ireland and abroad. In so doing, the chapter outlines the first halting attempts, by male and female writers including John Toland, George Berkeley, Jonathan Swift, Henry Brooke, Frances Sheridan, Elizabeth Sheridan, and Edmund Burke, to create the idea of a national Irish literature in English.