A HISTORY OF IRELAND
By Professor Julius Pokorny
Old Irish sagas offer a key to the history of European civilization, and their value has been recognized increasingly by modern scholars. The Gaels, as we meet them at the beginning of historical times, still retain many traces of a lost pre-Aryan culture in their customs, beliefs and language. .4 History of Ireland (The Talbot Press, Dublin, 8s. 6d.) was published in German in 1916, and has been translated for the first time by Dr. Selina D. King. Prof. Julius Pokorny is one of the best-known Celtic scholars of today, and the earlier chapters of this book are of exceptional interest, for they contain a summary of the author's theories concerning an Artie substratum in the pre-historic population both of Ireland and of Great Britain. The rest of the book is little more than a popular account of Irish history written at a time when racial passions were intensified by the Great War. Prof. Pokorny admits frankly that he was writing outside his own subject : he wished to present to the German public a more reasonable picture of Irish history than that given by English historians such as Macaulay and Froude. He follows the methods of Alice Stopford Green and other Irish his- toriims of recent times, and his account may be taken as sub- stantially accurate. But he avoids in this rapid survey the deeper implications of his subject, and he accepts, for instance, the popular Irish version of the mediaeval Golden Age and the Norse invasion. The closing chapter, which deals with modern Irish politics, is purely personal in its value, and con- tains a eulogy of the Sinn Fein movement. As a philologist, Prof. Pokorny is an enthusiastic believer in the Irish lan- guage revival, and emphasizes the mental stimulation and advantages of bi-lingualism.
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