Gaelic revival

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Resurgence of interest in Irish language, literature, history, and folklore inspired by the growing Irish nationalism of the early 19th century.

With the 17th-century English conquest and settlement of Ireland, Irish almost disappeared as a literary language. By the mid-19th century, translations of heroic tales from ancient Irish manuscripts led to the popularity, among the educated classes, of poets who wrote in patterns echoing ancient bardic verse. The revival laid the scholarly and nationalistic groundwork for the Irish Literary Renaissance. See also bard.

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Irish literary renaissance - Flowering of Irish literary talent in the late 19th and early 20th century.

More on "Gaelic revival" from the 32 Volume Encyclopædia Britannica:

Gaelic revival - resurgence of interest in Irish language, literature, history, and folklore inspired by the growing Irish nationalism of the early 19th century. By that time Gaelic had died out as a spoken tongue except in isolated rural areas; English had become the official and literary language of Ireland. The discovery by philologists of how to read Old Irish (written prior to 900) and the subsequent ...

Celtic literature - Ironically, it was English-speaking antiquarians and nationalists from the small educated class, rather than the Irish-speaking minority, who led the 19th-century revival, which in turn was stimulated by the Romantic movement's interest in Celtic subjects.

Celtic languages - Some aspects of the modern Scottish Gaelic dialects show that they preserve features lost in the language of Ireland during the Old Irish period; such archaism is characteristic of "colonial" languages. The innovations are, however, more striking than the archaisms. Most remarkable is the loss of the voicing feature (i.e., the vibration of the vocal cords) in the stops. All of the stopped ...

Celtic literature - The introduction of Celtic into Ireland has not been authoritatively dated, but it cannot be later than the arrival there of the first settlers of the La Tene culture in the 3rd century BC. The language is often described in its earliest form as Goidelic, named after the Celts (Goidil; singular, Goidel) who spoke it. The modern form, known in English as Gaelic (in Gaelic called Gaedhilge or ...

physical culture - It was only with the Italian Renaissance that interest in the aesthetic development of the body was revived in Western civilization. Inspired by the ancient Greeks and Romans, this belief in man as "the measure of all things" was most evident in the great artworks of the 15th and 16th centuries. Leonardo da Vinci's drawings reveal a profound interest in the human skeleton, organs, and muscles and ...

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