Madam, - In his Tuarascáil article of August 13th, Torlach Mac Con Midhe reports on a trip he made to St Gallen in Switzerland, and tells how in its famous library he saw the ninth-century Latin grammar-book that was brought there by some unknown Irish peregrinus, one of those numerous scholars on the Continent who made the Irish a byword for learning and knowledge in the early Middle Ages.
"Warum die Iren?" ("Why the Irish?") asked a German member of his tour group, a question often asked about those "wandering scholars" so evocatively described by that great Belfast woman Helen Waddell in her book of that title (1927).
Your readers may be interested to know that the National University of Ireland here in Galway is the location for the Foundations of Irish Culture Project which has two research programmes under way (funded under the PRTLI):
(i) to catalogue and describe all the surviving manuscripts on the continent written by Irishmen in the period AD 600 - 850;
(ii) to list all the manuscripts containing scientific writings composed by Irish scholars in Latin during that same period.
We hope the research findings will finally enable us to offer a definitive answer to the challenge posed by the provocative title of Thomas Cahill's book, which boldly claimed to describe How the Irish Saved Western Civilization. - Yours, etc.,
Prof DÁIBHÍ Ó CRÓINÍN,
Director,
Foundations of Irish
Culture Project,
National University of Ireland,
Galway.