ABSTRACT
Four major metrical systems are attested, which follow each other in a roughly chronological sequence from the sixth to the seventeenth century, though with some overlap. The first is found in an archaic stratum of Irish poetry containing legal aphorisms, gnomes, genealogies, and the heightened language of prophecy embedded in prose sagas. Metrically, this poetry was characterized by a fixed number of syllables per line (most commonly seven), loosely accentual in the first part but with a fixed end-ofline cadence following a caesura. Take, for example, to-combacht selb soertellug, “landed property has been recovered by means of high occupation,” in which a first unit of four syllables with variable stress and marked with a caesura after selb (x`xx`x|) is followed by a unit of three syllables with a fixed cadence (`xxx). Close parallels with the meters of certain other languages, notably Sanskrit, Greek, and Slavic, argue for its ultimate origins in a shared Indo-European heritage. This meter was used by the filid, the preeminent learned class of early Ireland (see Áes Dána), no doubt long before the introduction of Christianity.
