Just 300 out of thousands of medieval Irish-language manuscripts still exist

Lavishly illustrated German manuscript containing the Arthurian romance of Wigalois. Picture: Leiden, University Library

Thousands of medieval Irish-language manuscripts have been lost to the sands of time.

At a time when pop culture is laden with stories of Vikings, monarchs past and other tales set in the Middle Ages, it has emerged that we are missing thousands of stories that could have provided us with rich source material and insights into our past.

New research has revealed that over 3,000 ornate scripts telling tales of heroism and chivalry have been lost over the centuries.

Just over 300 of these Irish-language manuscripts exist today according to a new international study.

Researchers from Ireland, Belgium, Denmark, England, the Netherlands and Taiwan found that more than 90% of European manuscripts from the Middle Ages no longer exist.

The study showed that 80% of prose tales in Irish, Icelandic and German survive while for Dutch, English and French literature fewer than 50% of works are still known.

The Irish member of the research team, Professor of Modern Irish at University College Cork Pádraig Ó Macháin said the findings indicate the remarkable affinity between the island cultures of Ireland and Iceland.

Opening of medieval Irish tale Cath Leithreach Ruibhe. Picture: Royal Irish Academy

The study is the first attempt to quantify the loss of medieval manuscripts over time and compare them to trends in other countries.

It examined how those losses affected the loss of individual texts, in this case, prose tales, Prof Ó Macháin explained.

"Such was the distribution of these tales across many manuscripts that stories could still survive in single copies despite the loss of multiple other copies."

In order to carry out the research, the international scholars employed models developed in ecological studies where researchers estimate how many rare species are missing based on the surviving numbers.

For this study, the team calculated the survival rates for six medieval language areas separately and observed that there are huge differences in these survival rates within Europe.

One of the lead authors, Professor Mike Kestemont, professor of computational humanities at the University of Antwerp, said: “We suspected ecologists’ statistical methods to predict numbers of rare species could also be used to estimate numbers of lost literary works and we were right.”

Prof Ó Macháin said the research marks an exciting collaboration between science and the humanities, between ecologists, statisticians and manuscript scholars.

It is hoped this study will open up a new line of research in the study of human cultures of the past as the method could be used across the heritage sciences.

The findings of the research are published in the leading international research journal, Science.