Tighernach O'Braein

Irish annalist and Abbot of Roscommon and Clonmacnoise, died 1088. Little is known of his personal history except that he must have been born in the early part of the eleventh century and that he came from a Connaught family. His "Annals" (among the earliest of Irish annals) are of the greatest value to the historian of Ireland because of the author's attempt to synchronize Irish events with those of the rest of Europe from the earliest times to his own day. His learning is shown by his quotations, among others, from the works of the Venerable Bede, Josephus, Eusebius, and Orosius, not to speak of the Vulgate. But his sources for the Irish portions of the "Annals" are not now discoverable because of the loss of the Irish manuscripts from which he drew his information. Only fragments of Tighernach's "Annals" are now extant; these are in a vellum of the twelfth century and one of the fourteenth century in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and in a fourteenth-century manuscript in Trinity College Library (Dublin). These fragments were published by Dr. O'Conor in his "Rerum Hibernicarum Scriptores" (1825), but O'Conor's text is full of errors. They have recently been published and translated by Whitley Stokes in the "Revue Celtique" (vols. XVI, XVII, XVIII). Two pages in facsimile are given in Gilbert's "National Manuscripts of Ireland", part I.

JOSEPH DUNN