Earlier posts have remarked on a connection between Irish nationalism, and Germany. This connection is a complex one with multiple layers. I am thinking of the sad ending to the career of Dr. Kuno Meyer.

The layer in question here is language, linguistics, literature, lyrics.

Dr. Kuno Meyer was a German born and bred, and ultimately he would die there. But his career took him elsewhere. His studies of languages led him to Dr. Ernst Windisch, a 19th-century German specialist in Middle Irish. I don't know nearly enough about Windisch, nor about Zeuss whose first name I can't recall right now, Zeuss specialized in Old Irish actually. This earlier generation of German scholars became deeply devoted to Gaelic literature. These are the professors who went and looked for the manuscripts scribed in the monasteries by Irish monks, and copied down the Gaelic quatrains in the margins, or the longer poems that filled up larger spaces such as the beloved "Messe ocus Pangur Bán."

These were the authorities in place when a relatively young Douglas Hyde pleaded the case for Gaelic as a language in its own right; he called upon them for support, and their opinions and research overcame the opposition, at least in that particular contest.

Kuno Meyer had a solid career teaching this language and literature in Dublin, and he was branching out to North America as a lecturer, when the Great War began. Because Meyer, somewhat automatically, sided with his native Germany, his career collapsed like a house of cards, because the countries in which his career was based were all opposed to the aggression of the Germans. Suddenly he could no longer teach in Dublin, and Harvard University changed its mind and decided that he did not belong on their faculty.

By the time the Easter Rising took place, Meyer was more or less persona non grata in Ireland and Englsnd. He found himself in North America, lecturing, and hanging on to the remnants of his career in linguistics. After a brief marriage to an American woman, he made his way back to the Continent; while the Ireland that he loved made its destiny without him, he returned to Germany and died in 1917.

Meyer was a scholar of such stature that an entire generation of Irish or Anglo-Irish linguists learned their craft from him, and owed their very educations and careers to professors like him.