Colin A. Ireland, The Gaelic Background of Old English Poetry Before Bede. Publications of the Richard Rawlinson Centre. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2022, xiii, 450 pp.

This fine volume bridges the scholarly gap between one of medieval Europe’s least studied but most prolific literatures, that in Middle Irish, and certainly the most studied but strikingly limited vernacular poetic corpus, in Old English. Bede is an appropriate point of reference, since the book does for its vast subject what that author did for the history of the English church. The temporal span is 635−735.