Two Irish Apocalypses, trans. John Carey. Turnhout: Brepols, 2025, xii, 216 pp.

Owing (in part) to Bismarck, whose wars were crucial for Germany’s Gründerzeit (a “Founding Era” of dynamic economic growth), nineteenth-century German academics were able to finance ambitious projects, some of them used to this day. They included editions (being replaced only now) of early Irish verse and prose. That brings us from der eiserne Kanzler to John Carey of University College, Cork. He here provides translations of Fís Adomnáin (“The Vision of Adomnán”) and Dá Brón Flatha Nime (“The Two Sorrows of the Kingdom of Heaven”), supplementing his editions of those Middle Irish texts for Corpus Christianorum: Series apocryphorum in 2019. So, Professor Carey offers an advance on Irische Texte mit Wörterbuch (Leipzig, 1880), containing Ernst Windisch’s pioneer edition of Fís Adomnáin, a scarifying Middle Irish precursor (by some three hundred years) of Dante’s Inferno. The same applies to Dá Brón Flatha Nime, reporting in similar alarming tones on Doomsday, and likewise in an edition hard to find (one of 1900 by Georges Dottin).