The Gaelic Journal was a monthly magazine that was founded in 1882 and owned by the Gaelic League. Donnchadh Ó Corráin, an Irish historian and a professor of Medieval History at University College Cork, described The Gaelic Journal as “the first important bilingual Irish periodical.” Languages ranged from Gaelic, English, Welsh, and French. The Journal’s content contained folktales, literary texts, poetry, historical studies, fiction, and drama. In a web version of the Journal on archive.org, David Comyn, the then editor, wrote in a section titled “To the Readers of The Gaelic Journal”:
The heavy burden of establishing and conducting a periodical exclusively devoted to the interests of the Irish Language has rightly fallen to the Council of the Gaelic Union… It will be strange, indeed, if this journal, founded as it is on an independent basis, going neither to the right nor the left, but keeping its object steadily in view, should be allowed to languish and die. Established, not as a commercial, but as a purely patriotic undertaking, and by those who have already given such good earnest of their zeal and energy, I cannot believe that Irishmen will fail in their clear duty of sustaining the Gaelic Union, which in this effort needs the aid of all. Many things are yet necessary to complete our country’s regeneration and secure her happiness, but I am unwilling to believe that in the struggle she would suffer her language to be lost; and I think that if the case were fairly put before the people, they would not purchase a (perhaps) very temporary material advantage by the loss of the one grand link which binds them to the past—the one indelible, undying and unmistakable mark of Irishmen.
This note was written in the November issue of 1882. The Journal unfortunately ceased publication in the year 1909.
For more works of The Gaelic Journal, click here.
