Annals of Connaught

The Annals of Connaught, another ancient MS., often quoted, was in the possession of Dr. Charles O’Conor. A copy is in the Library of the Royal Irish Academy. It contains chiefly the history of Connaught, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century; and is considered to have been compiled chiefly by the O’Maolconrys as Historiographers of Connaught. A beautiful MS. on vellum, folio size, now deposited in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and containing partly in poetry, and partly in prose, the history of Fionn MacCumhail [Finn MacCoole] and the celebrated Fenian heroes of Ireland in the third century, with some of the poems ascribed to Oisin, was composed by one of the O’Maolconrys, about the fourteenth century. Dr. Drummond in his Prize Essay on the poems of Oisin, states that MacPherson, the celebrated author of “Ossian’s Poems,” on visiting Oxford, was shown the above mentioned Irish MS., as containing the Poems of Oisin, a single word of which he was unable to read.