The Rigvedas are fixed by some scholars at 1500 B.C.
When we come to the Avesta of the Iranians who left India and wrote their work in a language that is almost Sanskrit, we find more liberty as regards the metres. The Gathas, which are said to be the oldest portions of the work, the work of Zoroaster himself, have the same or nearly the same kind of metre as the Vedic hymns, but there is greater liberty. The syllables need not be of a uniform quantity at the end of the line, but each line, as in the Rigvedas, also has the same number of syllables. The third of the five Gathas uses the trishtubh or most frequent metre of the Veda, four lines of eleven syllables, but without restrictions as to quantity of final vowels.
Of course the reader can see that such verse is really prose, for there are no limitations as to when accent or quantity should uniformly be used. L. H. Mills in his
translation of the Gathas keeps close, as he tells us, to the original metres. He wisely breaks up the metrical line, based merely on the counting of syllables, and the result reads like prose, which it really is in the original.
A study of the five "metres" of the five Gathas appears in Martin Haug's Essays in the Sacred Language, Writings and Religion of the Parsis.
The Gathas were written about the fourteenth century B.C. by Zoroaster and hence are not much later than the Rigvedas.
In the Rigvedas and Gathas we have the first stage of metre used by Aryan nations; these are the basis of all later metres. They were written, it must be recalled, not in ages of barbarism, and represent the transition from prose to regular metre. They are so near prose that only an arrangement into lines makes us call them metrical. After all, they do not differ much from the rhythmical prose in which the poetry of Ancient Egyptians, Babylonians and Hebrews was written. We see thus that rhythmical prose was the first language wherein poetry was written, and that hampering metre is always late in the literary development of a nation. We learn how great is the delusion of literary historians that metrical poetry is the first literature of all nations and that prose is a later growth.
The earliest poetry of a country is expressed first in prose by word of mouth. It is then put down first in writing in prose, and later versions sometimes change the prose into meter. Often the earlier prose version is lost and it is then concluded that a literature of a nation begins in verse.
Let us examine the form of the earliest Irish literature. The oldest stories in Irish literature center around the exploits of Cuchulinn, who is reputed to have died at the
beginning of the Christian era. This means that the tale about him was told by word of mouth up till the time they were written down in the seventh or eighth century. The versions of a few centuries later are the copies we now have in the epic Táin Bó Cualnge. According to Edmund C. Quiggin's article on Irish Literature in the Britannica, the original Tain consisted of prose interspersed with rhythmical prose called rhetoric. Later metrical poems were largely substituted for the rhetoric. As Mr. Quiggin says, the Tain is of interest as showing the preliminary stage through which the epics of all other nations had gone. No doubt even the Iliad was originally told in prose (and probably written in prose) while the verse versions are the latest we have of the story.