Stark silence hovers round the islet’s shore
Where tread of warriors oft had shook the ground.
The chiefs and chieftains of the isles and west
Are seen no more at great Macdonald’s court;
Their galleys traverse not the island seas:
They with their furious feuds are now at rest:
Razed is each castle, ruined is each fort,
Within thy bounds, Queen of the Hebrides!
The name that stands first on the roll of the bards of the Middle and Modern Ages is that of Muireadach Albannach. He is the author of several poems which have been preserved in The Book of the Dean of Lismore. Religious subjects are the theme of all his compositions. None of the old bards exhibits so much earnestness and intensity of feeling. There is also more subjectivity in his poems than in other productions of the period. His name signifies Murdoch of Albin, or Scotland, given probably to distinguish him from another Irish bard of the same name. Muireadhach became the ancestor of a family of senachies and bards who have been very distinguished in the literary annals of Gaelic Scotland. They were hereditary bards and senachies to the Clanranald family. One of them, Lachlan Mòr MacMhuireadhach or Vurich, accompanied Donald Balloch of the Isles in 1411 at the battle of Harlaw, reciting his grand war-incitement poem. The last of them, Lachlan MacVurich, gives evidence in the report of the Highland Society on Ossian, and traces his genealogy through eighteen generations to Muireadhach Albannach. Muireadhach appears to have lived between A.D. 1180 and 1220. I give here a metrical version of a short religious poem of his in the Dean of Lismore’s book. He is supposed to have been an ecclesiastic, as many of those who wrote in early times were.
I praise Thee, Christ, that on Thy breast