Thanks to some very very odd formatting of accented vowels, that very weird Irish hymnal, Dánta Dé, has been hiding in plain sight, on archive.org! (Since May 2009, apparently.)
It doesn’t list the editor. It doesn’t list the name, even. But darn it, there it is! An exercise of Murphy’s Law which is entirely in keeping with the twisted history of this ill-starred but good-intentioned publication.
Mwahahaha! Enjoy it, my friends! The tiny Irish font with the super-tiny lenition dots! The handwritten scores! The even tinier handwritten lyrics on the tiny handwritten scores! The multiple variations of spelling from every kind of Middle, Early Modern, Modern, and “New” Irish Gaelic! The abbreviations nobody else uses! And the tempos tallied up in half notes! Yes, enjoy it all, for now it can be yours.
It’s really not as bad as all my complaints would paint it, though. It’s got a good chunk of Irish religious poetry from both folk sources and great poets, and it sets them either to the melodies that go with them in tradition or with solid dignified tunes, most of them well-known. It even tries to create choral, liturgical sean-nós singing.
As an attempt to create a national Catholic hymnal in the Irish language, it was a magnificent try. The more I work with it, the more I see how others (like the great Sean O Riada) have built upon it. So even though I curse it, I recommend it too.
And I’m sure the Zoom function will be a great relief to my poor eyeballs. Heck, those scores look pretty legible when you jack them up to twice their size.
