Irish - Pangur Bán

‘White Pangur’: A scholar and his cat

This is one of the most familiar Old Irish poems and tells the story of a scholar and his cat, white Pangur. It survives in a single manuscript, the St Paul Codex, folio 1 verso now in the monastery of St Paul in Carinthia. Gregory Toner has argued that the cat functions as a metaphor for the poet’s scholarly activity and thus this poem, like many other medieval Irish compositions, is a sophisticated reflection on God’s creativity (‘Messe ocus Pangur Bán: Structure and Cosmology’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 57 (2009), pp. 1–22).