Gerard Collins

This story began when I first met the ‘Four Masters’ of Irish history on a small bridge in the Bundrowes area of County Leitrim. I was still a teenager and out walking with my father on a bright, warm, summer’s evening when we came to a small stone bridge over the river Drobhaise. The only sound to be heard was the quiet gurgling of the rich, brown water below us. As we started to walk across that lonely bridge, we came to a commemoration stone situated on the raised wall along the side of the bridge. When we looked at it closely, it told us about the four historians and how they had set out from that spot to compile a history of Ireland. That chance discovery of the ‘Four Masters’ of Irish history, was the spark that began my interest in this topic and the very origin of this novel. The Annals of the Four Masters, as it has become known, is a manuscript written in the Gaelic language between 1632 and 1636, it was written close to that stone bridge in a small house on the Donegal Leitrim border. The ‘Annals’ were an ambitious attempt to record the entire history of the people of Ireland, over a period of thousands of years. The first section of the ‘Annals’ relies heavily on several earlier manuscripts, written by Celtic Monks, from the eleventh century and before. These original manuscripts refer to The Book of Invasions, or The Lebor Gabála Erenn. The Book of Invasions is the source material for this novel. While modern historians believe that some of the elements of the ‘Annals,’ are based on medieval pseudo-histories, there are other elements which are based on the ancient, oral mythologies of the Irish people, passed on through the generations by storytellers and bards. The leader of the ‘Four Masters’, Micheál O’Clerigh, was himself from a ‘Bardic’ or storytelling family.

Hi, my name is Gerard. Thank you for taking the time to visit this page. The Legend of Silver Arm is my first experience of attempting to write a novel. How successful that experience has been, I leave up to you, the reader, to decide.