This short piece was written by a monk in the margin of an Irish manuscript of Priscian's Institutiones grammaticae (the Stiftsbibliothek MS 904 at the Abbey of St. Gallen). The poem's author welcomes a stormy night free from the risk of attacking Vikings, and supplies us with our earliest attestation of the Irish name for Scandinavia.

"Is acher in gáeth" read in reconstructed Old Irish pronunciation

"Literature taken in through the eyes can attract us, at best, by its content. If the content is dull or beyond our ken, we have no other path to familiarity except stubbornness, and life is really too short for much of that. But by reading it aloud we have the chance become intimate with it first, and that intimacy will hold our attention long enough to let our interest be appealed to a second and third time. Surely that is how many native readers come to learn classical literature in the first place. As in an arranged marriage, love is sometimes born more of familiarity than of passion. That secret of teaching is known in all the long-lived literate cultures of the world, and we would do well to heed it today. We learn must learn to be our own illiterate nannies, and sing Hànbûn into memory like the lullabies of childhood"

— David Branner

"Is acher in gáeth" read in reconstructed Old Irish pronunciation

A. Z. Foreman