A landscape of words. Ireland, Britain and the poetics of space, 700–1250 by Amy Mulligan

Abstract

Reviewed by: A landscape of words. Ireland, Britain and the poetics of space, 700–1250 by Amy Mulligan A. Joseph McMullen (bio) Amy Mulligan, A landscape of words. Ireland, Britain and the poetics of space, 700–1250. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1-5261-4110-1. xii + 251 pages. $120 (hardcover), $36.95 (paperback). The field of Celtic Studies has had to wait a long time for the next word on the medieval Irish ‘environmental imagination.’ With A landscape of words, however, Amy Mulligan has made that wait more than worth it. This scintillating book persuasively argues for an Irish poetics of space—a deep interconnection between landscape and words at the very core of place-making in the literature from and about medieval Ireland. It is this attention to ‘verbal topographies,’ as well as the various readers and audiences of these works, that separates A landscape of words from other studies. Mulligan digs deeply into a wide range of texts—from immrama to the dindshenchas, from vitae to ethnographies—to tell a new story about a well-known feature of early Irish literature. A landscape of words not only further excavates ‘one of the richest and most complex bodies of medieval topographical writing’ (3), it reveals how central the writing of these literary landscapes was to the poets, authors, and redactors of medieval Ireland. The first two chapters are connected by an interest in journeying and pathfinding. In Chapter 1, Mulligan puts Adomnán’s De locis sanctis and Vita Sancti Columbae in conversation with the Navigatio Sancti Brendani and Immram curaig Maíle Dúin. She explains how Adomnán ‘transmits an embodied, sense-based engagement with the Holy Land’ (26) that allows his audience to inhabit holy sites through their imaginations. This spatial practice is expanded in his Life of Columba, where closer (but potentially dangerous) places can be visited by the Iona community. Mulligan then argues for the presence of similar literary conventions at work in Irish voyage tales. Developing the concept of ‘boat as book’ (42), she examines how the audiences of the Navigatio and immrama might themselves ‘row-about’ in the narratives. Much like how the voyagers [End Page 255] must undertake spiritual journeys before reaching the promised land, readers of these texts can also undergo transformative experiences through contemplation. Chapter 2 moves inland to the Ulster Cycle and the figure of Cú Chulainn, ‘heroic Ireland’s most productive and conscientious place-maker’ (67). Rather than focusing solely on Táin bó Cúailnge, Mulligan considers how Ireland’s most famous hero is entwined with the natural world throughout his heroic biography. She examines, first, his ‘spatial precocity’ (69) in Compert Con Culainn and the Macgnímrada (from the Táin), especially in terms of wayfinding and border crossing/guarding, before considering topographical language and eroticism in Tochmarc Emire. The Táin itself suggests that Cú Chulainn is a successful warrior in large part because of his mastery of placelore. Through and because of this knowledge, Cú Chulainn becomes enmeshed in the landscape: the natural world, in turn, supports him (especially in the form of rivers) and he frequently uses inscriptions on stone and trees to communicate (this focus on textuality returns later in an analysis of Siaburcharpat Con Culaind). Furthermore, in the Táin and Mesca Ulad, the destruction of the landscape asks readers to consider the violence of war. The third chapter offers an important new study on the Dindshenchas Érenn collections of stories dedicated to how places got their names. Though the dindshenchas tales have begun to receive more attention recently, they remain still vastly underappreciated. Mulligan takes great strides in this chapter to rectify that, paying particular attention to the poets of the verse compositions and their audiences. It is also not a surprise that this chapter is at the core of her book, given its focus of the poetics of space via the construction of literary landscapes. Reading these poems as ‘verbalized topographies’ and ‘extensive virtual landscapes’ (110) which encourage a view of ‘landscape as literature and text as territory’ (114), Mulligan argues that the dindshenchas ‘became the national landscape as created, preserved and performed by the...