Celtica 29 by Barry J. Lewis, Ruair� � hUiginn (review)

Abstract

North American journal of Celtic Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1 (May 2019) Copyright © 2019 by The Ohio State University REVIEWS Celtica 29 (2017), ed. Barry J. Lewis & Ruairí Ó hUiginn. School of Irish Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. ISSN 0069–1399. ISBN 978–1–85500–233–3. vi + 329 pages. €35. Brian Frykenberg Andover, MA This very rich volume commences with a short piece by Donnchadh Ó Corráin, who regretfully did not live to see its publication. In ‘A crux in the fourth letter of Columbanus ’ (1–5), Prof. Ó Corráin weighs Walker’s 1957 emendation of the text in question from seventeenth-century transcriptions (the original now lost) against W. J. Smit’s 1971: 242–243 ingenious critique of the same. The edited passage reads sed Fedolio modo referente eorum teporem pene meum tulit animum ‘but when Fedolius just reported their coolness he quite took my mind from that’ (Columbanus’ desire to visit the gentes and preach the gospel) (Walker 1957: 30 §5). Like Smit, Ó Corráin rejects Walker’s emendation of the corrupt text to ‘Fedolius’, a name that is taken from a poem attributed to Columbanus dating at least as late as the ninth century. While Smit took the passage to begin with ablative absolute sed fel inodo modo referente . . . ‘but when the synod reported their coolness, the venom quite took my mind off that’, Ó Corráin, instead, first observes how odd such a synod, addressing ‘the attitude of supposed pagan or semi-pagan populations (gentes)’, would be; next, he notes that both Smit and Walker have taken the sense of gentes too narrowly; third, he contextualizes the troublesome passage in terms of Columbanus’ distress in Burgundy at the time of writing (ca. 610); and lastly, he resolves the ‘crux’: Metzler ’s transcription of the corrupt text in the Bobbio manuscript (St. Gall, Stiftsbibliothek Brian Frykenberg [frykenberg@​ comcast​ .net] is an Associate of the Department of Celtic Languages & Literatures at Harvard University, and Coordinator of ‘Boston and the Irish Language’, a Mass Humanities digital oral history project sponsored by Cumann na Gaeilge i mBoston and hosted by the Open Archives at the University of Massachusetts — Boston http://​ openarchives​ .umb​ .edu/​ cdm/​ landingpage/​ collection/​ p15774coll11. He has published work on Suibhne Geilt and on the Celtic Wild-Man Legend. Reviews 95 Sang. 1346) reads fee.modo; that of Fr. Patrick Fleming’s 1623 Collectanea sacra seu Columbani . . . acta et opuscula (ed. Thomas Sheeran, Louvain, 1627) reads fel.modo. In each case, the Latin appears to indicate an underlying Irish *Felmedo (al. Felmeda, gen. sg. of *Felmed, ‘a dialectal syncopated form of Fedelmid’). Referring the reader to early forms of the name in ogam and in Old Irish, Prof. Ó Corráin points to the genealogy of Uí Ḟelmeda, son of Énna Cennselach of south Leinster. He notes that the status of the eponym may account for the name ‘Tilach (al. Tulach) Meic Felmeda . . . the townland and parish of Tullowphelim al. Tullow, barony of Rathvilly, Co. Carlow, in the dynastic lands of Uí Ḟelmeda’ appearing in saints’ genealogies; that ‘Columbanus came from Leinster’; and that ‘it is possible that one of his followers was closely associated with the ruling south Leinster dynasty’. In ‘Aduỽyn gaer yssyd. An early Welsh poem revisited’ (6–37), Paul Russell offers readers a reassessment of the Book of Taliesin poem known as Etmic Dinbych, providing us not only with close discussion of previous scholarship, including of course the editions by Sir Ifor Williams and by Geraint Gruffydd, but also with an analysis of content, form, and poetic, social, and historical context, concluding with a new diplomatic text, an edited text with translation, and notes. Prof. Russell entitles the poem Aduỽyn gaer yssyd considering how incomplete the marginal designation is to which we owe the familiar title, yet, indeed, also because of significant repetition of this phrase, which commences each awdl initiated by a capital letter. In attending to these and other scribal considerations, to the absence of strict syllable count, and to occasional sufficiency of a gair cyrch to compensate for end-rhyme, he avoids ‘preemptive editing’. He also shuns what perhaps are overly martial interpretations given by the poem’s other...