Early Irish Literature and Law (2006–7)

The early Irish prose tale Airne Fíngein and the relevant material from the dindshenchas and other prose tales discussed represent both the origin and the loss of king’s sovereignty as deeply dependent on some source of supernatural knowledge. The status of any distinguished (or extraordinary) character in Early Irish literature, to a great extent, depends upon supernatural and otherworldly beings in the image of the pre-Christian past drawn by authors of the early Christian period. This article revisits the concepts of kingship and periphery in early Irish literature on the basis of a particular fragment from Airne Fíngein where connection between status and supernatural can be perceived and analysed.

White cows with red ears often appear in early Irish literature and folklore as signs of the fairy otherworld. Osborn Bergin suggested that there may be a historical basis for this folk motif. This paper takes up Bergin’s suggestion and further examines white, red-eared cattle and their appearance in early Irish literature.

Gender & History the thought of the Anglo-Saxon monastic theorist Aldhelm (c.639-709), for example, religious men and women partook, in Emma Pettit's words, of a 'shared invisible spiritual identity heavily indebted to masculinity'. Monks and nuns alike were enjoined to contend 'manfully ' (viriliter) in the battle against vices. The visible dimensions of religious life, however, from dress to demeanour, retained clear gender distinctions, and for Aldhelm the transition to religious life entailed a more dramatic break for men than for women. Elsewhere, hagiographers drew on different models of sanctity in characterising the transition to female religious life, from the transcending of gender through virile asceticism to the transformation of gender through spiritualised motherhood. Often, as Simon Coates has shown in his study of the vitae of the sixth-century abbess Radegund of Poitiers, hagiographers blended elements from these models. cross the diversity of early medieval models of sanctity (and their modern interpretations), chastity was a crucial sign of religious distinction. But chastity was also fragile, an 'unstable condition and easily lost among the pitfalls of the world'. From early Christianity onwards, sexual lapses were rude reminders to individuals and communities of the gender roles which religious orientation sought to reconfigure. When, in the early third century, Tertullian critiqued an emergent custom in Carthage for virgins who had renounced marriage to stand unveiled in church, he noted acerbically that after uncovering their heads many ended up covering their bellies in shame or resorting to abortion to prevent public disclosure of sexual sin. 9 From punitive retribution to the remedy of penance, responses to such lapses endeavoured to recover the communal experience of chastity and to contain the turbulence of sexual sin in communities of the chaste.

Thurneysen, Rudolf (1857–1940)

For at least one early Irish writer, it was Paris's face that launched a thousand ships. According to the twelfth-century Irish dynastic poem Clann Ollaman Uaisle Emna [Children of Ollam, the nobles of Emain] male beauty was the cause of the Trojan War and the war in Táin Bó Cúailnge, the central martial narrative of the Ulster cycle. The poem's prologue, which pairs characters from the Ulster sagas with counterparts chosen from the matter of Troy, equates Derdriu's lover Noísiu with Paris since "their beauty caused Troy and the Táin" [rena néim Troí ocus Táin]. (Alexander is the usual name for Paris in medieval Irish versions of the Trojan narrative.) Just as Paris's beauty caused the Trojan War, so Noísiu's beauty caused the war of the Táin.1 Clann Ollaman Uaisle Emna's radical revision of the Helen of Troy trope—changing the sex of the beautiful, blameworthy, object of desire—typifies the difference encountered by modern readers of Irish heroic literature. Irish sagas consistently represent beautiful male characters as objects of the gaze, but what this implies for structures of gender in medieval Irish culture is unclear. A useful point of departure for the study of gender and visuality in early Irish literature may be found in three sagas of the Ulster cycle that give special prominence to scenes of desirous looking: Táin Bó Fraích [Fráech's cattle-raid], Longes mac nUislenn [The exile of the sons of Uisliu], and Táin Bó Cúailnge [The cattle-raid of Cooley].KeywordsScopic EconomyMarriageable GirlDark PoolNarrative CinemaVisual PleasureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This study of the sister’s son in some of the major early Irish narratives, in religious verse, and in the laws (and including linguistic analysis of kindred terminology) shows that the relationship between sister’s son and maternal kindred is an important theme in the literature; the relationship can be amicable (and accordingly be greatly beneficial to society) or hostile (and greatly destructive of social order); the sister’s son must be integrated into society by means of a solemn contract; and the social good will be served only if the obligations imposed by that contract are duly discharged on both sides. The social role of the sister’s son can be summed up in the word goire, and this is reflected in gormac, which came to replace the inherited term nia as the designation of ‘sister’s son’.

Early Irish literature. By Eleanor Knott and Gerard Murphy. Introduction by James Carney. Pp viii, 205. London : Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1966. 32s. - Irish sagas. Edited by Myles Dillon. Pp 175. Cork : Mercier Press. Paperback. 1968. 10s. - Early Irish poetry. Edited by James Carney. Pp 99. Cork : Mercier Press. Paperback. 1965. 5s. - Volume 16 Issue 62

Táin Bó Cúailnge or the “Cattle Raid of Cooley” (TBC) is the most famous epic narrative in early Irish literature, having been brought to prominence in modern times by Thomas Kinsella’s iconic translation (1969). The origins of TBC were described by Kinsella as “far more ancient” than the medieval manuscripts that relate it and associated prequels to the tale, called remscéla. One of these, not included in Kinsella’s translation, is Táin Bó Fraích — “The raid of Fráoch’s cattle” (TBF). TBF comes in two discontinuous parts which differ in subject matter and style. We examine the structural relationships between TBF as presented by Leahy [Heroic Romances in Ireland (David Nutt, London, 1906)] and TBC from a social networks point of view and compare them with the seven smaller tales presented in Kinsella’s text. We find that network structures in Kinsella’s text — both TBC itself and the remscéla he selected — are similar to those in TBF, and somewhat moreso the first part than the second.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Irish Tradition. Robin Flower The Cycles of the Kings. Myles Dillon Early Irish Literature. Myles Dillon Early Irish History and Mythology. Thomas F. O'Rahilly Tom Peete CrossTom Peete Cross Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 46, Number 4May, 1949 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/388809 PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

In early Ireland, there were many names for what scholars have dubbed the ‘Otherworld’: the Plain of Delights, the Land of Youth, the Land of Promise, and more. Many of the myths and legends from this period involve an encounter between a hero and a woman from this Otherworld, with sufficient frequency to form a distinct theme within the literature. This book examines the particularities and consequences of these otherworldly encounters, attending in particular to the question of gender and the social dynamics at work. Five stories purportedly from the lost book Cín Dromma Snechta receive detailed analysis, alongside material from other sources, in order to reconstruct the mindset of the early Irish who told these stories about the Otherworld and their views about women in general.

In early Ireland, there were many names for what scholars have dubbed the 'Otherworld': the Plain of Delights, the Land of Youth, the Land of Promise, and more. Many of the myths and legends from this period involve an encounter between a hero and a woman from this Otherworld, with sufficient frequency to form a distinct theme within the literature. This book examines the particularities and consequences of these otherworldly encounters, attending in particular to the question of gender and the social dynamics at work. Five stories purportedly from the lost book Cín Dromma Snechta receive detailed analysis, alongside material from other sources, in order to reconstruct the mindset of the early Irish who told these stories about the Otherworld and their views about women in general.

Irish warriors opposed to the early saints are often wearing tattoos, described as diabolic signs by the hagiographers. Tattoo, Lat. stigma, Ir. rind, or crechad, has frequently been associated with the name of the Picts, and sometimes considered as a non Indo-European usage (Zimmer, N. Chadwick). But it must be admitted that tattooing has been widely practiced by Insular Celts. Among classical sources, Caesar only says that Bretons paint their body with woad (uitrum), but others (Herodian, Claudian, Solinus) refer precisely to tattooing by puncturing. They are all aware of the social meaning of tattoo, which they criticize as Barbarian. Isidore admits that it might be a mark of higher status. The Bible criticizes foreigners’tattoos (Leviticus) but S. Paul (Galatians, end) refers to his own stigmata as to glorious marks, comparable to the tattoos of Roman soldiers. These two contradictory views on tattoing are present in the early Irish literature : tattoo means paganism, or ruthless violence in the hagiographical literature, mais it might be considered as the distinct mark of heroes : though references to tattooing are rarely found in the early Irish sagas, this study endeavours to search for every available evidence.

Despite the indisputable importance of early Irish literature in European medieval thought and literature, its study has too often been restricted to the comparably few Celticists and Hiberno-Latinists. For the scholarly discourse to become truly interdisciplinary, anthologies such as this serve as welcome introductions to neophytes even while advancing our specialized knowledge. The volume presents some of the most stimulating contributions to the study of the [End Page 751] immrama: those four early Irish narratives interconnected by common themes (the travel from island to island), common motifs (e.g., that of the latecomers, the supernumeraries), common narrative structures, and a pervasive Christian peregrinatio ideal (pilgrimage overseas). And yet, each work carries its own distinct character, as well as its own philological problems. The most widespread voyage narrative that may have influenced the other four, the legend of St. Brendan, is known both through the Latin Navigatio Sancti Brendani of the late eighth century (if we follow Dumville's dating, p. 131) and the various texts of the Vita Brendani.

The representation of women as fantasy objects in Irish culture has a long history stretching back through the ages from Old Irish (written before 950ce), to Middle Irish (950–1200ce) and Early Modern Irish (1200ce to the 1700s).1 The earliest extant literature was written during a period of social transition and, while based on pagan oral tradition, it was transcribed by Christian writers. Consequently it is difficult to determine what the original pagan tradition must have actually been, as it was buried under centuries of interpretive and translational palimpsests. While early Irish literature was constantly re-worked into the new Christian mythopoeic system, it was not interrupted or broken up by that system but merely transformed into the new Christian ethos. Between the early Irish and the nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish traditions, however, there was definite schism. The new modifications were due to several contingent factors, as Rosalind Clark suggests: ‘the change from an independent to a colonial Ireland, the change from the Irish to the English language, new social mores, and, finally, new standards of literary convention and taste. As the society and its ideals and beliefs altered, the literature and its portrayal of women altered.’2 Clark contends that the Anglo-Irish authors ‘knew little of the dying Irish tradition until they discovered it by means of laborious scholarship.

Though medieval Irish literature is awash with characters described as ‘heroes’ by scholars and the public alike, such as Cú Chulainn and Finn mac Cumailll, what precisely is meant when we describe these characters as heroic remains uncertain. This project argues that, based on an intensive comparative study of two hundred and fifty-one medieval Irish works of heroic literature, drawn predominantly from the seventh through the fifteenth centuries, that there are six common qualities connecting medieval Irish heroes. These six qualities do not exist in a vacuum they emerged in response to cultural factors and were modified as society developed. At least two of the qualities are potentially based in ancient Celtic cultural practices described by Classical authors, while others appear to be rooted in medieval Irish aristocratic lifestyles. All six qualities change as they are influenced by historical events that shift how medieval Ireland conceptualizes aristocratic violence, such as the Norse and Norman invasions.