Heroes of their time: The development of heroism in early Irish literature

A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain and the Poetics of Space, 700–1250

THE SHOCK OF THE OLD: TRANSLATING EARLY IRISH POETRY INTO MODERN IRISH KAARINA HOLLO twentieth-century readers of English without a knowledge of Old Irish (ca. 600–900 a.d.) or Middle Irish (ca. 900–1200 a.d.) were given reasonably good access to early medieval Irish poetry through the medium of the translation anthology. Through the efforts of Kuno Meyer, Robin Flower, Gerard Murphy, Frank O’Connor, and others, a good amount of early Irish verse written between the seventh and twelfth centuries was made available to English-language audiences.1 But what of translation of this poetry into Modern Irish? Who undertook this task, for what reasons, and to what effect? From the very beginnings of the Gaelic Literary Revival, there had been calls for the translation of medieval Irish literature into Modern Irish. The ordinary reader of Modern Irish would not be able to make much sense of an early medieval Irish story or poem. Thus, at the time, in order to access a substantial portion of the medieval literary tradition, a Modern Irish speaker would generally turn to English translations provided in more or less scholarly editions or to the more literary reworkings provided, again in English, by the likes of Lady Gregory (1902, 1904) and Standish O’Grady (1878–80, 1894). Learning the earlier forms of the language was a daunting task, not one that the average reader of Irish with an interest in the earlier literature could be expected to undertake. This meant that the Irish reader’s experience of older Irish texts was essentially mediated by English. In 1900 the perceived need for translations directly from the ancestral language into Modern Irish was formally acknowledged by the OireachTRANSLATING EARLY IRISH POETRY INTO MODERN IRISH 54 1 See, for example, Meyer 1911; Flower 1926; Murphy 1956; Greene and O’Connor 1967. For a thorough discussion of the ideological and political dimensions of translation from Old and Middle Irish into English, see Tymoczko 1999. I wish to thank the joint editors of this volume for their thoughtful and constructive comments on several drafts of this paper. tas2 in the institution of a prize for “the best modernized version of a tale or episode from Old or Middle Irish” (O’Leary 1994:233). Philip O’Leary has identified three main rationales for such modernization: (1) an awareness of the linguistic, historical, and cultural value of the early literature; (2) ideological grounds; and (3) a view of medieval Irish literature as providing a model for modern writing in Irish (1994:268–70). It is hard to disentangle the three, and separating them risks reductionism: for example, there is certainly an ideological element to the belief that medieval Irish literature is intrinsically valuable and that it can provide a model for contemporary authors. Speaking of the period 1922–39, O’Leary writes that what Gaelic activists wanted was for native scholars to use their learning to enrich contemporary Irish reality by restoring to the nation an authentic and accessible sense of its own past. In practical terms one of the central features of this project would be the immediate provision of competent Modern Irish versions, translations, of the full range of earlier Irish literature. (1998:201) The translation efforts undertaken on this front were almost exclusively from the prose tradition. Until the mid-twentieth century, verse seems to have been more or less ignored. The great early Irish prose narratives such as Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cúailnge, modern “Cooley”) were seen as constitutive of and more essential to Irish national identity than were the religious, personal, and love poems from the same period. Therefore earlier translation efforts were centered on the prose, but by mid-century, with Irish political independence a reality, it was possible to turn to works that could not be so easily pressed into the mold of a heroic national ethos, such as lyric verse.3 We will focus here on the translations done by two men, both of them significant figures in the mid-twentieth-century Irish literary world. Tomás Ó Floinn published two collections of Modern Irish translations from Old and Middle Irish: Athbheo (Alive Again or...

A Woman's Words is the first in-depth analysis of Middle Irish literature from a feminist standpoint, and the first formal critical discussion of the representation of female speech in medieval Irish literature. Joanne Findon analyses the representation of Emer, the wife of the great Irish hero Cu Chulainn, in four linked medieval Irish tales, and discusses Emer's ability to use powerful, effective words to change her fictional world and the audience's reading of that fictional world. A Woman's Words considers Emer as a literary figure rather than a mythic archetype or a reflection of a pre-Christian Celtic goddess. Emer and the narratives she inhabits are discussed as literary constructs, and are considered within the historical and legal milieu in which these tales were told, recorded, and read. Findon places Emer within the wider context of medieval literature in general as an unusual and compelling example of a heroic secular woman, married and fully integrated into her aristocratic society and yet capable of speaking out against its abuses. Her freedom to speak and be heard is remarkable in the light of prevalent later medieval impulses to silence women. By employing speech act theory to analyse Emer's discourse, and by viewing and interpreting the texts through the lens of current feminist criticism, Joanne Findon seeks to bring Middle Irish literature into the arena of current debates, particularly among feminist medievalists, and to offer a new approach to reading female characters in medieval Irish literature.

The present study briefly considers the vernacular terminology used to describe figurative language in medieval Irish literature, and then offers an analysis of three explicitly allegorical episodes from medieval Irish narrative texts (two in the vernacular and one in Latin) as preliminary groundwork in assessing whether literature which is not explicitly allegorical, but which shares the same images and motifs as explicitly allegorical literature, might also be read as allegory. The three case studies in question provide allegorical depictions of men of learning or of learning itself. This paper suggests that the nature of medieval Irish education, with its focus on grammatica, including enarratio, and, at a more advanced level, exegesis, would have facilitated the exposition of literature on a figurative level, and that this should have significant implications for the way that we read medieval Irish narrative poetry and prose.

Myth and History in Celtic and Scandinavian Traditions

In early Ireland tales were told by official storytellers at great public assemblies and storytellers also provided entertainment in noble households. These were learned and, it would appear, professional storytellers, who were rewarded for their art, and mention is made of them in various contexts in early Irish literature. In the tragic story of ‘The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu’, for example, dating fromabout the beginning of the ninth century, such a storyteller (scélaige) is met with. He is Feidhlimid mac Daill, the father of Deirdre (of the Sorrows) and he is the storyteller of Conchobhar Mac Nessa, king of Ulster. The story implies that Feidhlimid is a man of substance and social standing as he is entertaining the king and his retinue in his house (Windisch 1880: I, 67, lines 2-3). Other storytellers are also glimpsed in medieval Irish literature, and extant tale-lists show that the professional activity of the file or learned poet included storytelling, and that his repertoire consisted of a large corpus of tales for narrating ‘to kings, princes and noblemen’ (Mac Cana 1980: 15-16, 137; Rees 1961: 16).

A rich and varied corpus of written material has survived from medieval Ireland, much of it concerned with providing an extended account of Ireland’s past. Through the technology of writing, a constructed history was created in which the art of writing itself functioned as process and as theme. Inscriptions and manuscripts bear witness to the mechanics of writing, while the development of letters and language is explored in origin-stories in significant ways. The power of the word was important, but so was control of the landscape, ordering society, taming space. Land-clearing, building settlements, and refining tools form a prominent strand in the account of Ireland’s beginnings, particularly in medieval Irish narratives of place; how fire was mastered; when and why were mills introduced. In explaining the past and so shaping the present, the technology of writing presented a story of technologies of other kinds, a selection of which is presented in this chapter on technology, writing, and place in medieval Irish literature.

Reviews 103 volume is a great pleasure to read. I have a single desire for improvement: the otherwise legible, elegant font is inconsistent in rendering lower-case italic ‘a’, which in some places appears proportionately together with its partners (see p. 86), yet elsewhere manifests an unusually low, squat counter (as at p. 138). This is perhaps a niggling criticism. However, one’s eye meets with that letter-form repeatedly. References Boll, Sheila. 2002. Foster-kin in conflict. Fosterage as a character motivation in medieval Irish literature. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge. Ní Bhaoill, Róise. 2010. Ulster Gaelic voices. Bailiúchán Wilhelm Doegen 1931. Béal Feirste: Ultach. Ó Corráin, Donnchadh. 1979. Onomata. Ériu 30: 165–180. ———. 2017. Clavis litterarum Hibernensium. Medieval Irish books & texts (c. 400—c. 1600). Turnhout: Brepols. Ó hInnse, Séamus. 1943. Fosterage in early and mediaeval Ireland. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University College Dublin. O’Rahilly, Thomas F. (ed.). 1926. Dánta grádha. An anthology of Irish love poetry (a.d. 1350–1750)2 . Cork: Cork University Press. ———. 1946. Early Irish history and mythology. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Parkes, Peter. 2006. Celtic fosterage. Adoptive kinship and clientage in northwest Europe. Comparative studies in society and history 48: 359–395. Smit, Johannes Wilhelmus. 1971. Studies in the language and style of Columba the Younger (Columbanus). Amsterdam : Hakkert. Tolstoy, Nikolai. 2009. The oldest British prose literature. The compilation of the four branches of the Mabinogi. Lewiston , NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Walker, G. S. M. (ed. & trans.). 1957. Sancti Columbani opera. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Gilbert Márkus, Conceiving a nation. Scotland to ad 900. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. ISBN 978–0–7486–7898–3. xiv + 295 pages. £70 (hardback) / £19.99 (paperback /e-book). Patrick Wadden Belmont Abbey College The early medieval history of northern Britain, with its legacy of Roman borders, the presence of several different peoples (Picts, Gaels, Britons, Anglo-Saxons, and Scandinavians ), and shortage of surviving textual sources, presents unique questions and obstacles for the modern scholar. In this engaging book, Gilbert Márkus deals with these in a conPatrick Wadden [patrickwadden@​ bac​ .edu] is Associate Professor of History at Belmont Abbey College, North Carolina. His interests focus on the political and cultural links that existed between the different part of the Gaelic world and on the place of the Gaels in the broader Insular and European worlds of the Middle Ages. 104 North American journal of Celtic Studies fident and compelling way. The result is a work that manages to be both informative and sophisticated and that will be of interest to students and more advanced scholars alike. As the first volume of the New History of Scotland, this book replaces Alfred Smyth’s Warlords and holy men of 1984. Recent decades have witnessed innovative changes in our approaches to medieval sources that emphasize the dangers and difficulties of reading texts written in later periods as sources for earlier events. Simultaneously, revolutions in our understanding of such crucial concepts as frontiers and ethnicity have fundamentally altered our view of early societies. Informed by these recent historiographical trends (vii–ix), Márkus provides a thorough overview of the period, while also attempting to reframe certain debates. After a brief preface, the book consists of six chapters. The first, sub-titled ‘Trade, culture and empire in the early centuries’, deals with the earliest recorded history of what is now Scotland through to the end of the Roman period. The author demonstrates an impressive breadth of knowledge in setting events in northern Britain not only in the context of events farther south on the island, but also in relation to developments elsewhere, particularly other frontier zones. He also uses archaeological and epigraphical evidence well to augment the scant historical records of the period. Gone is the image of the ‘Celtic fringe’ of Europe and, in its stead, we are presented with the image of northern Britain as already in contact with the rest of Europe before the arrival of the Romans. The next chapter, on the development of sub-Roman kingdoms, deals with the emergence of the polities familiar to students of early medieval northern Britain, including Dál...

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.

Seanchas: Studies in Early Medieval Irish Archaelogy, History and Literature in Honour of F. J. Byrne

Journal Article Seanchas: Studies in Early and Medieval Irish Archaeology, History and Literature in Honour of Francis J. Byrne, Alfred P. Smyth Get access Colmán Etchingham Colmán Etchingham National University of Ireland, Maynooth Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 116, Issue 466, April 2001, Pages 453–454, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/116.466.453 Published: 01 April 2001

Seanchas: Studies in Early and Medieval Irish Archaeology, History and Literature in Honour of Francis J. Byrne, Alfred P. Smyth Get access Colmán Etchingham Colmán Etchingham National University of Ireland, Maynooth Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 116, Issue 466, April 2001, Pages 453–454, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/116.466.453 Published: 01 April 2001

The environmental sense of text as image evoked by the color-term glas requires further examining of the Otherworld trope in relation to early medieval visual theory. The “problem” of landscape in Tain Bo Cuailnge and its context in the Ulster cycle provides a place to start. The Celticist Francesco Benozzo notes that Tain Bo Cuailnge offers “mere allusions to landscapes, sometimes so vague that they seem to belong to a stylised convention.” But the Tain’s allusive landscape also has been highlighted by an able translator, Thomas Kinsella (among many others), for showcasing topography, “a continuing preoccupation of early and medieval Irish literature.” While the Tain in successive versions does not feature modern-style landscape, it is grounded and focused on places, spaces, and terrain on Ireland, mythically contextualized around the time of Christ. To read the Tain as a literary landscape that in a modern sense is “not there” but nonetheless integrates tradition with physical topography is necessarily to consider its context in the Ulster Cycle and related stories in the Mythological Cycle, all featuring landscape in which otherworldly and human realms interweave with natural topography. The role of such landscape echoes textually Ernst Gombrich’s view of the function of colors in visual art as Benozzo restates it, metonymic in at once being part of reality and representing it,3 but with words in topography taking the place of colors in images. The landscape of the Tain as textual image related to environment subverts Augustine’s paralleling and hierarchizing of reading over viewing, so influential in the West.4

Taking its starting point from the current trend towards using Indo-European comparative material for elucidating Scandinavian Bronze Age rock art sites, this article develops an interpretation of the overall iconographic program of the Massleberg Stora Skee rock art panel in Bohuslän, southern Sweden. It focuses on the hunting scene which forms one of the centerpieces of the site and poses the question of how this hunting scene relates to the remaining iconographic elements of the panel, especially the ships and footprints, and to the water flowing over the rock. Using analogies drawn from Old French “Breton lays,” medieval Irish and Welsh literature, and the archaeology of the Hallstatt period (the Strettweg cult wagon), it is possible to develop an interpretation which connects the hunt with the communication between the human world and an “Otherworld” and to show how such an interpretation can tie in with the other iconographic as well as natural elements of the site. On this basis, the article concludes with a general discussion of the use of typological analogies versus the application of concepts of Indo-European heritage for the analysis of Scandinavian rock art and discusses the wider applicability of the “Otherworld” term as an analytical concept.

This short article reviews some of the colonial underpinnings of the field of Medieval Irish Studies (a subdiscipline of Celtic Studies), using the career of Whitley Stokes (1830–1909) as a case study in the entanglements between British colonial activity in India and the development of philological research on medieval Irish literature in the 19th century. It then proceeds to use autoethnographic reflections from graduate students in the field of Medieval Irish Studies whose backgrounds locate them at various intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. These reflections offer constructive pathways toward working to decolonise the discipline.