Introduction: Medieval Literature and Contemporary Irish Writing

Abstract

The invitation to Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Bernard O’Donoghue, and Frank McGuinness to contribute the following set of papers to the Irish University Review was prompted by the 2013 International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (ISAS) conference in Dublin, organised by Mary Clayton of University College Dublin and Alice Jorgensen of Trinity College Dublin. The conference was the largest ISAS gathering to date, with 210 delegates. Its theme was ‘Insular Cultures’, focusing on the connections between Britain and Ireland in the early Middle Ages. One of the highlights was the reading in the National Museum by Seamus Heaney on 29 July – one of his last public appearances – in which he read translations and poems inspired by Old English and Old Irish poetry, including part of his Beowulf, his very early ‘Trial Pieces’, whose starting point was the Wood Quay excavations of Viking Dublin, his version of the Old English ‘Deor’, ‘Colmcille the Scribe’, and ‘St Kevin and the Blackbird’. It was obvious from the reading how steeped Heaney was in the medieval literatures of both islands. Heaney’s Beowulf, like his translations of Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables (2009), owes an obvious debt to the texts of Old and Middle English literature that were standard on university curricula on both sides of the Irish Sea up to recently. Other contemporary Irish writing also bears witness to this influence, such as the many versions of Old English poems by Irish poets in The Word Exchange (2010), edited by Greg Delanty and Michael Matto, which includes translations by Greg Delanty, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, Eavan Boland, Ciaran Carson, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Bernard O’Donoghue, and many others as diverse as Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer (2006), Frank McGuinness’s play Someone to Watch Over Me, and Bernard O’Donoghue’s verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In order to mark the occasion of the 2013 ISAS conference, hosted for the first time in Ireland and with its focus on pre-conquest connections and exchanges