Varia II. Middle-Irish turtur

Abstract

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3318/ERIU.2019.69.6 Ériu lxix (2019) 179–184 Royal Irish Academy VARIA II Middle-Irish turtur1 DIL lemmatises two distinct words homographically as turtur.2 The first is, unproblematically, an unaltered Latin loan-word, meaning ‘turtle-dove’ . The second, hapax legomenon and undefined in DIL, occurs in the Rennes Dindṡenchas at §31, which purports to explain the place-name Ráith Cnámrossa: Rath Cnamrossa, canas roainmniged? Ni ansa. Mac cecht mac Sloide Seiched do Connachtaib roalt Lee Fer Flatha mac Conaire. Is é rotesairg a[c] togail Bruidne da Derga cona forruim i cobraid a sceith in mac, 7 rom-brui 7 rom-baid turtur 7 treinimteacht in miledh 7 tæscad 7 tesbach a fola, corondecca hi Corraib Ednecha, 7 ni fuair acht carnail cnam comai[g]de 7 topachta a cobraid dia scieth, 7 fosceird in cnamfros sin inde, 7 ros-adnacht iarsodoin, et [unde] Cnamros dicitur. Stokes translates thus, leaving turtur italicised and accompanied by the mark of query: [Ráith Cnámrossa: whence was it named? Not difficult.] Mac cecht son of Slaite Seched of Connaught fostered Lee Fer Flatha son of Conaire. ’Tis he that at the Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel rescued the boy and laid him in the hollow of his shield, wherein the turtur (?) and vehement going of the soldier, and the pouring forth and heat of his blood shattered and drowned the boy, so that he died in Corra Ednecha, and of him Mac cecht found in the shield-hollow nought save a heap of broken and severed bones. So in the rath he lays down that bone-shower (cnám-ḟros), and afterwards buried it.Whence Cnámros is said.3 There is no doubt as to the correct reading of the word, which is represented in the manuscript by the combination of t and superscript ur compendium , written twice.4 Although the dindṡenchas of Ráith Cnámrossa is 1 Special thanks are due to Kevin Murray, who first brought this passage and word to my attention, and to Anthony Harvey, the editors of Ériu and the anonymous reader of this paper for suggesting improvements to my draft. 2 See the e-DIL entries dil.ie/42548 and dil.ie/42549. 3 Whitley Stokes, ‘The prose tales in the Rennes Dindṡenchas’, RC 15 (1894), 272–336, 418–84; 16 (1895), 31–83, 135–67 , 270–312: 15, 333–4 §31.An emendation to Stokes’s translation [reading déccaid ‘looks at’ rather than a form of éccaid ‘dies’ in corondecca ‘looked at him’] was suggested by Damian McManus. Stokes’s edition is based on Rennes, Bibliothèque de Rennes Métropole, MS 598 (olim 15489), fol. 100va40-b17 . 4 At fol. 100va45. 180 Joseph J. Flahive lacking in some other manuscripts or explained by a different, Fenian story (which, in the Rennes manuscript that Stokes edited, follows the anecdote discussed here), alternative readings for turtur are not found in manuscripts that do contain the tale presented above: the form of the word is confirmed by other good copies of the text, including those in the Book of Ballymote5 and the Book of Lecan.6 Some clue to the meaning may be gleaned from the context. The language of this brief passage on Ráith Cnámrossa is in a style that features alliterating pairings and parallel constructions: rom-brui 7 rom-baid; tæscad 7 tesbach a fola; and it also includes an additional pair in which the parallel construction does not bear the alliteration: carnail cnam comai[g]de 7 topachta.7 On this account, there would be an antecedent probability that turtur 7 treinimteacht would form a similarly related pair semantically as well as alphabetically. The proposal made here is that the lexeme turtur is a borrowing from the Late-Latin noun tortura, and that this hypothesis provides a sensible and appropriate meaning in the context of its occurrence. Tortura is a derivative of the verb torquere, which carries the broad range of meaning ‘twist, turn; torture; bend, distort; rotate, spin; shoot out’ .This substantive occurs in many Late-Antique and early-mediaeval texts, including a...