Book Of Lecan Research Articles

Bronner, Dagmar (ed.): Three historical poems on Tuathal Techtmar and the bórama from the Book of Lecan. Edition, translation and commentary. Berlin: Curach Bhán Publications, 2017. 186 pp. ISBN: 978-3- 942002-32-5. € 27,50.

Article Bronner, Dagmar (ed.): Three historical poems on Tuathal Techtmar and the bórama from the Book of Lecan. Edition, translation and commentary. Berlin: Curach Bhán Publications, 2017. 186 pp. ISBN: 978-3- 942002-32-5. € 27,50. was published on December 22, 2021 in the journal Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie (volume 68, issue 1).

Varia II. Middle-Irish turtur

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...

Echtra Cormaic Maic Airt, “The Adventure of Cormac Mac Airt”

The Irish tale recounting the fabulous adventures in “The Land of Promise” of King Cormac Mac Airt, who according to the Annals reigned in the third century A.D., survives in several recensions. The first recension forms part of the text called [Seél na Fír Flatha], Echtra Cormaic i Tir Tairngiri, ocus Ceart Claidib Cormaic, “The Tale of the Ordeals, Cormac's Adventure in the Land of Promise, and the Decision as to Cormac's Sword”, which has been published by Whitley Stokes on the basis of the extant copies in two late fourteenth century MSS, The Book of Ballymote and The Yellow Book of Lecan. As these two copies exhibit only minor, insignificant variations in their readings, they would seem to derive from a common exemplar or archetype. The age of this common exemplar or archetype remains, however, a matter for conjecture. The linguistic evidence at least suggests that the text as transmitted antedates the actual compilation of the MSS by some two hundred years, for linguistically it hardly can be much later in date than the version of Acallamh na Senórach, “The Colloquy of the Ancients”, which Whitley Stokes has edited. Now since Acallamh na Senórach was composed about the middle of the twelfth century, the text of the first recension in its present state of transmission probably was written sometime between A.D. 1150–1200, whereas the exemplar or archetype upon which it is based was, of course, made at an earlier period.

The Lecan Text of the Battle of Cenn Abrat

The battle of Cenn Abrat forms part of the story known as The Battle of Mag Mucrama and is told in §§ 10-14 of Stokes' edition (RC 13, 440). It is recorded in the Annals of Tigernach (RC 17, 10) and by the Four Masters, A.D. 186. There is, however, a longer account which appears as a separate story and is preserved in two manuscripts, The Book of Lecan (15th century) and RIA C i 2 (15th-16th centuries.) The occasion of the battle is not mentioned here, but according to the tradition of the Battle of Mag Mucrama, a dispute arose between Lugaid Mac Con and his foster brother Éogan son of Oilill Ólom, king of Munster, about a fairy musician they had found, each of them claiming the musician for himself. The king decided in favour of Éogan, and Lugaid said that it was a false judgement.

Two Tales about Find

To Professor Kuno Meyer, whose death was an irreparable loss to Celtic scholarship, belongs the credit of first editing these two tales,' but at the time of publication he knew only of their existence in Ms. D.iv.22 of the Royal Irish Academy. In this Ms., both texts occur in a corrupt state, for the scribe reproduced his source very inaccurately, since he did not always understand what he was transcribing and also wearied of his task.' He has, in consequence, distorted several words to such an extent that they can no longer be identified, and on two occasions he has omitted verbs which are vital to the sense. Apart from these scribal lapses, the Ms is badly rubbed at one spot, so that approximately five lines are no longer legible. It is, therefore, not surprising that Meyer was unable to provide a perfect translation of the tales in question, but that he succeeded so well despite the difficulties with which he was faced deserves the warmest praise of all scholars. Fortunately, however, as Meyer himself later discovered,4 both of these tales are also preserved in the Yellow Book of Lecans which affords a much better, though by no means faultless, text. In this codex there is a small triangular rent which has obliterated a few letters and even words, but these lacunae can be supplied from D.iv.2. On the other hand, the lines which cannot be read in D.iv.2 are quite legible in the Yellow Book of Lecan. Since in almost every way the Yellow Book of Lecan provides a superior text, it has been considered advisable to re-edit these tales on the basis of this codex,6 and to indicate the important variant readings from D.iv.2 in the footnotes. For the sake of completeness, a fresh translation7 is also offered which follows in the main Meyer's rendering, except that it is now possible to interprete the illegible part in D.iv.2 as well as several other passages where the scribe of that Ms. carelessly left out the main verb and thereby completely obscured the sense. These tales display that curious mixture of Old and Middle Irish terminations which is so characteristic of the codices written after the tenth century. On linguistic grounds, Meyer originally assigned the probable period of composition to the eleventh century,8 but, later, on the basis of certain of the readings in the Yellow Book of Lecan he thought that the prototext was compiled about two centuries earlier.9 Even that date, however, seems too recent. For the Yellow Book of Lecan contains two forms which are sufficiently archaic to justify the

A Further Note on sa in Archaic Irish

In LANG. 16.12-6, I indicated that alongside of som, cases occurred where sa was also employed in archaic Irish as the enclitic emphasizing pronoun of the third person masculine and neuter. After citing several instances that seemed to me reasonably certain, I quoted a few examples which were open to question. Among these, I included focicertsa from the unpublished version of the Bruiden Atha I in the Yellow Book of Lecan, and I added (16.15) that Kuno Meyer regarded it as 'a scribal error for fo-cicherr, though it should be noted that in the recension printed from Stowe MS 992 sum apparently replaces sa'. But upon examining the photostats of both MSS of this text which have just reached me, I find that Meyer's statement and mine need to be somewhat revised. In the first place, the Yellow Book of Lecan writes fochicertsa and not focicertsa as Meyer asserts.' In the second place, there are several illegible lines at this point in Stowe MS 992, so that sum in this codex does not replace sa in the other MS, but is all that can be read of do-ronsom 'we have done', which occurs later in the Yellow Book of Lecan. The reading corresponding to fochicertsa cannot, therefore, be established in Stowe MS 992. That is regrettable, since fochicertsa cannot be right as the context shows: dia-marad mac Maic Niad, fo-chicert-sa mu gair gubai-si 'if the son of Mac Niad were alive, he would utter (literally: would put) my cry of lamentation'.2 Here, the sequence of tenses requires the conditional 3d sg. fo-cichred and not the future 3d sg. fo-cicherr as Meyer proposed. But more significant would have been the fact whether the scribe of Stowe MS 9923 substituted som for sa or retained the archaic form of the emphasizing pronoun. That, unfortunately, cannot be determined. Although the verb may have been incorrectly transmitted, the Yellow Book of Lecan, which is the older and better MS, has at least preserved sa, nor is the survival of this archaism surprising, since other linguistic evidence

The Book of Lecan, Leabhar Mór Mhic Fhir Bhisigh Leacain. With descriptive Introduction and Indexes by Kathleen Mulchrone. Pp. lxiii, fos. 315. Dublin: Stationery Office. 1937 [1938]. £12 12s. (Irish Manuscripts Commission, Facsimiles in collotype of Irish manuscripts, II.)

The Book of Lecan, Leabhar Mór Mhic Fhir Bhisigh Leacain. With descriptive Introduction and Indexes by Kathleen Mulchrone. Pp. lxiii, fos. 315. Dublin: Stationery Office. 1937 [1938]. £12 12s. (Irish Manuscripts Commission, Facsimiles in collotype of Irish manuscripts, II.) - Volume 1 Issue 3

Reprint of the Introduction and Indexes to the Book of Lecan

Reprint of the Introduction and Indexes to the Book of Lecan

The Book of Lecan

The Book of Lecan

The Book of Lecan

The Book of Lecan