Early Irish Literature Research Articles

Crossing the disciplines - a starter toolkit for researchers who wish to explore early Irish literature

The inspiration behind this paper came from both authors’ long-term collaboration with our friend and colleague, Professor Ralph Kenna. This connection emerged initially through his interest in Rathcroghan and in our paper, ‘Exploring the Nature of the Fráoch Saga’, which we concluded with the statement that we believed it ‘presents a case that will hopefully ignite conversation between disciplines’. This led us to consider the potential value for researchers of compiling a template list of useful and reliable sources and resources to consult, in other words a type of starter toolkit or guide for any individual from an alternative discipline or background, who might possess, or, in time, develop a personal or professional interest in Early Ireland and Early Irish literature. In doing this, we decided for ease of illustration, to take the example of the location name Rathcroghan/Cruachan Aí, (the prehistoric Royal Site of Connacht in the west of Ireland and the place that we both work in and interact with on a daily basis), as a case study in order to demonstrate an initial methodological approach to not only the types of resources and information available, but also to highlight some potential pitfalls that may arise in the course of an investigation.

Otherworld women in early Irish literature by Heather C. Key (review)

Otherworld women in early Irish literature by Heather C. Key (review)

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

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.

A landscape of words. Ireland, Britain and the poetics of space, 700–1250 by Amy Mulligan

Reviewed by: A landscape of words. Ireland, Britain and the poetics of space, 700–1250 by Amy Mulligan A. Joseph McMullen (bio) Amy Mulligan, A landscape of words. Ireland, Britain and the poetics of space, 700–1250. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1-5261-4110-1. xii + 251 pages. $120 (hardcover), $36.95 (paperback). The field of Celtic Studies has had to wait a long time for the next word on the medieval Irish ‘environmental imagination.’ With A landscape of words, however, Amy Mulligan has made that wait more than worth it. This scintillating book persuasively argues for an Irish poetics of space—a deep interconnection between landscape and words at the very core of place-making in the literature from and about medieval Ireland. It is this attention to ‘verbal topographies,’ as well as the various readers and audiences of these works, that separates A landscape of words from other studies. Mulligan digs deeply into a wide range of texts—from immrama to the dindshenchas, from vitae to ethnographies—to tell a new story about a well-known feature of early Irish literature. A landscape of words not only further excavates ‘one of the richest and most complex bodies of medieval topographical writing’ (3), it reveals how central the writing of these literary landscapes was to the poets, authors, and redactors of medieval Ireland. The first two chapters are connected by an interest in journeying and pathfinding. In Chapter 1, Mulligan puts Adomnán’s De locis sanctis and Vita Sancti Columbae in conversation with the Navigatio Sancti Brendani and Immram curaig Maíle Dúin. She explains how Adomnán ‘transmits an embodied, sense-based engagement with the Holy Land’ (26) that allows his audience to inhabit holy sites through their imaginations. This spatial practice is expanded in his Life of Columba, where closer (but potentially dangerous) places can be visited by the Iona community. Mulligan then argues for the presence of similar literary conventions at work in Irish voyage tales. Developing the concept of ‘boat as book’ (42), she examines how the audiences of the Navigatio and immrama might themselves ‘row-about’ in the narratives. Much like how the voyagers [End Page 255] must undertake spiritual journeys before reaching the promised land, readers of these texts can also undergo transformative experiences through contemplation. Chapter 2 moves inland to the Ulster Cycle and the figure of Cú Chulainn, ‘heroic Ireland’s most productive and conscientious place-maker’ (67). Rather than focusing solely on Táin bó Cúailnge, Mulligan considers how Ireland’s most famous hero is entwined with the natural world throughout his heroic biography. She examines, first, his ‘spatial precocity’ (69) in Compert Con Culainn and the Macgnímrada (from the Táin), especially in terms of wayfinding and border crossing/guarding, before considering topographical language and eroticism in Tochmarc Emire. The Táin itself suggests that Cú Chulainn is a successful warrior in large part because of his mastery of placelore. Through and because of this knowledge, Cú Chulainn becomes enmeshed in the landscape: the natural world, in turn, supports him (especially in the form of rivers) and he frequently uses inscriptions on stone and trees to communicate (this focus on textuality returns later in an analysis of Siaburcharpat Con Culaind). Furthermore, in the Táin and Mesca Ulad, the destruction of the landscape asks readers to consider the violence of war. The third chapter offers an important new study on the Dindshenchas Érenn collections of stories dedicated to how places got their names. Though the dindshenchas tales have begun to receive more attention recently, they remain still vastly underappreciated. Mulligan takes great strides in this chapter to rectify that, paying particular attention to the poets of the verse compositions and their audiences. It is also not a surprise that this chapter is at the core of her book, given its focus of the poetics of space via the construction of literary landscapes. Reading these poems as ‘verbalized topographies’ and ‘extensive virtual landscapes’ (110) which encourage a view of ‘landscape as literature and text as territory’ (114), Mulligan argues that the dindshenchas ‘became the national landscape as created, preserved and performed by the...

THE ENIGMATIC FRÁOCH AND HIS EPONYMOUS TALE — NETWORK ANALYSIS OF AN EARLY IRISH HEROIC ROMANCE

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.

Archaeologists explore mythology

North American journal of Celtic studies Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring 2020) Copyright © 2020 by The Ohio State University REVIEW ESSAY Archaeologists explore mythology EDEL BHREATHNACH Mallory, J. P. 2016. In search of the Irish dreamtime. Archaeology and early Irish literature. London : Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-05184-9. 320 pp. £18.95 (hardback). Waddell, John. 2018. Myth and materiality. Oxford: Oxbow Books. ISBN (paperback) 978-178570 -975-3; ISBN (digital) 978-1-78570-976-0. 182 pp. £15.99 (paperback). Archaeologists, linguists, and mythographers working on the evidence of their respective disciplines in Ireland are gifted with a very rich seam of primary material to the extent that they can carve out a niche topic for themselves without great difficulty. Yet, for all periods from prehistory to the modern period, genuine cross-disciplinary research is rare. There are reasons for this situation prevailing in Ireland: an historical antagonism between the disciplines and, hence, the absence of a tradition of collaboration; a lack of funding for long-term projects that would enable researchers to tease out the evidence of their respective disciplines and develop thoroughly considered syntheses. The need to remedy this situation is greater than ever: the amount of archaeological evidence being uncovered in Ireland for most periods continues to increase exponentially as a result of development-led excavations, while proper analysis of this material, especially cross-disciplinary analysis, lags far behind. Yet the potential for future studies cannot be understated and is an issue that researchers in the field must address. This opening statement does not deny that some scholars over the past 30 years or so have made valiant attempts to foster cross-disciplinary studies, none more so than Edel Bhreathnach [bhreathnachedel@gmail.com] is former CEO of The Discovery Programme: Centre for Archaeology & Innovation Ireland. She is author of Ireland in the medieval world AD 400–1000 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014) and co-editor of Monastic Europe. Medieval communities, landscapes and settlements (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019). 120 North American journal of Celtic studies Professors John Waddell and Jim Mallory, whose books form the basis of this particular review. Both have been involved in projects that have sought to use Irish evidence—archaeological , mythological, and historical—to gain a more nuanced and complex view of Irish society in prehistory and the early medieval period. In addition, they have sought to introduce other approaches to the evidence, anthropological and comparative in nature , in an effort to explain links between Ireland, Britain, and the Continent, or certain institutions and beliefs in Irish society at a given time. Their research emanates from the increasing focus in recent decades on the four major ceremonial landscapes in Ireland that also feature prominently in the literature: Emain Macha (Navan Fort, Co. Armagh), Crúachu (Rathcroghan, Co. Roscommon), Temair (Tara, Co. Meath), and Uisnech (the Hill of Uisneach, Co. Westmeath). Emain was the focus of the Navan Research Group (formed in 1986 by Jim Mallory) and its related journal Emania. The Discovery Programme’s Tara Research Project led by Conor Newman began in 1991 and continues to the present, and it has been cross-disciplinary since the beginning. Crúachu has been the focus of a project in the Department of Archaeology in NUI Galway and an active program of surveying and land management is currently in operation there. Hence this is the backdrop to the volumes under consideration here. John Waddell’s Myth and materiality can be viewed as a companion volume—probably for a wider and more international audience—to his Archaeology and Celtic myth. An exploration (Waddell 2014). Both books draw on a detailed scientific and collaborative volume published in 2009 relating to surveys undertaken at Rathcroghan (Waddell, Fenwick, & Barton 2009). Hence Waddell’s core corpus and focus are the monuments of the Crúachu/ Rathcroghan landscape and what they meant to the communities that laid them out and built them. Throughout Myth and materiality, he also keeps the other great ceremonial landscapes in mind as he interrogates archaeology, literature, and mythology in his quest to understand these places. His stated aim is ‘to promote the thesis that myth may illuminate archaeology and that on occasion archaeology may shed light...

22. Kuenzler, Sarah. 2016. Flesh and Word: Reading Bodies in Old Norse-Icelandic and Early Irish Literature. Berlin: De Gruyter, 449 pp.

22. Kuenzler, Sarah. 2016. Flesh and Word: Reading Bodies in Old Norse-Icelandic and Early Irish Literature. Berlin: De Gruyter, 449 pp.

Begrudgery & Brehon Law: A Literary Examination of the Roots of Resentment in Pre-Modern Ireland

<p><em>This essay traces the published roots of the components of Irish begrudgery in early Irish literature (</em><em>Táin Bó Cúailnge and other ancient Irish myths) and </em><em>Brehon legal tracts (such as the Senchus Mór and The Book of Aicill)</em><em>. First, the power of language in a predominantly oral culture is explored through examples like cursing and the peculiarly Irish type of satirist. A brief explanation of the functioning and history of Brehon law is provided, and the connections between Brehon law, literature and begrudgery are considered. </em><em>Begrudgery is then tied to Nietzsche’s theory of ressentiment as both are distinguished primarily by a concern and involvement with power. While the elimination of Brehon law cannot be linked directly to the rise in begrudgery, the two events emerged from the same historical conditions. It was British colonialism that removed Brehon law from Irish society, just as the long colonial period offered a perfect environment for a sentiment like begrudgery to flourish as a widespread social phenomenon. So, while the apparatuses of begrudgery existed well before the English invasion, and although examples of early begrudgers can be found in ancient Irish literature, it was the colonial period that gave birth to modern Irish begrudgery.</em><em></em></p>

Fantastic technology in early Irish literature

La technologie fabuleuse dans la littérature irlandaise ancienne La description d’objets techniquement ingénieux ou complexes n’est pas un thème reconnu de la littérature irlandaise ancienne, mais l’on trouve des exemples de moyens de transport, de pièces d’armement et de procédés pour acquérir ou préparer des aliments qui montrent qu’une intrigue peut impliquer un élément de technologie fabuleuse – ce dernier pouvant apparaître comme un thème quasiment indépendant dans une histoire culturelle foisonnante. Les objets merveilleux ne sont pas surnaturels, ni même magiques ; pourtant, il s’agit d’objets fantastiques qui ont dû avoir plus d’existence dans la littérature qu’ils n’en ont jamais eu dans la réalité historique. La «réalisation» verbale de ces procédés suppose une domestication et une exploitation du langage, dont la complexité potentielle reflète bien celle de ces inventions.

Celtic Tigers: Recent Studies in Early Irish and Welsh Literature

Celtic Tigers: Recent Studies in Early Irish and Welsh Literature

The Sexual Shame of the Chaste: ‘Abortion Miracles’ in Early Medieval Saints’ Lives

The Sexual Shame of the Chaste: ‘Abortion Miracles’ in Early Medieval Saints’ Lives

Extraordinary Weapons, Heroic Ethics, and Royal Justice in Early Irish Literature

ABSTRACT The synthesis of pagan and Christian cosmologies that informs medieval Irish letters incorporates prestigious and extraordinary weapons, and other such objects into an all-compassing Nature, in which they are preferentially associated with the themes of heroic ethics, legitimate and just royal rule, and the removal of errant rulers through a cosmic deployment of the “instruments of their fate.” Yet only rhetorical effects of literary depiction raise such weapons to a status approximating the preternatural.

The iconography of the Papil Stone: sculptural and literary comparisons with a Pictish motif

The axe-carrying bird-men and the remaining iconography of the cross-slab from Papil, West Burra, Shetland, are described and analysed. Special emphasis is placed on examining the Pail bird-men first with Irish and Pictish examples of the Temptation of St Antony and second with detailed descriptions of weapon-carrying bird-men and axe-carrying human figures in Pictish sculpture, concluding that the Papil bird-men belong with the latter. This motif is compared with descriptions of battlefield demons in early Irish literature, namely, Morrigan, Bodb and Macha. The Papil cross-slab is suggested to date to the early 9th century, based on technique and comparative iconographic evidence, and is thus contemporary with related Pictish examples. This motif is shown to represent a common ideal of mythological war-like creatures in Pictish tradition, paralleled by written descriptions of Irish battlefield demons, thus suggesting shared perceptions of similar mythological figures in the Insular world. A further connection between Ireland, Irish ecclesiastical foundations in the Hebrides, Shetland and southern Pictland is also discussed.

Netherworld and Otherworld in early Irish literature

Netherworld and Otherworld in early Irish literature

An Introduction to Early Irish Literature

Des 1948, M. Dillon, celtisant de renom, publie un ouvrage fondamental : Early Irish Literature (5e ed., 1972). Il est suivi en 1966 d’un ouvrage d’E. Knott et G. Murphy : Early Irish Literature (int. J. Carney) et en 1990, d’une synthese importante par K. McCone : Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature. J. E. Caerwyn Williams et P. Ford nous donnent dans The Irish Literary Tradition (1992), une etude thematique de ce sujet. Aujourd’hui, M. Ni Bhrolchain, pendant vingt-cin...

An introduction to early Irish literature

An introduction to early Irish literature

Пять пятин Ирландии: новое, неожиданное предположение?

The problem of the so-called ‘five fifths of Ireland’ remains unresolved up to now, in spite of numerous attempts to find a solution to this linguistic and geographical contradiction. In Modern Irish, traditional provinces of Ireland are called cúige (‘a fifth’), but there are only four (Ulster, Leinster, Munster and Connacht) of them. The same names of the four provinces were known in the Early Irish literature (cóiced Ulad etc). The Irish literati envisaged that contradiction and made some attempts to resolve it in early mythological and pseudo-historical sources (in sagas and poetry). According to their pseudo-historical theory, the province of Munster was further divided into ‘the fifth of Cú Roí’ and ‘the fifth of Eochu mac Luchta’. At the same time, the compiler of the saga ‘The Settling of the Manor of Tara’ proposes a theory of the sacred centre (Tara, the seat of kingship, and/or the hill Uisnech, the centre of druidism) of Ireland and of the four subject provinces or zones – North, South, East and West. The idea of of the dominant Goidelic race led T.F. O’Rahilly to propose the existence of the Midland kingdom. Rees Brothers added to this theory a veil of universal cosmology. We would like to propose another solution to this problem. It is not based upon the traditional cosmological or geographical principle of division of a country, but on another one, which can also be presented as the ‘traditional’ principle as far as the geography of the Ancient World is concerned. In reality, it may well be that Ireland was divided into five parts, but this so-called ‘native’ division of the island persisted for a short time only. The idea of the ‘five fifths’ preserved in Irish mythology and pseudo-history was supported by the symbolic role of the number ‘five’ in Irish tradition. Thus, the ‘power of word’ or a word-hypnosis influenced historical and native geographical tradition.

King in Exile in Airne Fíngein (‘Fíngen's Vigil’): power and pursuit in Early Irish literature

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.

Early medieval sentinel warrior burials

This study examines the motif in early medieval Irish literature of a sentinel warrior, buried near a territorial boundary, facing enemy territory to protect his people/territory against that enemy. Since there is not to date any physical manifestation of this type of burial in early medieval Ireland, a possible source for the motif in early Irish authors may lie in an awareness of early Anglo-Saxon contexts, and to this end several possible archaeological examples of such burials located on territorial boundaries in seventh-century Anglo-Saxon England are adduced.

Further on white red-eared cows in fact and fiction

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.