Abstract
During the course of Professor Ó Cathasaigh’s distinguished career he has produced many important studies of medieval Irish saga literature, and it is entirely fitting that they should now be collected together in a single volume. The result is a fascinating insight into the evolution of his ideas over the course of more than 30 years, in relation to both his overarching conceptual frameworks and his close readings of specific texts. Ó Cathasaigh’s greatest contribution to the study of early Irish literature may seem rather banal to the outside observer, but was in fact revolutionary within the field: he argued simply that medieval Irish literature should be read as literature. That is, he demonstrated how medieval Irish narrative texts should be investigated for their rhetorical strategies, their thematic complexities, and their literary integrity. Given that medieval Irish saga literature had long been read for other purposes and as something other than literature per se—whether that be as repositories of lexicographical evidence for the oldest forms of the Irish language, or as corrupted and inadequate written records of a richer ‘oral tradition’ which supposedly endured into the Middle Ages from pre-Christian times—Ó Cathasaigh’s insistence that we cannot understand medieval Irish literature at all unless we take it on its own terms was of immeasurable significance. Thankfully his approach has been an influential one, and a younger generation of scholars has responded to his clarion call and enhanced our understanding of individual texts immeasurably: two of the most significant contributions are Ralph O’Connor, The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel: Kingship and Narrative Artistry in a Mediaeval Irish Saga (Oxford, 2013) and Mark Williams, ‘Lady Vengeance: A Reading of Sín in Aided Muirchertaig meic Erca,’ Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 62 (2011), 1–32, but one could mention many others.
In one of Ó Cathasaigh’s most significant studies, ‘The Rhetoric of Scéla Cano meic Gartnáin’ (pp. 352–75, originally published in 1989), he rejected the approach exemplified by scholars such as Gerard Murphy, who likened medieval Irish manuscripts to ‘museums,’ with texts ‘arranged without much attention to artistic requirements,’ and contrasted ‘inartistic manuscript versions’ of tales, produced by ecclesiastical scribes, with what Murphy believed was a more vibrant oral and non-ecclesiastical culture in medieval Ireland (cited by Ó Cathasaigh on p. 354). Ó Cathasaigh responded by showing the rich literary artistry of Scéla Cano, and concluded his study by stating that ‘each reading of Scéla Cano reveals some fresh complexity in this densely textured tale’ (p. 375). Ó Cathasaigh’s readings of other medieval Irish tales, such as his 1985 study of ‘The Rhetoric of Fingal Rónáin’ (pp. 376–98) and his many studies of Ulster Cycle tales (pp. 187–279) are similarly subtle and illuminating. It is difficult to single out one chapter for discussion, but a few remarks on Ó Cathasaigh’s 2004 study of ‘Sound and Sense in Cath Almaine’ (pp. 439–46) may be taken as exemplary.
Cath Almaine (‘The Battle of Allen’) is a 10th-century tale which centres on a battle fought at the Hill of Allen (Co. Kildare) in 722 between a king of the Uí Néill and a king of Leinster. The former had unjustly attempted to extract a tax from the latter, and it is the Leinstermen’s refusal to pay which incites the battle during which, though greatly outnumbered, they defeat their Uí Néill overlords. As Ó Cathasaigh noted, the battle itself receives relatively brief attention from the author of the tale; rather, his concern is with the events preceding and following the military clash. In his study, Ó Cathasaigh shows the importance of ‘verbal or vocal acts’ to the structure of the tale and argues that a ‘remarkable concatenation of utterances … constitute the very fabric of the tale’ (p. 440). It is worth citing Ó Cathasaigh’s conclusion at length in order to illustrate the subtlety of his reading: The central message of Cath Almaine has to do with the futility of warfare. The victors in this battle hear a piteous war-chant, which leaves them sorrowing and weeping. It is the vanquished who hear sweet music: but they, after all, are dead. The real victor is the war-goddess, the ‘red-mouthed sharp-tongued’ scald-crow, who ‘raised a cry of victory about the head of Fergal’. What Cath Almaine shows us is that war has no victor but war itself. (p. 446)
Ó Cathasaigh’s ability to reach the moral heart of the tale, and to decode its rich symbolism, is indicative of the ways that medieval Christian authors and audiences could themselves reconcile the use of non-Christian imagery (such as the ‘war-goddess,’ deployed in the text as metaphor for carnage) in heroic—or in this case anti-heroic—literature produced within the context of a Christian society.
There is one aspect of the present volume, however, which strikes this reviewer as extremely problematic, and that is the presentation of the book (whether through the choice of Ó Cathasaigh himself, or the book’s editor, or its publisher) as A Companion to Early Irish Saga. That is something which this book certainly is not. It is the collecting together of the work of a remarkable scholar of medieval Irish literature; but one could not, for example, give many of the studies contained within the volume to undergraduate students or to non-specialist readers without numerous caveats. It is inevitable that some of the essays are now very dated: Ó Cathasaigh made statements in the 1980s which one assumes he would not make now. For example, one only need have some small idea of Ireland’s rich contribution to the study of biblical exegesis, grammar, and computus in the seventh and eighth centuries to dismiss the baseless ethnic stereotyping of a claim such as ‘It is in … mythology that we can discover the native ideology of Ireland, for although the early Irish material includes a valuable wisdom literature the abstract formulation of philosophical and theological theories was not the Irish way’ (p. 52). One would now question what exactly constitutes early Irish ‘mythology’ (as opposed to what Ó Cathasaigh has himself shown is in fact a self-conscious and rhetorically sophisticated literature composed in the Christian era) and in this regard Ó Cathasaigh’s heavy reliance in his earlier scholarship on the work of Georges Dumézil is also problematic. Reading (or re-reading) Ó Cathasaigh’s subtle analyses of individual texts leaves one yearning to read his mature reflections on the rich corpus of medieval Irish narrative literature. One sincerely hopes that Coire Sois is not a termination, but rather a stepping stone, since a real comprehensive companion to early Irish saga remains an urgent desideratum of scholarship and Ó Cathasaigh remains the best-qualified person to produce such an important work.