Abstract
Ireland is celebrated as the home of the oldest vernacular literature in western Europe, and this literature is largely framed in terms of an even older past: a great deal of the narrative canon comprises legends set in the pre-Christian period, and many of the foundational authorities in the prestigious fields of poetry and law were assigned to this period as well. This was a culture whose identity was rooted in a vision of indigenous antiquity, leading Frank O’Connor to characterize its collective mentality as that of ‘the backward look.’
Such resonant and memorable phrases are, of course, almost always over-simplifications. In fact, the medieval Irish attitude to the past appears at all times to have been characterized by dynamic creativity, and by a resourceful sensitivity to contemporary imperatives. Although we have texts in Irish going back to the seventh century, our knowledge of them depends on manuscripts dating from the 11th and 12th centuries and later. This was a time of reinvigorated antiquarian scholarship—but so were the Carolingian and Italian renaissances. Study of the past was concomitant with sweeping changes in the political landscape and in the organization of the Church, and with a lively and intelligent awareness of the wider world.
It is with this dialectic that the pieces in this volume, following on from a workshop held in Cambridge in 2011, are concerned. The collection begins with a 40-page introduction by the editors. Besides placing the other contributions in a unifying context, this essay serves as a penetrating and nuanced reflection on the central theme. We are encouraged to recognize that every invocation of authority, inasmuch as it applies the past to the present, is ipso facto an act of adaptation: in Ireland, we find ‘not an inherently conservative “backward look”, but rather an active engagement with historical authorities in, and for, new contexts.’ Crucially, the decision has been taken to explore the topic through a series of case studies: larger patterns, if they are to be found at all, will only emerge from the consideration of particulars. In what follows, I shall for reasons of space be obliged to confine myself to discussing the essays most relevant to the concerns of this journal.
The contributions by Paul Russell and Thomas Charles-Edwards are intriguingly complementary: both deal with the ways in which glosses and commentaries accrued to important Old Irish texts (the elegiac poem Amra Choluim Chille and the legal treatise Bretha Comaithchesa); and both are concerned not only with the content of these various textual layers, but with their arrangement on the manuscript page. Both note that the information provided by commentators is not straightforwardly presented, Russell observing that the Amra commentary is ‘unreadable in a linear fashion,’ while Charles-Edwards gives a useful taxonomy of types of commented legal text. Charles-Edwards makes a further valuable point: that in the Old Irish period ‘the reverence for the old text was not nearly as marked as it later became.’
The next two contributions, dealing with Airbertach Mac Cosse’s late tenth-century poem on the Psalter (by Pádraig Ó Néill) and with the Middle Irish Sermo ad reges (by Brent Miles) also complement one another: in both, one is struck by the extent to which later writers continued to operate within the spiritual and intellectual horizon of the seventh and eighth centuries. Thus Ó Néill calls attention to Airbertach’s close adherence to the Old Irish Treatise on the Psalter, while Miles observes that ‘apart from the Middle Irish, nothing in the Sermo would seem out of place in an early Hiberno-Latin manuscript’: for him, the latter represents ‘creativity in the face of a comparatively closed corpus.’
Moving to the field of sacred narrative, Erich Poppe examines an account of Christ’s early career and the chronology of the first Roman emperors, finding the same ‘Antiochene’ concern with history rather than theology which characterizes much Hiberno-Latin exegesis, and also a tendency to non-linear ‘nesting and embedding’ similar to what Russell has identified in the Amra commentary.
The part played by Irish scholarship in the Carolingian renaissance has been widely recognized, sometimes with rather indiscriminate enthusiasm. Also important is the impact which accounts of Ireland had in Europe at a later date, such texts as Nauigatio sancti Brendani and Visio Tnugdali being prominent examples. Elizabeth Boyle examines a fascinating but less familiar work: the poem De mirabilibus Hibernie. This account of ‘the wonders of Ireland’ is closely based on vernacular texts with the same subject (a genre which, as Boyle intriguingly suggests, appears to have been placed in the same category as catalogues of the wonders attendant on Christ’s birth). But the poem appears to have ‘internationalized’ its material for a wider audience; in this it is comparable, as Boyle points out, to the collection of Irish marvels in the Norse miscellany Konungs Skuggsjá.
There are also fine studies on the vernacular grammatical tradition (Deborah Hayden), on aspects of the Ulster Cycle of heroic tales (Ruairí Ó hUiginn, Hugh Fogarty), on local associations in the Finn Cycle (Geraldine Parsons), and on the dynastic narrative Cogadh Gáedhel re Gallaibh (Máire Ní Mhaonaigh).
The volume concludes with a richly reflective essay by Kevin Murray, which illuminates the extent to which the tension that is the collection’s theme—a tension between authority and adaptation, between collective tradition and authorial individuality—is inherent in the very dynamics of transmission. Even when they innovated, writers still depended on their audience’s adherence to an inherited framework of concepts and conventions: ‘Is it not inevitable that we have Middle Irish narrative texts with an Old Irish core?’
This is a learned, penetrating, thoughtful, and stimulating collection, which sheds important light on the topics considered and points the way toward further studies along similar lines: the tradition of legendary history represented by Lebor Gabála Érenn would be one obvious candidate. Both wine and wine-skins (to borrow an image invoked by Pádraig Ó Néill) have been reassessed to excellent advantage.