by Tom Birkett
to anthologise the same limited set of poems; the failure to recognise the Christian
context within which all medieval Irish poetry (not just overtly religious poetry) was composed; the frequent separation of verse from a wider prose setting; and the
use of the poetic ‘mask’ vis-à-vis the identification of a confessional or lyric mode in medieval Irish poetry. There are many specialised scholarly publications which
deal with all of these issues, but there seems to have been little ‘trickle down’ effect, in either the popular or creative spheres.
Beyond Lyric Verse
If we turn to the creative sphere (and it is notable that the editors of many anthologies of Irish verse are themselves poets), O’Siadhail has succinctly summarised the artificial barriers which linguists and poets have erected to separate their endeavours:
A scientific or systematic view of language and its grammar is often thought of by
poets as boring, objective and without feeling. On the other hand, for linguists all this poetry stuff is emotional, subjective and lacking in rigour.26
As noted above, editions and translations of a more representative range of medieval
Irish poems can only be found in relatively obscure, philological y-oriented jour-
nals. And in the case of poems which have only been edited and not yet translated,
engaging with the original Old or Middle Irish requires a very advanced degree of
24 Translated by Murphy as ‘I am Eve’ ( Early Irish Lyrics, ed. Murphy, pp. 50–53); by Carney as ‘Eve’ ( Medieval Irish Lyrics, pp. 72–5); by Kinsel a with the opening words ‘Eve am I’ (Kinsel a, ed., New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, p. 56); and by Thomas MacDonagh as ‘Eve’
( Penguin Book of Irish Poetry, p. 19, and The Finest Music, ed. Riordan, p. 50).
25 Murphy, Early Irish Lyrics, pp. 74–83; by Carney as ‘Ebbing’ ( Medieval Irish Lyrics, pp. 28–41); by Kinsel a as ‘The Hag of Béara’ (Kinsel a, ed., New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, pp. 23–7); by Crotty as ‘The Lament of Baoi, the Nun of Beare Island’ (Crotty, ed., Penguin Book of Irish Poetry, pp. 62–6); and by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin as ‘Song of the Woman of Beare’
(Riordan, ed., The Finest Music, pp. 44–9). James Carney suggested that the author was most likely male; this has been cautiously disputed by Thomas Owen Clancy. For an overview of the issue of female poets, including references to Carney’s original arguments regarding male authorship of ‘The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare’, see Thomas Owen Clancy, ‘Women
Poets in Early Medieval Ireland’, in ‘The Fragility of her Sex’? Medieval Irish Women in their European Context, ed. Christine Meek and Katharine Simms (Dublin, 1996), pp. 43–72. A modern collection of poems which – contrary to the medieval poem itself – embeds the old woman/nun of Beare in a mythical and pre-Christian setting is Leanne O’Sullivan, Cailleach: The Hag of Beara (Hexham, 2009).
26 O’Siadhail, Say But the Word, p. 33.
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philological training.27 Biddy Jenkinson has recently made an irreverent but telling
nod to this intellectual divide in her witty Modern Irish poetic reworking of the
medieval Irish saga narrative Táin Bó Cúailnge.28 In a knowing reference to the aim of Jenkinson’s own adaptation, which is to ‘liberate the Táin from the dominant patriarchal reading which has suffocated it’,29 we are told that the female protagonist of her poem is conducting research on ‘Fluctuations of Gender in Nouns in
the Stowe Version of T[áin].B[ó].C[úailnge].’. Jenkinson’s conceit is that there was a genuine historical Táin (‘Cattle raid’) of which the saga narrative is a ‘masculine’ and false account. In her poem, then, the protagonist’s great-grandmother expresses her
horror that she should work on such a patriarchal and treacherous account of the
Táin, to which she responds:
‘Ach, a Mhaimíní, táim ag gabháilt d’ainmfhocail – ní cás liom an scéal
féin.’30
With these words, Jenkinson can be seen as offering a savage indictment of scholars
of medieval Irish literature who privilege philological study over literary interpretation, that is, those who deal with nouns and are ‘not bothered about the story itself’.
Although a divide between those who engage with philology and those who engage
with poetry may have existed to some degree in the past, it is also the case that
philology and poetry are inextricably linked. It is certainly true that there is rela-
tively little good literary criticism of medieval Irish poetry, but it is also the case that editing and translating medieval Irish poetry is difficult and requires a thorough
mastery of the earliest forms of the Irish language, in addition to palaeographical
and philological skil s which are today often dismissed as antiquated and derided
27 The gap between ‘literary’ and ‘academic’ translators is wider for Old Irish than it is for Old English. In the case of Old English, there are many literary translators who have a great facility for the language, presumably as a result of having studied it at university as part of an English Literature degree. By contrast, there are very few Irish poets with any ability in Old Irish (Seamus Heaney, for example, admitted to being reliant on the facing-page English translation in scholarly editions of Old Irish texts, as the starting point for his adaptations) and therefore there is usual y an academic English translation which stands between the poet and the original Old Irish text.
28 Probably the most famous medieval Irish saga, translations of Táin Bó Cúailnge have been produced by two major Irish poets, Thomas Kinsel a, The Táin (Oxford, 1970) and Ciaran Carson, The Táin (London, 2007). In both cases Kinsel a and Carson did not produce translations of any one surviving medieval version of the saga, but rather they conflated episodes from the so-called first and second recensions to produce something which, in terms of form and structure, accords more with the aesthetic expectations of modern readers.
29 Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Review of Jenkinson, Táinrith, in Poetry Ireland Review 114
(2014), 70–1, at p. 70. However, Ní Ghríofa’s review misrepresents the medieval Irish literary corpus, pitting ‘traditional, formal y conventional Irish poems and characters’ against Jenkinson’s irreverent and mischievous approach, p. 71. The whole point is that the ‘tradition’
– if such a thing can be identified – is itself frequently irreverent and subversive, continual y defying audience expectation, overturning stereotypes, and making the kind of clever intertextual references witnessed in Jenkinson’s poem.
30 Biddy Jenkinson, Táinrith (Dublin, 2013), p. 8: ‘But, Mamas, I am dealing with nouns –
I’m not bothered about the story itself’, my translation.
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Elizabeth Boyle
as inextricably linked with negative nineteenth-century ideologies.31 Philological
work remains essential to establishing texts with which more creative writers can
work, but nineteenth- and twentieth-century philological scholars gave far more
of their attention to nature, narrative and lyric poetry than to other types of verse, and this has determined the type of medieval Irish poetry that is available to literary critics as much as creative writers and general readers.32
However, the penetrating, but narrow, focus on medieval Irish lyric poetry – to
the exclusion of most other genres – on the part of philological scholars does in large part coincide with the defining aesthetics of modern Irish poetry. Eric Falci has
argued that a generation of modern Irish poets, including Paul Muldoon, Medbh
McGuckian, Ciaran Carson, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnail , are undertaking ‘a critical
project to revitalize lyric poetry’.33 Falci suggests that this contemporary engage-
ment with lyric verse has always had at least one eye on the
past:
The kinds of positional instability and formal contradiction that mark contemporary
Irish poetry are often catalysed by self-conscious turns to past Irish poetry and to the positing of a tradition that, though itself constructed as fractured and discontinuous, is still a viable resource.34
And Falci states further that:
At work is a diffuse but insistent effort to use the complex historical figure of the Irish poet to delineate the conditions of Irish poetry in the late twentieth century ...35
Therefore, the image of the medieval Irish poet as lyric poet has been utilised in
shaping the identities of modern Irish poets. But if we move beyond lyric poetry, we
can start to see that the variegated nature of medieval Irish poetry meant that poets
had a much broader social role, political y, cultural y and pedagogical y.
We can find a wide range of attitudes towards the translation of non-lyric poetry
among specialists in the field of medieval Irish. For example, in a note in his recent edition of the twelfth-century historical poem ‘Eól dam seiser cloinne Cuinn’, Dáibhí
Ó Cróinín wrote that ‘As the composition is nothing more than a list of names, I have
not felt it necessary to offer a translation’.36 This is disingenuous, to say the least, 31 For an excellent overview of the links between philology and imperialism, see Ananya Jahanara Kabir, ‘Reading between the Lines: Whitley Stokes, Scribbles and the Scholarly Apparatus’, in The Tripartite Life of Whitley Stokes (1830–1909), ed. Elizabeth Boyle and Paul Russell (Dublin, 2011), pp. 78–97.
32 One of the most important and prolific editors and translators of medieval Irish
literature, Whitley Stokes, was an associate of the Pre-Raphaelites, and commented frequently in his correspondence on the poetry of Tennyson, Browning, the Rossettis, Swinburne
and Allingham. See Elizabeth Boyle, ‘The Impiety of the Intellect: Whitley Stokes and the Pre-Raphaelites’, in The Tripartite Life of Whitley Stokes (1830–1909), ed. Elizabeth Boyle and Paul Russell (Dublin, 2011), 44–58.
33 Eric Falci, Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, 1966–2010 (Cambridge, 2012), p. 8.
34 Ibid., p. 9.
35 Ibid., pp. 9–10.
36 Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, ‘ Eól dam seiser cloinne Cuinn: the Fortunes of a Twelfth-Century Irish Syncretistic Poem’, in Gablánach in Scélaigecht: Celtic Studies in Honour of Ann Dooley, ed. Sarah Sheehan, Joanne Findon and Westley Follett (Dublin, 2013), pp. 198–219, at p. 212, n. 44.
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since the poem in question is far more than a list of names: it consists also of epithets of praise, personal descriptions, historiography and poetic chevilles, all of which
might be of interest to the non-specialist reader. But Ó Cróinín’s approach exem-
plifies the general y low regard in which functional, didactic and historiographic
poetry is held. When scholars do provide a translation – in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries these were often in English, German or French; in recent
decades English has increasingly dominated – the emphasis is usual y on conveying
the literal meaning, rather than reflecting the poetic qualities of the original.
Furthermore, the translations of functional and didactic poems are usual y prose
translations, in long lines, without any attempt to reproduce the metrical scheme of
the original. There is general y no attempt to render the alliteration or other stylistic features. This is because functional or didactic poetry, when it is valued at al , is
valued by scholars for its content rather than its form. The information such poems
contain is seen as more important than the fact that they are poems. I shall briefly
discuss three medieval Irish poems here – one religious, one historical and one
pedagogical – in order to give some concrete il ustrations of the various phenomena
I have al uded to above, namely, the diversity of forms and functions of medieval
Irish poetry, the stylistic sophistication of so-called ‘functional’ verse, the attitudes of earlier generations of scholars to such poetry, and the potential creative value of hitherto neglected verse forms.
How about this? A Poem on Idolatory and the Apostolic Missions
My first example is a Middle Irish poem on the spread of idol-worship and the
coming of the apostolic missions to drive out idolatry. Tragical y, we do not have to
look far to find contemporary parallels for the concepts underlying the poem: in our
own time, there are many instances of the belief-systems of others being dismissed
as idolatrous and the artefacts of previous ages being destroyed in the name of erad-
icating that idolatry. For example, Islamic fundamentalists have recently destroyed
cultural sites of incalculable importance.37 The value to contemporary society of
a medieval Irish poem that deals with these themes is therefore striking. Further-
more, this Middle Irish poem, which survives in two manuscript copies38 and
which I would date roughly, on linguistic grounds, to the eleventh century, contains
far more than inchoate outrage at supposedly misguided beliefs: it is a rich and
complex work of poetry, metrical y sophisticated, and evincing intricately-woven
themes and images which reveal the underlying historical-theological worldview of
the poet. To begin with the stylistic sophistication of the work, if we look at just one stanza, we can observe its metrical complexity:
Ro īad re ed n-ōinūaire –
ba adbul arna īadud –
37 Thus, for example, the statement by one IS spokesperson that ‘Islamic State has sent us to these idols to destroy them’, as reported in Louisa Loveluck, ‘Isil Gloats over Destruction of Iraqi History’, Daily Telegraph, 6 April 2015, p. 12.
38 Dublin Royal Irish Academy MSS 23 N 10 and B iv 2.
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Elizabeth Boyle
a c[h]uma ina c[h]ride-sium,
gēr duine-sium ba dīabul. (§5)39
Even a reader unfamiliar with the Middle Irish language can be exposed to poetry
in the original language and can thus see something of the metrical systems under-
lying early Irish poetry. This poem provides an example of a complex metre called
aí fhreisligi. Each line has seven syl ables. Lines a and c end with a trisyl abic word; lines b and d with a disyl abic word. We have rhyme between lines b and d: íadud and díabul. There is also so-called aicill rhyme between the last word of line c – cride-sium – and the penultimate stressed word in line d – duine-sium – although admittedly in this case that is not an ideal rhyme. In this stanza there are no other stressed words in line d, but if there were they would have a rhyme with a stressed word in line c. We also have alliteration in every line, and linking alliteration between lines a and b. This is not a simple metre, such as those general y used for narrative verse, and the fact that the poet went to the trouble to compose a poem on this subject
matter in a relatively complex metre is a reflection of the significance and impor-
tance of the subject of the poem. The metre alone could provide the creative reader
with interesting raw material: Micheal O’Siadhail stands out as one contemporary
Irish poet who has experimented with the metrical systems of the poetry of various
world cultures. This particular metre offers interesting formal possibilities which
have not yet been explored.
The poem fal s into two halves: the first half tel s the story of the creation of the
first idol, using imagery of darkness and vastness to emphasise the extent to which,
after the Fall but before the coming of Christ, mankind was wandering
directionless
and unguided, towards error and sin. The first idol was created by a man – named in
the poem and elsewhere in medieval Irish literature as Zerofanes – whose unnamed
son had died. Out of grief, the man created a statue of his son, which then began to
be worshipped as a divine being. If we now look at my translation of the stanza cited
above we can begin to see some of the possible readings which this poem might
bear.
There closed in, in the space of a moment –
it was vast after its closing –
grief for him in his heart
although he was a man, he became a devil.
On the one hand we might see it as sympathetic – the misguided action of a
bereaved father suffering the loss of his beloved son – but on the other we might
see the poet as condemning excessive grief and warning of the dire consequences of
unrestrained emotion. The latter reading is perhaps more plausible in the context of
medieval social norms.
Examining the biblical source of this stanza, Wisdom 14:15, provides us with one
way of situating the poem in a wider framework.
39 The poem was edited without translation by Kuno Meyer as ‘Heidnischer Götzendienst und die Sendung der Apostel’, in his ‘Mitteilungen aus irischen Handschriften’, Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 13 (1921), 15–16. All translations are my own and are based on my own readings of the two surviving manuscripts.
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For a father being afflicted with bitter grief, made to himself the image of his son who was quickly taken away: and him who then had died as a man, he began now to worship as a god, and appointed him rites and sacrifices among his servants.
In this way then, the author has taken an incident from Judeo-Christian history
and clothed it in the particular form of early Irish poetry. Indeed, the conception of history underlying the whole poem is one common to all of medieval Christendom,
that is, the idea of Heilsgeschichte, ‘salvation history’, the revelation in history of God’s plan for humankind. Thus, as the wandering vastness of mankind leads to the