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This paper presents some of my findings from a structural study of the remscéla ‘prefatory tales’ to the Táin Bó Cúailnge in Eg. 1782 (Eg.); it outlines the application and adaptation of Proppian methodology in the search of an overarching principle governing the use of the classificatory term remscél. Moving away from the traditional taxonomy, Propp’s framework provides a fitting empirical schema for the study of the Remscéla Tána Bó Cúailnge, as it looks beneath the descriptive details of the superficial narrative stratum. I endeavour to show that, through the application of the Proppian model, we can unearth the minimal narrative components (i.e. the narrative ‘functions’) of the series of these twelve tales. Once revealed, the narrative ‘functions’ of the remscéla corpus in Eg. provide us with a better understanding of their textual reception and the compiler’s intentions. I hope to show that, although the remscéla list was a secondary invention to the composition of the individual tales, their collocation and form in the Eg. compilation reflects a conscious attempt at creating a narrative whole.

What more efficient method of promulgating one’s supremacy over a people than to exert sexual dominance over their wives and daughters? Known variously as droit du seigneur, droit de cuissage, ius primae noctis on the Continent, and coll cétingen in Early Irish literature, the archetypal right of a lord or king to deflower his female subjects was not an uncommon literary concept throughout the course of history. While scholars as diverse as Gary Beckman and Alain Boureau have advanced the studies of such customs in Anatolia and medieval France respectively, little has been achieved in the field of Celtic Studies. This paper questions whether the custom formally existed within Irish society and, furthermore, whether it was implemented using tribal law or simply societal tradition.

I also discuss pre-marital virginity in medieval Irish society and its impact on economic matters such as bride-price; this brings into focus whether ius primae noctis is a plausible practice in a society preoccupied with women’s chastity and continence. Both the fictional, medieval Irish material and the laws allude to the value (either monetary or otherwise) of the greatest female commodity, virginity, and such is the case that being stripped thereof appears to have inflated the jurisdiction of the king.

Scéla Conchobair meic Nessa (‘The Tidings of Conchobar mac Nessa’), Tochmarc Emire (‘The Wooing of Emer’), Talland Étair (‘The Siege of Howth’) and Echtrae Nerai (‘The Adventure of Nera’) all exhibit literary examples of how a king or lord may intrude upon the intimate relationships of his subjects, and therefore enforce his own authority. Obviously, the dichotomy between royal exemplar as represented in the literature and social reality is complicated. Yet, what is fictional literature but a mirrored embodiment of social norms?

There are three extant lists of tale titles which purport to enumerate a series of medieval remscéla ‘prefatory tales’ to the Táin Bó Cúailnge: 1. in the twelfth-century Book of Leinster (LL); 2. in the fifteenth-century RIA MS D iv.2 (D); and 3. in the seventeenth-century RIA MS C vi.3 (C), which is a conflation of the LL and D lists. Due to the nature of the lists and the finite amount of linguistic diagnostics, it is not possible to date the remscéla lists with any certainty. However, the LL manuscript itself provides a Middle Irish terminus post quem for the LL list and gives the impression that the remscéla were understood to be part of a series at the time of transmission of Recension II of the Táin Bó Cúailnge (TBC). If this is so, why were the tales not compiled as a series in the manuscript, such as we find in the sixteenth-century Brit. Libr. MS Egerton 1782? Similarly, there is no attempt by the Recension II redactor to create further textual conhesion with the remscéla by inserting allusory remarks.In this paper, I will discuss the likelihood that the remscéla series was coined by the medieval scholar long after the emergence of the tales themselves. Despite this hypothesis, however, the series is rife with textual links among the remscéla and between the remscéla and the Táin Bó Cúailnge: textual links range from overt, one-line references to the Táin, e.g. the final line in Aislinge Óenguso, to fully developed, narrative episodes, e.g. Táin Bó Regamna. I will identify the nature of these textual links and their impact on the creation of the remscéla as a literary series.

In honour of Eleanor Knott’s work on the Early Irish tale Togail Bruidne Da Derga (TBDD), ‘The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’, this paper will investigate the group of remscéla, ‘prefatory tales’, associated with TBDD and the wider implications of medieval, literary serialization. The attested use of the term remscél appears sparingly throughout medieval Irish literature: apart from TBDD, the only other extant examples of the term refer to those tales associated with the Táin Bó Cúailnge (TBC) and to the various episodes in the Irish adaptation of Lucan’s Pharsalia, In Cath Catharda ‘The War of the Romans’.During this talk, I will draw comparisons between TBDD and TBC in particular and how the two extended narratives were prime candidates for literary serialisation. I will also investigate the differences in the nature of the textual relationship between the remscéla of TBC and TBDD; and, furthermore, how this impacts the definition of the term remscél. Taking stock of Erich Poppe’s study into the diachronic development of ‘cyclical impulse’ (Poppe 2008, 42), I will also comment on the manipulation of pre-existing tales for the purpose of complementing a literary series and if/how this manifests itself in the categorization of the TBDD remscéla.

Poppe, E., 2008: Of Cycles and Other Critical Matters. Some Issues in Medieval Irish Literary History and Criticism, E. C. Quiggin Memorial Lectures 9. University of Cambridge: Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic.

I roinnt téacsanna Rúraíochta, castar orainn mná osnádúrtha a bhfuil an cumas acu éin (ealaí go háirithe) a dhéanamh díobh féin: Derbforgaill in Aided Derbforgaill, Fand in Serglige Con Culainn, Caer in Aislinge Óengusa, srl. Go hiondúil, bíonn laoch an scéil sa tóir ar an mbean seo. Cuireann a leithéid seo de mhná i gcuimhne dúinn móitíf na heala-mhná (nó swan maiden) agus an finscéal idirnáisiúnta ATU 400 ’Man on a Quest for his Lost Wife’.  Insítí an scéal seo ar fud na hEoraipe, agus bailíodh scórtha de leaganacha in Éirinn sa 19ú agus 20ú aois.

Séard atá i gceist agam sa gcaint seo ná an bhaint a d’fhéadfadh a bheith ag na scéalta meán-aoiseacha seo leis an bhfinscéal a phlé. Arbh ea go raibh an finscéal ar eolas ag údair na dtéacsanna seo? Cén chaoi a d’athraigh siad an traidisiúin béil nuair a chuaigh siad i mbun scríbhneoireachta? Agus cén chaoi is féidir úsáid a bhaint as na scéalta seo mar fhoinse eolais do stair agus scaipeadh an traidisiúin béil seo?

Stair Ercuil ocus a Bás (SEB) ‘The History of Hercules and his Death’ is a fifteenth-century Irish-language retelling of the heroic biography of Hercules, preserved uniquely within Trinity College Dublin MS 1298 (H 2 7) in the hand of Uilleam Mac an Leagha, who was likely alsothe author. SEB is a translation of William Caxton’s Late Middle English The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, published in Bruges in 1474, which is in turn a translation of Raoul LeFèvre’s Middle French Recoeil des histoires de Troyes ‘Compendium of the Histories of Troy,’ written for Philip the Good, third duke of Burgundy, c. 1463. Unlike Togail Troí and other medieval Irish adaptations of Classical narrative, SEB is a ‘translation’ of a contemporary vernacular rather than Classical or Late Antique Latin text, and represents an interest in other vernacular engagements with Classical tradition.

Like most medieval translators, the author of SEB took considerable liberties with his source material, abridging significantly and adapting the narration to fit the conventions of Gaelic heroic narrative. Other interventions are more substantial, and the author often draws upon earlier Irish adaptations to complement or correct elements of his source. The aim of this presentation, then, is to explore some of the interventions made by the translator within the context of his hybrid Gaelic-English literary milieu: how Burgundian courtly literature is repackaged for an Anglo-Norman readership, and how LeFèvre’s Gallic Hercules is made Gaelic.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Ireland were marked by the centralization and expansion of royal power under Tudor and Stuart monarchs. With this project came sustained attacks on the native Gaelic aristocracy, as well as the elite literary culture which it sustained. Some members of the aristocracy, capitulating to the demands of the Crown, sent their sons to be educated in Dublin or in England. Others, in response to military defeat, dispossession, and ongoing cultural pressures, sought refuge on the Continent: would-be clerics pursued education in European seminaries, displaced aristocrats found positions in the courts and militaries of Catholic monarchs, and scribes and poets often followed their patrons into exile.

A characteristic of Gaelic poetry of this period is an increasing awareness of and interest in Classical antiquity: praise poets in Ireland and Scotland would liken their patrons to famous heroes of the ancient past, and draw exempla from Classical narrative, especially accounts of the Trojan War and Caesar’s civil war. Unsurprisingly, several poems which address the upheavals and migrations of the era do so in reference to the various perambulations, exiles, and homecomings of Classical tradition.

This presentation will explore the ways in which Gaelic poets of the period made use of Classical tradition in political poems of exile and repossession. Particular attention will be paid to the works of the Ulster poet Fearghal Óg Mac an Bhaird (fl. 1560-1620), and his poems to Uí Dhomhnaill patrons who fled Ireland during the Flight of the Earls of 1607.

Imthechta Tuaithe Luchra agus Aided Fergusa is a lengthy medieval Irish prosimetric saga, composed sometime c. 1300, and preserved in a manuscript from the early 1500s. The text relates, in a burlesque, farcical, and, at times, obscene manner, the adventures of the legendary king of Ulster, Fergus mac Leite, with various members of the eponymous Tuath Luchra, a diminutive race of beings who correspond with the ‘leprechaun’ of later folklore, along with Fergus’ death while fighting a monster dwelling within present-day Dundrum Bay.

While this text has received relatively little critical attention, it has had a noteworthy afterlife: to give two examples, the first two parts of Johnathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), featuring the diminutive Lilliputians and gigantic Brobdingnagians respectively, seem to have taken inspiration from this text; and the name of the primary antagonist of the horror film Leprechaun (1993), Lubdan, is taken indirectly from this text.

The first and, at present, only English translation of the text was published by Standish O’Grady in 1892 as part of the collection Silva Gadelica. O’Grady’s translation is marked by a florid style and several lacunae. Linguistically difficult or repetitive passages are absent in the translation, while other omissions seem more purposeful, as several episodes which may have offended Victorian mores are left out. As the only English translation, O’Grady’s interpretation of the text formed the basis for subsequent retellings, many of which were aimed at children, including the Irish-language author Peadar Ua Laoghaire’s novella Eisirt (1909).

In this presentation, I intend to trace the line of development from the later Medieval saga to Ua Laoghaire’s novella; discussing the various decisions and omissions made by the authors in order to make the text more palatable to their different audiences, within the context of the conservative cultural revival of pre-independence Ireland.

The present article offers an overview of Classical personal and place-names found in Early Modern Irish syllabic verse. The relative frequency of these names is discussed, and names are subjected to metrical analysis. Two categories of names are distinguished: those borrowed in Middle Irish or earlier, characterized by the loss of final syllables and other types of assimilation, and later borrowings, in which the Latin spelling is largely preserved. The evidence suggests that poets pronounced Latin words in a manner consistent with the evidence of later medieval Latin writing from Ireland, and that the influence of French and English pronunciation of Latin was minimal. Features of contemporary Irish pronunciation of Latin, especially the assibilation of <c> and antepenultimate or penultimate stress, are applied even to Classical names borrowed from Middle or Early Modern Irish sources. An appendix lists all of the poems discussed, and identifies the Classical content within each poem.

Ingnad echtra is a poem consisting of eighteen stanzas in ollbairdne aiclech íarcormarcach which recount the adventure of Aodh, the chief poet of Fergus mac Leite, in the land of the Túath Luchra, a race of diminutive supernatural beings who can be identified with the leprechauns of later folklore. 

This poem is preserved within two manuscript witnesses. In British Library Egerton MS 1782, it appears as part of the Early Modern Irish prosimetrum Imtechta Tuaithi Luchra ocus agedh Fergusa, which recounts Fergus mac Leite’s dealings with the Túath Luchra and his violent death while fighting a lake monster in Dundrum Bay. It is also preserved as an independent poem in the Book of the Dean of Lismore, where it is presented in that manuscript’s distinctive Scots-based orthography.

In addition to the divergent orthographies, the two witnesses present noteworthy textual differences: entire quatrains unique to each manuscript and several metrical irregularities in the Dean of Lismore text. In this presentation, I argue that these textual differences can best be explained by positing a period of oral transmission between the poem’s original composition and being copied or transcribed in the Book of the Dean of Lismore. 

Although first written in the Middle Ages, these sagas purport to offer a glimpse of the mythic, pre-Christian past, populated with a larger-than-life cast of heroic warriors, sinister druids, and pagan gods. While they have not enjoyed the same degree of influence as their Old Norse counterparts, the Irish sagas have been a source of inspiration for metal bands, especially folk metal bands, in Ireland and abroad.

This paper will begin with an overview of the bands which draw upon early Irish literature in their songs, as well as the stories which are frequently referenced or retold in their lyrics. This is followed by a discussion of the various scholarly and popular intermediaries through which artists may have encountered these medieval texts. There will also be a brief discussion of the use of medieval and modern Irish by these bands although, as will be noted, the use of Celtic languages tends to be fairly superficial.

The majority of the paper will be dedicated to an analysis of the ways in which bands make use of early Irish narrative. For some bands, the main attraction of Irish saga is those elements which suggest an affinity with fantasy literature. For other bands, the use of saga narrative is part of a strategy of invoking an archaic national past: “primordial nationalisms”, to borrow Simon Trafford’s term. Unsurprisingly, many of these bands are from Ireland, and their use of Irish saga forms part of a general preoccupation with Ireland’s past and future. For bands from outside of Ireland, this invocation of an Irish and Celtic past can be seen as a form of nationalism which is distinctly international in character, defined by a sense of a shared Celtic identity and an opposition to modernity.

The aim of this interdisciplinary conference is to showcase and make accessible a large body of medieval texts, written in the Middle Irish/Gaelic language in prose and verse, which recreate and transform in this Celtic guise the myths, legends, and intellectual culture of ancient Greece and Rome. These texts, dating from the tenth to the fifteenth century, demonstrate the extraordinary vigour of Gaelic Ireland’s indigenous and pre-colonial engagement with Classical learning. Ireland emerges as a unique locale where expertise on the European past flourished and recreated itself on the Atlantic edge of Europe, in a cultural environment that traditional scholarship has too often regarded as peripheral. The texts themselves, however, remain largely unknown outside the circles of specialist scholars, and their mediation between Celtic and Classical linguistic codes and literary norms presents a significant challenge to interpretation. Our conference aims to bring together Celticists and Classicists for a groundbreaking venture that will generate accessibility to these texts and place them within the broader context of European literary history as a whole, including the corresponding traditions of medieval Scandinavia. The conference also aims to challenge prevailing research patterns within several neighbouring academic disciplines, including colonial and postcolonial studies.

This discussion concerns the portrayal of two supernatural beings, the mermaid and the banshee, within Irish and Scottish Gaelic folk tradition. Despite some obvious differences, such as appearance and habitat, a comparison reveals many underlying similarities, allowing mermaids to appear in narratives typically associated with banshees and vice versa. It is argued that beliefs and narratives surrounding both beings reflect a common cluster of ideas and anxieties regarding the status of women within exogamous and patrilocal families. Further connections are drawn between folkloric accounts and portrayals of female death-messengers and sovereignty-figures in early Irish literature.

This poem was composed to Richard de Burgh, second Earl of Clanrickarde, most likely on the occasion of his inauguration in 1550. The apologue of the poem, which recounts the adventures of Hercules in the Island of the Purple Sheep, is drawn from Stair Ercuil ocus a bás, a late fifteenth-century adaptation by Uilleam Mac an Leagha of either Raoul Lefèvre's Le recoeil des histoires de Troyes or William Caxton's English translation, The recuyell of the historyes of Troye. The apologue was previously edited from RIA MS 3 C 13, along with a glossary but no translation, by Eleanor Knott in Irish syllabic poetry, and a 'lightly edited' transcription was published in A bardic miscellany. A complete edition of the poem, based on the Book of the O'Connor Donn's text, is presented here for the first time, along with an introduction, notes on sources and analogues with other bardic poems, and an English translation.

The present study deals with the use of two Irish verb constructions, the autonomous (e.g. cuireadh litreacha chun bealaigh, ‘letters were dispatched’) and the passive progressive (e.g. bhí m’athair á leigheas acu, ‘my father was being cured by them’), in a corpus of 20th-century texts. From this corpus, 2,956 instances of the autonomous and 467 instances of the passive progressive were extracted and included in the analysis. Dialectal variation concerning the use of these two constructions is also surveyed.

The study explores and compares the use of the autonomous and the passive progressive. The main aim of the study is to investigate the two constructions with regard to their textual functions. The features studied relate to verb and clause type, as well as the measuring of topicality of patients, implicit agents, and – in the passive progressive only – overt agents.

The autonomous tends to be used when the patient is topical, or central, in the text. The passive progressive, on the other hand, is mainly used with an overt agent that is considerably more topical than the patient. In agent-less passive progressives, patients and implicit agents are equally low in topicality. The autonomous occurs about equally often in main and subclauses, while the passive progressive is used primarily in subclauses, mainly non-finite ones. This difference is connected to the finding that 24% of the clauses containing the autonomous denote events as part of a sequentially ordered chain of events, compared to 4% of those containing the passive progressive.

The most salient dialectal variation concerns the frequency of the passive progressive: 73% of the instances of the passive progressive in the database occur in the Munster texts, compared to 22% in Connacht 5% in Ulster. The autonomous, in contrast, is fairly evenly distributed across the dialects.

This dissertation contains a critical edition of the early Irish tale Aided Derbforgaill “the violent death of Derbforgaill”. It includes an introduction discussing the main thematic components of the tale as well as intertextuality, transmission and manuscript relationship. The edition is accompanied by transcripts from the three manuscript copies of the tale and textual notes.

Aided Derbforgaill is an Ulster Cycle tale and belongs to a category of tales describing the death of prominent heroes, rarely heroines, in early Irish literature. Arriving in the shape of a bird to mate with the greatest of all heroes, Cú Chulainn, Derbforgaill is refused by Cú Chulainn on account of him having sucked her blood. Forced to enter a urination competition between women, and upon winning this, Derbforgaill is mutilated by the other competitors. The tale ends with two poems lamenting the death of Derbforgaill. This very short tale is complex, not only in its subject matter, but in the elliptical language of the poetry. Thematically the tale is a combination of very common motifs found elsewhere in early Irish literature, such as the Otherworld, metamorphosis and the love of someone unseen, and some rare motifs that are almost unique to this tale, such as blood sucking and the urination competition. The text also have clear sexual overtones.

Following recent work that has begun to reassess previously held views about the recensions of Dinds.enchas Érenn, this article examines the authorship and transmission history of the dinds.enchas of Loch Garman, which exists in two prose versions and one verse composition. We first argue that the verse dind‑s.enchas of Loch Garman is the product of a single author, Eochaid Éolach úa Céirín, refuting Tomás Ó Concheanainn’s assertion that Eochaid composed only the second half of the poem. We then examine the individual versions of the dinds.enchas of Loch Garman to posit a new relative chronology, with potential ramifications for an understanding of the recensions of the Dinds.enchas.