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.