Memory and Remembering in Early Irish Literature: Beyond the Backward Look 9783110799132, 9783110799095

Citation preview

Sarah Künzler Memory and Remembering in Early Irish Literature

Memory and the Medieval North

Edited by Jürg Glauser, Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell and Lena Rohrbach

Volume 2

Sarah Künzler

Memory and Remembering in Early Irish Literature Beyond the Backward Look

ISBN 978-3-11-079909-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-079913-2 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-079922-4 ISSN 2699-7339 Library of Congress Control Number: 2023943192 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Book of Ballymote, fol. 171 r, ©Royal Irish Academy. Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Preface When I set out on the British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship from which this monograph emerged, I was ill-prepared for an expedition which led me away from established theories of cultural memory to mucky boots and the study of alternative histories. This study is testimony to a research process that is guided by curiosity rather than by pre-formulated ideas. The research is framed by a desire to examine the ‘workings of cultural memory’: how texts contribute to a cultural memory which humans utilise to create and experience a spatio-temporal collective identity. Yet, as time went on, I realised that researching memory in medieval Ireland also changed my own perception on current issues, and that in turn many of these modern matters echo concerns also raised in medieval Irish texts. I also became more and more interested in what humans do with their memories, and what memories do to us, topics that have also dominated recent public debates. During the writing of this book, questions about the appropriation of the past in modern society and culture have come to the forefront in public discourse. News footage has shown people on the streets of London either protecting or seeking to displace statutes of figures associated with colonialism and slavery. Their actions have generated a long-overdue public debate on questions of remembrance, forgetting, and retribution: whose past is it, and who has the right to decide about its future remembrance? Which parts of the past have been forgotten, and for what reason(s)? Who shaped or shapes the knowledge of the past? Whose obligation – or in whose power – was or is it to preserve and communicate the past to others? And what cultural and individual perspectives make it possible to remember an event completely differently? All of these questions destabilise the past and place much greater emphasis on our access to, and the communication of, knowledge about times gone by. They also touch on the complex relationship between memory and forgetting discussed in chapter four. Agency, ownership, and communication of memory therefore emerge as prevalent topics in twenty-first-century public discourse. They have also been explored in the cultural output of this century. In the dystopian Series Black Mirror (2011–2019), for example, memory implants allow humans to re-view and hence to over-analyse their experiences. This leads to the break-down of relationships, suggesting that forgetting is a prerequisite for human interactions (The Entire History of You, S1 E3). In another episode, an Icelandic insurance worker accidentally uncovers a murder while harvesting the memories of a minor traffic accident through a device projecting personal memories onto a screen. Her investigation into the case eventually leads to the death of her whole immediate family (Crocodile, S4 E3). The message of these episodes is clear and poignant: memories hold https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110799132-202

VI

Preface

power. And they have consequences. Modern culture therefore invites us to consider that personal memories are not always private and that they can have a social or cultural impact; a thought that also appears in medieval Irish literature and which I explore in the third chapter. The third main topic of this study – memory and landscape – emerged from a more profane observation while walking a friend’s neurotic Golden Retriever in a South Dublin suburb. Although we were separated only by the length of a leash, our experience of the places and spaces through which we passed differed widely. Most obviously, Goose the Golden Retriever would pick up scents and criss cross the carpark or the nearby field in a frantic attempt to ‘read today’s newspaper’, with no regard for puddles, hedges or passers-by. I found both the carpark and the field exceedingly boring simply because there was nothing so see, and I could not engage with the landscape of smells that must have populated it for Goose. I saw the danger of speeding cars and bicycles shooting past us while she remained oblivious to these hazards, instead trying to chase yet another imaginary cat across the road. In short, our sensory engagement with, and reactions to places in our suburb differed vastly. This may be expected across species, but it made me wonder whether even humans show different reactions to their environment depending on their knowledge of it and previous experiences of it. I began observing how my husband, my friends and colleagues experience places which we ‘share’, and how we are influenced in this, not just by our personality and outlook, but also by our knowledge of cultural history. The different experiences this revealed echo the diverse angles on the intersection between landscapes and memory in medieval Irish literature. Although this topic only takes up a small part of this book (chapter two), the idea that both the past and the landscape, as well as temporal and spatial orientation, are relative and fluid permeates most pages. This monograph, selective in its focus as any single-author study must be, marks the beginning of a discussion rather than its endpoint. Over the past five years researching and writing this book has been comparable to driving along an Irish country road without Google maps. The journey was full of unexpected twists and turns that, a moment or a month later, afforded unanticipated yet exciting views of a new stretch of land. The work took a lot longer to emerge than originally planned: a pandemic and a relocation to Switzerland made access to libraries and exchange with much valued colleagues difficult. Starting a new career in the sustainability sector and opening a restaurant meant that in the past two years I could only work on this book on and off. However, the pronounced focus on the future of our planet that this shift in careers entailed ultimately enriched my understanding of the past.

Preface

VII

The primary driving force behind this research journey was my colleagues at the University of Glasgow (Celticists, Archaeologists, Onomasticians, Historians, and Literary Critics, if they must be put into disciplinary confinement), who patiently introduced me to their own research and provided valuable coordinates for navigating new terrain. Among them are Katherine Forsyth, Sheila Kidd, Kate Mathis, Simon Taylor, Thomas Owen Clancy, Sìm Innes, Stephen Harrison, Alasdair C. Whyte and Stephen Driscoll, as well as Aris Palyvos, Anouk Busset, Sofia Evemalm, Viktoria Marker and Cynthia Thickpenny. Without them, the focus of this book would have been much narrower, and the analysis much poorer for it. To them, and above all to my mentor, Geraldine Parsons, I offer my heartfelt thanks for their support and friendship. Thanks are also due to others who have provided inspiration, companionship, and constructive criticism over the years: Kay Muhr, Liam Ó hAisibéil, Emily Lethbridge, Jürg Glauser, Lena Rohrbach, Helen Imhoff and Nora Kauffeldt. Erich Poppe and Joseph Nagy provided valuable feedback that alerted me to necessary emendations and omissions and helped to finally complete this monograph. Any remaining errors are, as always, my own. The editors of the Memory and the Medieval North Series I thank for their patience and for including this study in their series and the staff at De Gruyter, especially Dominika Herbst and Robert Forke, for their expert guidance. Martina Maher deserves thanks for reading the entire manuscript and offering many helpful suggestions for improval. The research on which this book was based took shape during a British Academy Post-Doctoral fellowship at the Universtiy of Glasgow and I am immensely grateful to the British Academy for their support. My interest in cultural memory emerged from a previous post-doctoral project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and conducted at Trinity College Dublin, which in many ways paved the way for the current monograph. I am no less indebted to my husband for his support over the past decade and for the many happy memories we continue to make together. This book is a journey of discovery through the landscapes of early Irish texts, and it promotes research that is open to dialogues and guided by curiosity. It is unlikely that ‘a culture’s cultural memory’ will ever be fully grasped – too fluid are both cultures and their memories, and too limited are our perspectives as modern researchers. Yet, whatever progress we make in understanding how cultures, societies, or groups use the past to legitimise and experience a particular present (and plan for an anticipated future) will help us understand some of the fundamental coordinates of what it means to be human. In memory of Vital Künzler (1984–2018) and Bobby Durnam (1974–2020). In future memory of John Griffiths. Viva GSP

Contents Preface 1 1.1 1.2 1.2.1 1.3 1.3.1 1.3.2 2 2.1 2.1.1 2.1.2 2.1.3 2.2 2.2.1 2.2.2 2.2.3 2.2.4 2.3 2.3.1 2.3.2 2.3.3 2.4 3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.3.1 3.3.2 3.3.3

V Introduction 1 Memory Studies Between the Past and the Future 1 Glimpsing Medieval Irish Culture 7 Memory in Medieval Ireland: Texts and other Carriers 14 Medieval Practices and Modern Theories: Memory between Lived Experience and Scholarly Discourse 23 A Retrospective: Memory Studies and Celtic Culture 29 Philological Approaches to Memory 43 Ancestral Topographies? Memory, Places, and Landscape(s) Narrative Landscapes 46 Between Landscapes and Places 50 Medieval Irish Perspectives 52 An Absent Presence? Landscapes in Early Irish Texts 55 Imagining the Pre-Christian Past 59 Stones for the Dead: Materialising Memory in the Irish Landscape 59 Monuments Not Related to Death 74 Animals Leaving Traces 76 Females Shaping the Landscape 81 Understanding the Christian Present: Acallam na Senórach Seeing is Believing: Burial Mounds and Proof 103 Places Old and New (and to Come) 107 Identifying Elusive Places: Dindshenchas in Acallam na Senórach 109 Conclusion: The Past is Not a Foreign Country 120

46

98

Long Live the Eyewitness: Gaining Access to the Past in Early Irish Literature 123 Eyewitness Accounts and Cultural Memory Theory 128 All a Matter of Perspective? 131 Eyewitnesses in Early Irish Texts 136 Telling your Own Tale: Immram Brain meic Febail 136 Reviving the Eyewitness: Do Ḟaillsigud Tána Bó Cúailnge 139 How Far Back Can We Remember? Suidigud Tellaig Temra or the Search for an Eyewitness 147

X

Contents

3.3.4 3.3.5

From the Body to the Bodies: Scél Tuáin in Lebor Gabála Érenn 157 Knowledge that Shall not be Told: Imaccallam Tuáin fri Finnia and Imacallam Choluim Chille ocus ind Óclaigh 161 Saving the Past for the Future: Acallam na Senórach 167 A Motif Expanded 172 How to Make History: Airec Menman Uraird maic Coisse 173 Síaburcharpat Con Culaind: Cú Chulainn’s Look into the Future 179 Conclusion: In Dialogue with the Past 186

3.3.6 3.4 3.4.1 3.4.2 3.5 4 4.1 4.1.1

4.7 4.8

Memory’s Dark Twin? Forgetting and its Cultural Impact 192 Why Forgetting? 192 Total Oblivion or Partial Failure to Remember: Different Kinds of Forgetting in Pre-modern and Modern Discourse 200 Towards a Scientia Oblivionalis? 202 Total Recall: Cenn Fáelad and the Brain of Forgetfulness 204 Personal Forgetting, Social Impact 217 Eochad Rigéices, the Forgetful fili 218 Magical Oblivion: The Blissful Forgetting of Serglige Con Culainn 228 Deadly Consequences: Forgetting in Oidheadh Chloinne Tuireann 235 There’s Nothing Lost that may be Found if Sought: Forgetting and Retrieval in Do Ḟaillsigud Tána Bó Cúailnge and Suidigud Tellaig Temra 238 The Threat to Forget in Acallam na Senórach 245 Conclusion: Embracing Forgetting 250

5

Toward a Conclusion: Past, Present and Future Revisited

4.1.2 4.2 4.3 4.3.1 4.4 4.5 4.6

Appendix

265

Bibliography Index

287

269

253

1 Introduction We move into the future backwards. Paul Valéry, Variété IV

1.1 Memory Studies Between the Past and the Future Scholarly engagement with cultural memory in recent decades has shown that memory does not exist in a vacuum. Instead, it stands in complex relationships with politics, social organisation, cultural and historiographical practices, religious views, personal experiences and language (amongst other things). Controlling narratives about the past holds power, and memory is often a potent tool in political discourse and identity construction. Studying memory therefore entails an engagement with its role in social and cultural contexts as well as its embeddedness in the lived-in world. It also necessitates a consideration of how memory is stored and/or communicated both synchronically (within groups) and diachronically. These observations apply to personal, collective, and cultural memory – categories which cannot always be neatly separated from each other. Memory also needs to be mediated. Consequently, considering the sources by which researchers can access how individuals, societies, and cultures conceptualise(d) the(ir) past is a vital part of Memory Studies research. This presents its own kinds of challenges. For the centuries that we moderners term the Middle Ages, different media can give us an insight into how people engaged with times gone by in a world that in many ways differs from ours, but in which we may still observe similar concerns. Sculptures and paintings, inscriptions, different kinds of texts such as legal material, historiographical and religious texts, adaptations of Classical or courtly literature, myths, medieval sagas and poetry all provide insights into medieval culture. These sources existed alongside a vibrant oral tradition no longer accessible to us, but part of the world the medieval authors, compilers, copyists and audiences of the texts inhabited.1 The sources also show that the memory of an event or a figure is frequently consciously constructed for specific purposes. Different media – and different

 Author is a difficult concept in Medieval Studies, as has recently been discussed by Rösli and Gropper (2021). The term is used here in a lose sense for someone who brought a narrative into written form, while compilers and copyists worked with existing written material. All of these terms imply a conscious engagement with the narratives. The term audience refers both to those who read a text or hear it read out loud. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110799132-001

2

1 Introduction

texts – therefore show diverging interests in, or conceptualisations of, the past. When engaging with medieval texts that themselves engage with times past we may therefore ask: what cultural frameworks does a text employ to narrate the past? What perspectives on the past become tangible through it? Who has the power to mediate or validate the past and how do figures gain access to the past in the texts? And what happens if, instead of remembering, there is an individual or collective forgetting? These are some of the questions which this book addresses, placing a clear focus on the intradiegetic representations of the past and their cultural significance. In following a tripartite approach suggested by Erll, the close readings delineate the interrelations (and fluid boundaries) between the material, social and mental/cognitive realms of memory (Erll 2005, 102). The following chapters aim to offer perspectives on how the past was imagined and communicated in the secular narratives often referred to as early (or medieval) Irish saga, as well as in a small number of other texts such as Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of the Takings of Ireland or the Book of Invasions) and Auraicept na nÉces (The Scholars’/Poets’ Primer).2 All of the texts discussed in the following chapters are written in the Irish language and in prose or prosimetrum. In their representations of the past these texts allow an insight into the “the social, cultural, cognitive, political and technological shifts which affect how, what and why individuals, groups and societies remember, and forget” (Nordal 2018, xiii). The value of a Memory Studies approaches to these texts lies in that it challenges a monocausatic, historical perception of the past. Memory Studies also turn our interest to the multiple ways in which “groups of people (. . .) remembered their past”, as Hermann (2010, 69) phrased it. This in turn makes it possible to investigate “what modes were preferred when reference was made to times gone by” (Hermann 2010, 69). The following analyses therefore attempt to give an insight into medieval Irish conceptualisations of the past based on a relatively small number of texts. Yet, even this limited corpus unearths a wealth of perspectives if approached by contextualised close readings (see 1.3.2. and Künzler 2016). Given the limitation in its selection of sources, this study refrains from comments on the medieval Irish memory culture, instead placing its focus on close textual study and embracing the plurality of memory discourses at hand. The texts also refer to diverse (but not mutually exclusive) temporal layers, such as the heroic past, deep or mythical time and the time of the Bible. They tell us about

 I view a text as a specific version of a narrative composed/shaped at a particular time and place; e.g. the different recensions (texts) of Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley) a narrative. In line with common practice, the English titles of the early Irish texts commonly include the definite article, even though this is not explicit in the Irish titles. Some early Irish narratives are preserved with titles the manuscripts, yet in many cases, the titles are modern additions.

1.1 Memory Studies Between the Past and the Future

3

pasts that range from an elusive mythical deep time to what, for a medieval audience, would have been the very recent past – and they can successfully link all of these pasts to various presents. Tellingly, the texts are hardly ever interested in the past simply for the past’s sake; instead, they frequently relate the past to the present or to an imagined future. This reveals an awareness that even medieval cultures may have moved into the future backwards: attempting to learn from the past, keen to illicit future remembrance, and shaping their expectations of the future through the past. As texts like Síaburcharpat Con Culaind (The Phantom Chariot of Cú Chulainn) or Immram Brain meic Febail (The Voyage of Bran mac Febail) show, memory can be coupled with an awareness of things to come. The work is therefore also a call for Memory Studies to look beyond the present(s) in which the texts were written (down) and to increasingly include the texts’ nods to the future into analyses. The chapters address three distinct topics: landscape, eyewitnesses and forgetting. These areas emerged as prevalent and exciting themes during the study of the texts, and they hopefully prove of interest to the wider Memory Studies community. The themes also provide insight into diverse topics such as the relationship between oral and written culture, power and agency over memory, and access to the past. Glauser stresses that the focus of current Memory Studies lies neither on the past itself, nor on the social or historical reality of the past, but exactly on the memory of the past, on how people remember, and why. This further implies that cultural memory is upheld by the selections and choices that are made by groups of people; there is no “self-regulation” of this type of memory, which makes it relevant to focus on the complicated and multiple focuses and powers that stand behind it. (Glauser 2014, viii; my emphases)

Glauser therefore proposes that we ask how cultural memory operates “for whom, under which circumstances and under which specific conditions” (Glauser 2018, 22). That texts are but one media through which cultural memory was constructed in medieval Ireland has already been mentioned. Therefore, their study cannot be equated with an analysis of the memory culture that permeated medieval Irish society. However, it can provide an insight into a part of that memory culture that openly engages with the past. The following chapter investigates how an interest in the past is made tangible by both the physical surroundings and by learned and religious discourses. It emerges that these two poles were, perhaps, much more embedded in the lived-in world in the pre-modern period than they are now (see Mulligan 2019). The chapter foregrounds the medieval Irish sagascapes (to appropriate a term coined by Lethbridge (2016, 55) for the Icelandic tradition) and shows how landscape representations in medieval texts can be coupled with an interest in the material aspects of memory discourses. Remembering especially the pre-Christian past could assert Ireland’s place in the oecumene; at the same time, it may explain the partic-

4

1 Introduction

ularities of the Irish landscape which the medieval people inhabited. After all, the Irish landscape to this day is full of monuments that alert to the presence of earlier inhabitants, which may incite an engagement with what traces our generation will leave on the landscape. This of course reflects the fundamental digma that “things do not ‘have’ a memory of their own but trigger our memory” (Rekdal 2014, 109) – an observation that alerts us to the active part of remembering and the possibilities of inciting or constructing remembrance. Chapter three centres on a relatively common figure in medieval Irish literature: the miraculously old eyewitness who imparts important information about the past to a present that for the audience of the texts is already the past. The theme of eyewitnesses also alerts to a twofold mediation of knowledge about the past, as it is imparted in oral form within the narrative but transmitted in a text. Eyewitnesses can also raise questions about the origin of the knowledge about the past that enters the collective sphere in the narratives, and draw attention to mediations of memory and its legitimation. Agency and access to the past, as well as power over the present, appear to be openly connected in these instances. The chapter therefore addresses “the institutional forms, the social relations and discursive spaces in which knowledge about memory is produced” (Antze and Lambek 1996, xiv) in the texts. Moreover, the figure of the eyewitness also affords an insight into the complex relationship between written and oral sources, a topic that can only be addressed superficially here but is discussed at length by Johnston (2013). On an analytical level, I argue that the texts also incite a reassessment of the relationship between personal and cultural memory in medieval Ireland. The tripartite distinction of personal, collective, and cultural memory made by Jan Assmann (1992) does not always appear to be reflected in medieval Irish texts. Instead, the trusted memory of eyewitnesses could offer proof of events and could therefore have fulfilled an important function within medieval Irish memory culture by transmitting knowledge of the past to the present. This topos reveals a critical interest in how humans come to know about the past, who (legitimately) provides access to the past, and how these figures mediate their knowledge. In this regard, modern categories of thought must be revisited and perhaps even re-evaluated in relation to medieval Irish culture. While many texts foreground the transmission or validation of knowledge about the past, others draw attention to the impact of forgetting or critically reflect on (the fragility of) common mechanisms of remembering.3 As chapter four

 This should not be confused with questions regarding their value for modern historians, for a discussion of which see Ralph O’Connor (2016, 2014a); Poppe (2014, 2008, 2007); Toner (2005, 2000) and Dooley (2006).

1.1 Memory Studies Between the Past and the Future

5

shows, the joint topic of forgetting and loss is explored both in relation to writing and remembering. Even if there is no medieval Irish learned treatise on memory, the literary tradition emerges as remarkably self-aware of its limitations and the limitations of the learned men of memory, the filid (see pp. 16–20). In their entirety the texts demonstrate that questions about how people come to know about the past and who provides access to the past are by no means a modern phenomenon but appear to have preoccupied medieval authors, redactors, and audiences also. These thematic foci do not exhaust the possibilities of studying memory in medieval Irish culture. However, they represent prevalent interests expressed in secular texts and link these to recent critical research in Memory Studies. In addition, all three thematic clusters are closely connected to the question of identity formation, which was a spatio-temporal pursuit in the medieval period. After all, who people perceive themselves to be was (and is) frequently defined (for better or for worse) by our notion of where we come from and where we feel at home. This study thus investigates some of the ways in which a collective, culturally meaningful view of the past as narrated in these texts contributes to shaping a medieval Irish identity that is both local and global, at once retrospective and prospective, in its outlook. Taken together, the chapters offer room for evaluating the role of narratives in collective identities and afford glimpses into the diverse versions of the past that circulated in medieval Ireland – not as competing conceptualisations but perhaps as different frameworks for a complex Irish cultural identity grounded in time and space. The book critically engages with problems that arise from this approach and hopes to draw attention to blind spots in its own focus. It also charts future avenues for research in the field that would need a multi- or interdisciplinary approach and a wider range of expertise than any one author could offer. In particular, the question of how the past may relate to the shifting presents in which it was transmitted and recounted, that is, how later copies or recensions of a text differ in their engagement with the past must remain unaddressed here. Such manuscript-based research will reveal further interesting insights, but it lays outside the realm of the current study. This research therefore does not present definitive answers but hopefully instigates future conversations on how medieval memory cultures functioned. Mention will be made of different kinds of memory, from personal memory to what would fall under the definition of cultural memory (although one that diverges from the original definition proposed by Jan Assmann in 1992). In following the texts in their representations, the monograph is concerned with cultural and social practices of remembering as much as it is with cultural memory. The distinctions between the levels and functions of these kinds of memory become clear in the individual chapters. Yet, they all share the notion that memory is

6

1 Introduction

“knowledge with an identity-index”, i.e. it is knowledge about oneself whether “as an individual or as a member of a family, a generation, a community, a nation, or a cultural and religious tradition” (Erll and Nünning 2010, 112–113). The chapters also show that a reflective engagement with how the past is remembered is not just a modern pursuit. Addressing common modern stereotypes, Chedgzoy, Graham, Hodgkin and Wray assert that “memory cultures of the early modern world were complex, self-conscious and highly mediated, rather than organic and unreflective” (Chedgzoy et al. 2018, 7). Their conclusion can certainly be extended to the pre-modern period also, even if medieval practices of cultural remembering differ substantially from those in the modern era. Since this study is part of the Memory and the Medieval North Series, it is written for an interdisciplinary audience that is perhaps more at home in Memory Studies than in Celtic Studies. Some points of connection with Scandinavian memory culture(s) are considered and the texts are introduced in greater depth to account for a more diverse audience. Because both the Irish and the Scandinavian memory cultures were also shaped by medieval learned culture (as well as a vibrant oral tradition), references are made to Latin learning, Biblical scholarship, and Classical texts where applicable. The remainder of this introduction sketches the geographic, linguistic, historical, and cultural environment from which the texts emerged and hence the historical and cultural framework I perceive as important for the formation of medieval Irish memory culture through secular literature. It also summarises previous work on cultural memory in Celtic Studies and engages with the potential and pitfalls of linking theoretical frameworks to these texts (see also Tymoczko 2014). The present study is indebted more to the culturally nuanced and specifically medievalist applications of Memory Studies that emerged in Scandinavian Studies in the past decade than to any single theoretical concept. Memory therefore provides a framework for conceptually linking this research to related fields, but it should not obscure the particularities of medieval Irish culture. This in turn ultimately enables a broader understanding of medieval engagements with the past and brings Irish sources to the attention of a wider audience – perhaps the most valuable advantage in introducing theoretical concepts to the field.4

 Like Tymoczko, I am interested in the reciprocal relationship between literature and theoretical approaches, asking how Irish evidence can evaluate theories of cultural memory but also what “the field of cultural memory studies contribute[s] to an understanding of Irish history and Irish culture specifically and to Celtic Studies as a whole” (Tymoczko 2014, 33–34).

1.2 Glimpsing Medieval Irish Culture

7

1.2 Glimpsing Medieval Irish Culture Medieval Irish literature presents one of the largest, and earliest, bodies of vernacular literature in Europe, with a rich textual culture emerging from the seventh century AD. onwards. Ireland was Christianised in the fifth century and the new religion brought with it Latin learning, literacy, and book culture. The Christianisation therefore provided both the impetus and the practical skills for producing texts. In many ways, the texts also reflect the Christian milieu from which they emerged, despite the frequent references to pre-Christian culture in secular (and even some hagiographical) literature. The textual production was the product of a “self-confident, highly-educated and articulate intellectual élite” who “was engaged in the task of forming a Christian identity for Ireland that encompassed the island’s past as well as its present and future” (Boyle 2021, 2). Christian culture also ignited a profound interest in world and/or salvation history and provided spatial and temporal reference points for mapping the Irish place in the oecumene.5 As early as the 1980s Ó Corráin, Breen and Breatnach (1984) proposed that “biblical law – particularly Levitical law – was adapted, translated and recast in early Irish vernacular law tracts” (Boyle 2021, 14). They thus argued for a profound Christian influence on the legal system. Not long after, McCone’s booklength study Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature (1990) argued for a similarly decisive influence of Old Testament sources on sagas, hagiography, and poetry. Although their findings are not unanimously accepted in the field, there is a growing understanding that the Irish consciously engaged with their past for various purposes, and that Christian learning played a part in this. On the one hand, the medieval Irish sought to put themselves on the ‘Christian map’ and to align their past with the historiography of Classical sources; on the other hand, they strove to legitimise local power structures and their complex legal system. An engagement with Christian world history does, therefore, not preclude that the texts are grounded in Irish culture.

 Clarke cites the synchronisms, “where an Irish scholar essentially takes the Chronicle of Eusebius-Jerome, where the histories of world nations are tabulated in parallel columns, and adds an extra column for events at the corresponding points of Irish history” (Clarke 2015, 442). He further stresses that the same precision is also evident in poetry such as Gilla Coemáin’s Annalád anall uile, which shows that these ideas were productive across modern conceptions of genres (Clarke 2015, 442).

8

1 Introduction

A similar influence can also be proposed for Classical literature, which likewise influenced the Irish self-perception. Clarke’s research shows that aligning the “Irish past with the Greco-Roman past helped Irishmen to reshape the terms on which their historical memory operated, and to negotiate a prestigious position for both Ireland and the Irish language in relation to the rest of Europe” (Ralph O’Connor 2014b, 11).6 The Irish learned caste therefore appear similarly interested in the past related in biblical and Classical texts as they were in their own past.7 But they also draw on a vibrant stock of Celtic material and on a strong oral culture that gives medieval Irish literature its unique themes and characters. Rather than seeking to dissect these components in individual texts, this study views all these elements as equally valuable contributors to the Irish literary tradition and appreciates the texts in the form in which they have come down to us.8 The combination of native material with Christian and Classical tradition is by no means unusual for medieval cultures, but the Irish may have possessed an added impetus for linking themselves to perceived cultural centres. Geographically, Ireland occupies a marginal position at the fringe of Europe. This does not mean that the Irish perceived themselves as marginal, yet the location of their homeland at the edge of medieval mappae mundi and hence at the end of the known Christian world appears to have concerned even St Patrick in his writings (see O’Loughlin 1992). This may well have been in response to established opinions on the relationship between geographic marginality and a removal from (Christian) civilization. After all, the “perception that Ireland was located on the periphery, far from the centre at Jerusalem, is a recurring trope in medieval Irish texts” (Boyle 2021, 6).

 In some cases, Classical and local figures are juxtaposed. Ralph O’Connor cites the example of the late twelfth-century historical Clann Ollaman Uaisle Emna (The Children of Ollam are the Nobles of Emain). The poem contains a Classical interlude which juxtaposes well-known protagonists associated with Emain Macha (i.e. the chief personages of the Ulster court) with their Trojan equivalents (Ralph O’Connor 2014b, 11–12).  On the importance of Classical literature see also Miles Heroic Saga and Classical Epic in Medieval Ireland (2011), Ralph O’Connor’s edited volume Classical Literature and Learning in Medieval Irish Narrative (2014b) and the works of Poppe. It has recently been argued that because the historical conversion in the fifth and sixth centuries can only be studied through the considerably later existing documents it must remain a point for speculation (Etchingham 2016). Schlüter observes for the twelfth-century manuscript Book of Leinster that “the coming of Christianity, i.e. the arrival of St Patrick, may have been of even greater importance for the Irish scribes, which is indicated by the structure of Lebor Gabála Érenn and its two following tracts, which, as we have seen, is divided into the kings before and after the coming of Christianity” (Schlüter 2010, 89).  This does, of course, not mean that all texts show all of these influences and/or to the same degree.

1.2 Glimpsing Medieval Irish Culture

9

The relationship between centre and periphery in the Christian world preoccupied some of the most influential thinkers of the period. Isidore of Seville, for example, classified all peoples in terms of the places they inhabited.9 In equating spatial distance from Jerusalem with barbarian culture, Prosper of Aquitaine called Ireland before the faith an insula barbara, an epithet that could doubtless also have been applied to many pre-Christian cultures in similar geographic positions (Johnston 2013, 35). This is coupled with an awareness that “Ireland was not included in biblical lists of the peoples of the earth and sometimes not even included in the Classical sources that supplemented biblical geography” (Boyle 2021, 5). Hence the Irish had to write themselves into biblical history in their own texts, and one of the strategies they employed was to link their past to Biblical precedent. Such perceptions may have provided an impetus for specifically Christian conceptualisations of the past that are prevalent in many secular texts, even those that are primarily concerned with the pre-Christian heroic era. We should not, however, equate intellectual and geographical marginality, as Ireland was by no means removed from centres of learning. Culturally, Ireland was intimately connected to both its immediate neighbours and the continent. In fact, the Irish took an active role in shaping European Christian culture, even if their contribution may previously have been overstated (Ralph O’Connor 2014b). In the early medieval period, Ireland was a place of learning for Anglo-Saxon kings while prominent Irish figures such as the ninth-century Johannes Scottus Eriugena (active in the Rheims area) actively shaped the theological debates of their days (Johnston 2013, 41).10 From the seventh century onwards, Irish missionaries travelled the continent and founded important monasteries such as St. Gall, Luxeuil or Bobbio, which to this day are recognised as medieval centres of learning and book culture. Geographic marginally must therefore not be mistaken for cultural marginality, and particularly not for intellectual marginality. A similarly self-reflective engagement may be proposed for the vernacular literature of the present study, particularly in terms of an awareness of the transmission of knowledge. In the early medieval period, it was particularly important to stress Ireland’s status within the medieval learned tradition: Irish writers, themselves the products of local circumstances, felt it necessary to stress Ireland’s membership of this learned and Christian international community. This stress was a major shaper of Irish responses to literacy and all that it entailed. Columbanus, easily the

 For this see Mulligan (2019).  There exists a large amount of scholarship on Eriugena, see for example Brennan (1986); O’Meara (1988); O’Loughlin (1992); McGinn and Otten (1994).

10

1 Introduction

most famous Irishman on the Continent of his generation, made this point forcefully. For him, Irish learning was equal with, if not in fact superior to, the best that could be found on the Continent. (Johnston 2013, 36)

The responses of the early medieval Irish to Christian debates and their conception of their position in the Christian sphere therefore “tell us something about Irish learning as well as about the self-perceptions of Irish writers” (Johnston 2013, 31). Whether the same can be said for the High and later Middle Ages still needs to be conclusively assessed. Some of the later texts treated here strongly suggest such an awareness, even if local matters are perhaps more prevalent on the surface. This may have been engendered by the politics surrounding the Norman invasion, which was legitimised amongst other things by the works of Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales), who portrayed Irish culture as uncivilised and backwards. In this sense, Ireland’s geographic position and the medieval learned perceptions outside of Ireland may have proved an incentive to more actively engage with its position in the Christian world. This in turn may have contributed to the production of a self-reflective literary culture that spanned both secular and religious narratives and that was particularly concerned with integrating local Irish tradition into world history. It is important to stress that whatever their origin and however old their motifs, the texts as they have come down to us took shape in a Christian environment and were responsive to, and meaningful for, a Christian population. The medieval Irish clearly used their Latin learning to reflect on Christian and Classical culture with their own history in mind. Combined with curiosity and introspection, the appropriation of the past led to the emergence of a vernacular literary culture that is characterised by topical diversity, a delight in learning and storytelling, manifold connections to Biblical and Classical world history, and an interest in the particularities of Irish tradition(s). The breath of Irish literary activity in both the vernacular and Latin is remarkable. From the ninth century onwards, religious texts – such as hymns, prayers, homilies, martyrologies, and vitae – emerged alongside (religious) nature poetry, place-lore (Dindshenchas) and extensive (secular and ecclesiastical) legal material (written both in Irish and in Latin). To this can be added annals, genealogies, and chronicles, adaptations of foreign narratives such as the Troy material, didactic texts and learned treatise on grammar. While such modern classifications can be useful, we must acknowledge “that theoretical boundaries between law, literature, theology and history were porous in practice – not only in terms of the personnel who practised these disciplines, but in terms of fundamental medieval Christian approaches to intellectual enquiry” (Boyle 2021, 5). Within Irish learning, the “understanding of the Bible and Church Fathers, rather than of the Greek and Latin classics, was the

1.2 Glimpsing Medieval Irish Culture

11

primary focus and goal of all scholarship; but it included secular learning as well, in the tradition of Classical rhetoric and grammatica” (Ralph O’Connor 2014b, 1). This may be outlined in a brief discussion of one of the oldest Irish texts. Auraicept na nÉces (The Scholars’ Primer) is a Grammatical Treatise first attested in fourteenth-century manuscript copies but likely dating back to the seventh century (Poppe 2014, 145).11 It may therefore belong to the earliest period of vernacular literacy in Ireland and is discussed from a different angle in chapter four. Auraicept na nÉces shows a learned interest in the Irish language and narrates the origin of the Irish language in Biblical times.12 This is of considerable importance given the confidence the Irish exhibited in using their vernacular alongside Latin at an early date, even if Irish is not mentioned among the languages in the Bible (see Poppe 2014, 145; Boyle 2021, 9–10).13 According to Auraicept na nÉces, Irish was created by Fénius Farsaid from the best of all other languages after the linguistic dispersal at the tower of Babel. The Irish language therefore clearly occupies a place apart from other languages, but this is framed in a positive, even superlative, context: [i]n Auraicept na n-Éces, most notably, what Isidore briefly says about Greek, is instead applied to the Irish language in a much-elaborated form. In place of Isidore’s warm but relatively ambiguous statement that Greek is ‘more sonorous’ than other languages, the Auraicept makes the more technical claim that the Irish language is ‘more comprehensive’ (foirleithiu) than every other, on account of its containing ‘every obscure sound’ (gach son forrdorcha). (Watson 2018a, 28)

The Irish seemed confident enough in the status of their language even to divert from established Christian doctrine. The Biblical story here presents a mere frame into which a member of the Irish learned caste inserted their own version of the past. This is a common legitimising strategy to assert status, and it shows the ingenuity with which the medieval Irish engaged with both the biblical past and the history of their own language. Simultaneous notions of belonging and dis-

 The complex transmission history of the Auraicept na nÉces complicates the dating of its various parts. The text also lacks a definitive and comprehensive modern edition (Ahlqvist 1982, 17–19, 22–24).  The text is intended for the instruction of poets and covers general observations on the construction of language as well as “more complex topics such as the correct forms of meter and verse” (Quaintmere 2017, 124).  Auraicept na nÉces is not the only early learned text from Ireland that engages with the topic of language. Tristram briefly discusses the tenth-century Cormac’s glossary, which cites the three linguae sacrae Latin, Greek and Hebrew as well as the languages which Irish came into contact with: Cymbrian, English and lingua Northmannorum (Tristram 1990, 222).

12

1 Introduction

tinctiveness thus permeate the Auraicept na nÉces and perhaps medieval Irish memory culture in general. The early Irish textual corpus also includes a large body of texts that Poppe has termed “secular pseudo-historical narrative prose”, more commonly referred to as sagas. Poppe’s label of secular (pseudo-)historical narrative prose [. . .] for the texts of the so-called mythological, historical, and heroic cycles already makes one important claim, that these texts [. . .] purport to represent historical events, not fictions or inventions (the qualifying prefix “pseudo-” reflects only the cautious and sceptical perspective of the modern historian.). (Poppe 1999, 41)14

Poppe further argues that “(t)he view that cultural memory involves the reconstruction of a shared past according to the authors’ and their audiences’ knowledge and needs, squares well with the characterisation of a majority of the medieval Irish narrative texts as ‘narrative history’ [. . .]” (Poppe 2014, 153). The question of whether the Irish at all times perceived the events described in these texts as historical is not considered further here, since this presents a different angle on the texts. Although Poppe’s terminology is useful for alerting to the particularities of these texts, the more common term saga will be used in the following chapters (a term which overlaps with native Irish scél (story, narration, tale) semantically).15 On the basis of linguistic analysis, most sagas can be dated to between the eighth and the thirteenth centuries, but the texts were copied and revised over centuries, sometimes into the early modern period. For the readers less familiar with the early Irish tradition, information about a text’s transmission history is provided when the text is first mentioned. The appendix briefly outlines the chronology of the texts, although such an endeavour is fraught with difficulties: many texts cannot be securely dated or are subject to alternative datings. Others are only preserved in manuscripts that post-date their linguistic dating by centuries. These texts may be revised and adapted in later manuscripts, which can make

 Poppe’s term characterizes the texts largely in terms of binaries (secular, prose) but his inclusion of pseudo-historical alludes to an important issue in the field. In how far the texts may have been viewed as historical documents in the medieval period (under certain circumstances and at least by some audiences) and in how far they were geared towards entertainment is an on-going debate in the field. Poppe’s prefix pseudo therefore reflects modern skepticism, but it is possible that the texts could fulfil multiple purposes across times and contexts. In any case, historical function and enjoyment need not be mutually exclusive.  In fact, “the semantic range of saga overlaps with the Irish scél, meaning a story or piece of information in narrative form and of unspecified length, but in scholarship since the late nineteenth century it has become common to apply the Germanic term to the equivalent body of Irish narrative prose, in preference to the native label scél” (Ralph O’Connor 2014b, 6).

1.2 Glimpsing Medieval Irish Culture

13

them as much a product of the time of revision as of the time of composition (on this see Hermann 2022, 5). Despite these issues, the chronology provides a general overview of the progression of the early Irish literary tradition and helps the reader to broadly distinguish between earlier and later texts. The accompanying mention of the (most important) manuscripts which preserve the text in turn contextualises this information with its transmission history. Although all early Irish texts stem from the Christian era, a considerable number of them are set in the pre-Christian period. Some narratives develop contrasts and continuities between the pre-Christian and Christian eras, as is the case with religious texts like the Félire Óengusso (The Martyrology of Óengus) or with hagiographical material (Künzler 2020a). Except for the post-conversion narratives of the Kings’ Cycle, the sagas, however, are largely concerned with secular matters and portray pre-Christian Irish heroic societies and native non-Christian deities, often with an interest in heroic exploits and aetiologies (for example of landscape features). They are therefore an ideal starting point from which to examine conceptualisations of the past and their mediations into the present. How much the sagas draw on oral culture cannot be conclusively addressed, but in their unique narrative patterns and diverse characters it is likely that they relate to a vibrant on-going oral culture of storytelling. We do not have names of individual authors or compilers of the sagas or other texts from this period (although we do know the names of individual scribes and (later) poets). We also know that the production of written material was in the hands of a relatively small, learned, ecclesiastically trained monastic group of (male) individuals up to the twelfth century, after which it passed into the hands of learned families.16 Yet, even within this relatively small group shaping the texts as we have them today, one must always allow for multiple (regional, political or even personal) perspectives or divergent frames of learning. We certainly “need to be conscious of local variation in learning” (Boyle 2021, 5) and the same holds true for knowledge about the past. We cannot assume that any one scribe/redactor would have had access to the whole literary tradition. Furthermore, modern scholars will never be able to appreciate the full extent of the written sources (not to mention the contemporary oral tradition) due to losses

 The personnel of the learned families which became the beacons of the tradition thereafter displayed considerable continuity from the monastic period of production, as Ralph O’Connor (2014a) has pointed out. The monastic literati can be referred to in the sources in both Latin (literatus) and Irish (fer léighinn), both meaning ‘man of letters’. There is an equally highly trained group of secular individuals, the filid (sg. file/fili, learned man, historian, poet, also seer, diviner), who the texts tell us fulfilled an important social function by memorising, reciting, and also composing lore (on the filid see pp. 16–20).

14

1 Introduction

and damaged manuscripts, so different versions or re-workings of texts may stem from lost recensions as much as they do from conscious choices in favour of a region or dynasty. Johnston (2013) has presented a detailed and important study on Literacy and Identity in Medieval Ireland, which raises many of the issues in more detail than can be provided in this introduction. Her work sensitised scholars to the fact that vernacular Irish literature “developed its own unique and self-sustaining ecology of author, text, transmission and audience, an ecology rooted in the spoken language and in written words” (Johnston 2013, 31), thus spanning local, oral transmissions, Latin (book) culture and anything in between. This issue will become important in relation to the perspectives behind medieval Irish (cultural) memory, and what impact the media of transmission have on our modern perception of it; two areas with which the current study is especially concerned. Despite the Christian framework in which the texts as we study them today took shape, we cannot disregard the fact that they are genuinely Irish products and stand in close relationship to other medieval Celtic literatures.

1.2.1 Memory in Medieval Ireland: Texts and other Carriers Before delving into the worlds which the texts portray it is necessary to say a few words on the learned memory tradition in Ireland, both in written form and in terms of the personnel who the texts portray as responsible for memorising information about the past. An interest in how medieval cultures conceptualised and theorised memory (and even thought about increasing the memory capacity of the human brain) is not new. In the past three decades, Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies have increasingly started to focus on memory discourses, yet primarily with an interest in how these periods utilised, conceptualised, and even theorised trained memory (for the Norse tradition see Hermann 2022). Studies by Carruthers (1998, 2013 [2008], Coleman (1992), Draaisma (2000 [1995]) and Yates (1974 [1966]) have shown how Classical, medieval and early modern thinkers sought to ensure the retention of knowledge, often by organising them in a spatial manner. Together, these studies remain much-referenced ports of call for those interested in ars memoria (or memorativa) and medieval memoria. This interest is hardly coincidental, since memoria permeates much of medieval (or premodern) religious culture across Europe (see Hermann 2022, 6). Memoria was of particular interest as one of the five parts of the discipline of rhetoric (inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, pronuntiatio) and hence served a definitive function (Glauser 2018). Such Classical and medieval rhetorical texts, however, refer to trained rather than natural or collective memory, a distinction already made in the

1.2 Glimpsing Medieval Irish Culture

15

first-century BC text Ad Herennium.17 How (and in how far) cultural memory and memoria relate to each other is a matter that still needs to be examined. I am not currently aware of any medieval Irish treatise on rhetoric commenting on the art of memory.18 However, we find one use of the phrase ars memorativa in the medieval Irish corpus and this mention is briefly treated by Quaintmere. The phrase is in Latin and found in the fifteenth-century Irish adaptation of the Hercules story: Do smuain Ercuil ina menmain nach testa do threigib righachta uadha acht amain a beith gan eladhain dó, 7 do-cualaidh se co roibe rí isin domun in n-inbhaidh sin 7 gurb ardmaigistir isna secht n-eladhnaibh somaisecha saera he, 7 co ndenadh se ars memorativa .i. eladha na cuimni, do cach a coitcinne. (Quaintmere 2017, 27)19 Hercules thought in his mind that nothing of the qualities of kingship was lacking from him except that he was without the arts, and he heard that there was a king in the world at that time and that he was an arch-master in the seven very-beautiful noble arts, and that he taught the ars memorativa, namely the art of memory, to all in general. (Translated by Quaintmere 2017, 27)

Quaintmere is doubtful whether this “demonstrates any understanding at all of the deeper concepts” associated with ars memorativa (Quaintmere 2017, 28) and I

 Ad Herennium distinguishes between natural memory – that which is engrafted in our minds, born simultaneously with thought – and artificial memory, a memory strengthened by training (Yates 1974 [1966], 20). Ad Herennium provides practical guidance on how to train one’s memory: “It is a technical manual, systematic and formal in arrangement; its exposition is bold, but in greatest part clear and precise” (Yates 1966, 20). Yates underlines that “Ad Herennium was a wellknown and much used text in the Middle Ages when it had an immense prestige because it was thought to be by Cicero” (Yates 1974 [1966], 21). This belief was held until relatively recently but, according to Harry Caplan, is erroneous. In the introduction to his edition of the text, Caplan lists more than a hundred manuscripts which contain Ad Herennium, in itself an index of its popularity. Carruthers lists three chief ancient sources on rhetoric, all of which touch on trained memory: Cicero’s De oratore, in which it is summarily described in Book II, 350–360; the Rhetorica ad Herennium Book III, the most detailed account; and Book XI of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria (Carruthers 2013 [2008], 89). Carruthers further outlines that the text describes a “device of memory art based specifically on houses” – what is to be remembered is carefully “deposited” in individual rooms (Carruthers 2013 [2008], 89); a topic that is discussed in chapter four. This technique was widely received in the medieval period but it is unclear whether it reached Irish shores.  Johnston suggests that the legal text “Bretha Nemed Déidenach quotes from the pseudoCiceronian tract Ad Herennium in its scholarly discussion of the voice” (Johnston 2013, 145). For an edition of Bretha Nemed Déidenach see Gwynn (1942).  Stair Ercuil Ocus a Bás: The Life and Death of Hercules, ed. by Gordon Quin (1939) from MS, Dublin, Trinity College, H.2.7 (1319.2.7). Quoted in, and translated by, Quaintmere.

16

1 Introduction

would share his reservations.20 An unfamiliarity is also implied in the apparent absence of key Classical texts such as Ad Herennium, Aristotle’s De Memoria et Reminiscentia and Cicero’s De Oratore from the medieval Irish textual repertoire (Quaintmere 2017, 30–31). While other medieval literary cultures, like that of Iceland, show equally little engagement with theories of trained memory, it has been proposed that basic organisational principles from ars memoria can also be found in relation to cultural memory. In her studies on the storage of cultural memory in Nordic texts, Hermann argues that “[s]aga-texts, like mythological texts, presuppose the basic organising principles of memory which are emphasized in classical texts, places (loci), and images (imagines), and they reveal the relevance of places for the preservation and structuring of memory” (Hermann 2014, 27–28). Moreover, as chapter four will show, trained memory may function as a trope that can be criticised and the oft-cited storage house of memory can be perceived as explicitly limited. Perhaps most surprisingly, in the Irish tradition, individual memory can be the best guarantor for the accuracy of what, through authoritative reception, enters cultural memory (see chapter three). This study therefore passes over into territories that are not commonly associated with cultural memory, but it does so by following the sources, which may lack direct reference to influential texts on ars memoria yet can still apply similar principles. Quaintmere’s PhD thesis presents valuable groundwork in “medieval Irish attitudes towards memory as they are expressed in literature” and he also discusses the personnel associated with memory in the texts (Quaintmere 2017, 105). In particular, he stresses the importance of the trained filid (the learned class of poets; Sg. fili, pl. filid) who had to memorise tales (see Johnston 2013). Each túath (tribe or petty kingdom) had its own fili and therefore a person dedicated to memorising the collective past (Ó Cathasaigh 2011, 202).21 Despite little evidence for training methods, we know that these members of the medieval Irish learned caste were (amongst other things) entrusted with the preservation of lore (senchas) and had to memorise hundreds of tales. Ó Corráin summarises that within “their competence fell the preservation of ancient tradition (senchas) which included tribal and dynastic origin-legends, mythology, tales of migration, and genealogy”, and of “king-lists and synchronisms of kings” (Ó Corráin 1972, 74, 75).

 A similar conclusion was reached by Ross (1989). I thank Erich Poppe for bringing this to my attention.  This is evident from law tracts: “According to Bretha Nemed, an eighth-century legal tract, a proper túath must possess an ecclesiastical scholar, a poet and a cleric, as well as a king” (Johnston 2013, 64).

1.2 Glimpsing Medieval Irish Culture

17

The vernacular law tracts list the seven grades of filid, assigned according to both their levels of competence and family origins, and the years of training a filid underwent at each level.22 This demonstrates that the filid were hierarchically organised, with the highest grade, the ollam, having “the same honourprice (seven cumal) as the king of a túath” and a bishop (Fergus Kelly 1988, 46).23 The price to be paid for this legal and social standing was an extraordinary mnemonic feat, as the legal text Uraicecht na Ríar (The Primer of Stipulations) tells us: “the number of stories which a poet must know is dependent on his grade. Thus, an ollam is required to know 350 tales (dréchta)”, a remarkable amount of knowledge of the recent and more remote past (Fergus Kelly 1988, 47). As becomes evident in chapter four, texts also allude to the idea that the ardfili (high fili) of Ireland should know the lore and origin of minor places outside their own territory, but it is unclear in how far this reflects historical circumstances. The filid at first appear to reflect Jan Assmann’s understanding that cultural memory is sanctioned and transmitted by a small number of authoritative figures. In Jan Assmann’s view, these “specialized carriers of memory” (Rekdal and Poppe 2014, 8) preserved institutionalised memory in fixed, often formalised or archaic language. However, if we look at the representations of the filid in the texts and at the social context in which the filid operated, the picture becomes more complex. Ó Corráin states that “the word file means ‘a seer, a wise man’” and a file/fili was “an omnicompetent man of learning”, a guardian and expounder “of the traditional law, the immemorial customs of society” (Ó Corráin 1972, 74). Traditionally, the fili was viewed primarily as someone who memorised and related information about the past. Mac Cana contends that for the filid, [t]he tales (they memorised) were primarily part of the coimcne [. . .] the body of inherited knowledge on which the authoritative view of the past depended, and as such they meshed closely with law, genealogy, customary ritual, and the several other branches of traditional learning that served to define the origins and history of the social order and of the tribal and ethnic elements comprised within it. It was the fili’s responsibility to preserve, authenticate and interpret these traditional documents [. . .]. (Mac Cana 1980, 18–19)

There is, however, a growing awareness that the filid did not statically preserve what they memorised. Johnston asserts that “the tales are not simply the result of

 Bretha Nemed and Uraichecht na Ríar are particularly valuable sources. The latter is the only Old Irish law tract devoted entirely to poets (see Johnston 2013, 136).  The filid were divided into seven ranks according to their training and honour-price, the same number of ranks as is used in ecclesiastical hierarchy. The four highest ranks of filid had to memorise 350 tales (Ní Chonghaile and Tristram 1990, 250).

18

1 Introduction

mnemonic scholarship” (Johnston 2013, 137), but that the filid catered for divergent tastes and circumstances in their recitation. Tymoczko likewise stresses that far from statically preserving this lore, the filid were flexible in their role and functioned as creators of this knowledge. She suggested that the filid had to know how to cater to diverse tastes, divergent local beliefs and attitudes, regional variations in legal frameworks, and different (often competing) power structures with varying cultural views in distinct parts of the island. Absent a controlling centralized state, the local nature of Irish life and social organization fostered or even forced much of the heterogeneity of the oral and written archives of cultural memory in Ireland. In many ways the filid and other members of the native professional classes constituted the cohesive force in the social order, practicing and promoting similarity in difference in virtue [sic] of their role as guardians of cultural memory. (Tymoczko 2014, 47)

Johnston cautions that the traditional translation of “poet” for fili is misleading since filid were far more than poets: they fulfilled a variety of functions including those of genealogists, historians, reciters and authors. They were among the leading members of the áesdáno, people of art, who also included brithemain, “jurists” among their number and one of their central functions was to satirise and to praise. (Johnston 2013, 17)

Both acting as a jurist and composing poetry required profound knowledge of the tradition (Fergus Kelly 1988, 34) and the past therefore became intimately connected to their social standing. Nagy alludes to the social function of the poet when he asserts that “the poet and his art transcended political and social limitations of his world; he mediated not only between the distinct units within society but also between society in general and its past or future, and between this world and the mysterious world beyond it” (Nagy 1981/1982, 143; see also Poppe 1999, 293). The filid thus covered various areas of expertise related to the past, but that past (as well as their role) was multifaceted rather than static. A similar view had been expressed nearly a century earlier by Mac Neill, who saw the filid as authenticators, producers, and preservers of a tradition: “clearly the educational value of the stories was not felt to lie in the mere capacity to recite them” but that the “essential qualification (of the filid) was a capacity to ‘synchronise and harmonise all the stories’, to give them a chronology and a correlation; in other words, to weave them together into a web of ostensible history” (Mac Neill 1921, 37). For Mac Neill, the filid adapted their knolwedge to the circumstances in which they found themselves. Such observations are a major incentive to divert from Jan Assmann’s concept of the memorisation and retrieval of a static type of knowledge and instead explore the ways in which the authoritative and socially binding versions of the past communicated by the filid are continuously re-constructed.

1.2 Glimpsing Medieval Irish Culture

19

We get a glimpse of the filid’s repertoire in two tale lists which “purport to offer a catalogue of the principal medieval Irish tales” (Toner 2000, 88) that the filid were expected to have memorised. The tale lists therefore constitute something akin to a canon of early Irish literature that, on a first glance, appears to function as cultural memory (on closer inspections things prove, as always, more complex). Two long tale lists have come down to us, albeit in different contexts. The “two longest tale lists, conventionally known as A and B, are thought to be derived from a single parent, but considerable differences between the two have suggested substantial reworking of the parent list” (Toner 2000, 90).24 The two lists differ from each other both in categories and names, which would strengthen the argument for a fluid rather than fixed cultural memory. Tale list A is found first in the twelfth-century manuscript commonly reffered to as the Book of Leinster in the form of a list of tales which the filid were expected to memorise. Its introduction states that the list “concerns the qualifications of poets in regard to stories and coimgne [historical knowledge, synchronism] to be narrated to kings and chieftains, viz. three hundred and fifty tales” (Toner 2000, 89). Tale list B is part of the Middle Irish tale Airec Menman Uraird maic Coisse (The Ingenious Strategem of Urard mac Coisse), c. AD 1000, see chapter three), when the filid Urard enumerates all the tales in his repertoire.25 He also includes his own composition in this list, together with the Middle Irish adaptations of Dares Phrygius’s De excidio and the Alexander legend.26 Tale-list A contains “250 primscéla [main tales] and 100 forscéla [sub-tales]” and the primscéla can be divided into twelve categories: destructions, cattle raids, wooing, battles, terrors, voyages, deaths, feasts, sieges, adventures, elopements and plunderings, as well as an “appendix with more categories: eruptions (of lakes), visions, love stories, hostings, and migrations” (Toner 2000, 90).27 The two tale-lists vary in the categories which they list, and in the number of tales, but

 Toner also mentions two shorter lists that are preserved in a tract on the grades of the filid in Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh, MS VII, and in the introduction to the Senchus Mar in British Library Harleian Ms 432 (Toner 2000, 90).  The text is preserved in three manuscripts dated to the fifteenth and sixteenth century: Royal Irish Academy Ms 23 N 10; Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Rawlinson B 512 and British Library, London, MS Harley 5280 (Ní Chonghaile and Tristram 1990, 249, 251).  See also Miles (2011).  However, the list only enumerates 166 titles in the older and 163 titles in the younger manuscript which preserves it, namely the twelfth-century Book of Leinster (TCD MS 1339) and the sixteenth-century TCD Ms H. 3.17 (Ní Chonghaile and Tristram 1990, 251). List B presents a different order of the categories and also incorporates the appendix into the main list. It “also contains a miscellaneous group of ‘usual tales’ (gnáthscéla) in which titles are not sorted according to generic” (Toner 2000, 90).

20

1 Introduction

these variations are of no concern for the present study (see Ní Chonghaile and Tristram, 257). Mac Cana suggests that “the extant tale-lists are the final product of the practice of occasionally listing together for mnemonic purposes a number of narratives that shared a common theme” (Mac Cana 1980, 127). The grouping of texts may further aid a mnemonic purpose, while the categories represent the kinds of events of importance as cultural coordinates in medieval Ireland. The value of the tale lists also “lies in the fact that they often support an early date for the tales that are only found in later manuscripts, and even suggest the erstwhile existence of a great many tales that are not found in manuscript form” (Toner 2000, 88). Not all tales mentioned in the tale-lists have come down to us, while other well-preserved tales do not feature in the tale lists. It would go beyond the purpose of this monograph to conclude in how far the tale-lists conform to Aleida Assmann’s idea of a canon and archive (see p. 46), yet it is clear that these lists provide us with an idea of which texts were seen as culturally important at particular points in time, at least by a small part of the population.28 My own focus, on the other hand, lies on the praxis rather than on the doxis of the transmission of cultural memory and therefore the question of a canon only becomes important again in relation to forgetting (chapter four). It may be briefly mentioned as a sidenote that the grouping of secular prose (or prosimetric) tales was also undertaken in the modern period. Based on dramatis personae and chronology, the tales are classified as belonging to the Ulster Cycle, the Mythological Cycle, the Finn Cycle and the Historical or Kings’ Cycle. The first is concerned with the exploits of the heroes of the province of Ulster and set around the time of the birth of Christ. The Mythological Cycle’s narratives purport to pre-date this time and centre on mythological figures such as the Túatha Dé Dannan and the Fomori, yet the written tales do not predate the other Cycles (Wiley 2006). The Finn Cycle tells of the adventures of Finn mac Cumaill (Finn MacCool) and his warrior band, the fían (see Murry 2017). This Cycle develops after the twelfth century and the majority of its material is therefore later than the other Cycles. The last Cycle is concerned with the lives and times of kings. It is “a composite one that includes a wide variety of approximately a hundred tales about the prehistoric and historic kings of Ireland” (Ní Bhrolcháin 2009, 67).29 The Cycles will be referred to in the following chapters and their particularities will be introduced in greater depth where necessary.

 Mac Cana asserts that being able to recite the tales demanded by his audience was “one of the services expected of a visiting ollam filidechta, and as late as the sixteenth century the poet Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn tells of the lavish rewards he claims to have received for telling a tale in the house of Maol Mórdha Mhac Suibhne” (Mac Cana 1980, 16).  Ní Bhrolcháin (2009) provides an in-depth introduction to all of these Cycles.

1.2 Glimpsing Medieval Irish Culture

21

The intersection between the filid and the tale lists raises an important point: that although memory is commonly associated with oral tradition (for example in Folklore Studies), in Cultural Memory Studies concerned with medieval sources its relationship with, and appearance in, the literary tradition is foregrounded. The question of the role of orality and literacy in medieval Ireland is a complex one. Medieval Ireland can be understood as a “secondary oral” culture, namely, a society in which orality is supported, challenged, enriched, and surrounded by literacy. This orality is constituted by the range of activities practiced and experienced through speech, gesture, expression, and a whole gamut of non-verbal representation. [. . .] It should not lead to the assumption that literacy and non-literacy form a binary opposition as unbridgeable as heaven from hell. They are sometimes in dialogue, not all of which is gentle, and sometimes in opposition, not all of which is fierce. (Johnston 2013, 1–2)

In a similar vein, Quaintmere concludes that the filid “inhabited a learned culture that, in spite of its literacy, existed and operated within a world which was largely oral” (Quaintmere 2017, 81). Although specific influences are hard to determine on the basis of medieval sources, the present study shares the belief that the texts were closely linked to an equally vibrant oral culture. One final observation is needed to frame the analyses in the following chapters: that much of medieval Irish memory culture is concerned with origins. This becomes most obvious in the case of origin stories through which present claims can be legitimised or challenged, a medieval strategy with parallels in other North-Western European cultures (see Hermann 2010). John Carey (1994a) views Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of the Takings of Ireland) as the decisive Irish origin legend. In the eleventh-century text that has come down to us, Lebor Gabála Érenn narrates of the subsequent settlement of Ireland by various groups within the framework of Christian world history and therefore traces “Irish history back into the biblical past” (Schlüter 2010b, 86).30 Talking about the version preserved

 The most concise summary of the complex work was presented by Poppe and Schlüter: “It begins with an account of the Creation, followed by the well-known Biblical events, the expulsion from Paradise and the Flood. The presentation becomes more specifically Irish afterwards, but the important events in the history of the Gaels continue to be synchronized with the history of the Israelites: Fénius Farsaid, forefather of the Gaels, is present at Nimrod’s tower, and one of his descendants creates the Irish language from what was best of every language. The Irish have to emigrate at the time the Israelites are driven into exile by the Pharaoh. They go to Scythia, fall into decline there, have to leave, and finally settle in the Maeotic Marshes. It is made clear in the text that they will eventually reach their own promised land, Ireland, but that it will take a long time. After they have departed from the Maeotic Marshes, they stay in Spain until one of them, Íth mac Míled, perceives Ireland from Bregon’s tower in Brigantia. At that point, a rupture occurs in the narrative, which now turns to a list of the various pre-Gael settlers of the Irish isle. Among

22

1 Introduction

in the twelfth-century manuscript the Book of Leinster, Schlüter summarises that “Lebor Gabála Érenn smoothly link[s] the very beginning of world history to the course of Irish history and to the present of the compilation of the Book of Leinster” (Schlüter 2010b, 36). It therefore fills “the vast blank separating Irish tradition from accepted world history” and creates “a national myth which sought to put Ireland on the same footing as Israel and Rome” (Carey 1994a, 1). Carey sees the complex work (with an even more complex transmission history) as consciously revised, most probably in relation to recurring questions of plausibility and acceptability. Lebor Gabála Érenn by itself would constitute grounds for in-depth study from a Cultural Memory Studies perspective, particularly since the “widespread influence of the text is obvious in the literature of the later Middle Irish and modern Irish periods” (Carey 1994a, 21).31 There are “countless allusions to its doctrines in sagas, poems, chronicles, pedigrees, and placename lore” (Carey 1994a, 23), which shows the productivity of the Irish origin legend well into the seventeenth century, both in terms of narrative content and in providing frameworks for other historiographical texts. Jan Assmann drew attention to simultaneous synchronic and diachronic aspects in identity formation that closely parallel these observations in his proposal of a connective structure (konnektive Struktur, Jan Assmann 2005 (1992), 16). An experience of a shared past binds members of a group together synchronically (social connection), but it also binds them to their ancestors and the traces they left in the world (diachronic connective structure). Exploring how such a connective structure is created and sustained, particularly though origin legends, draws attention to the mechanisms which bind a culture or a group together. The present study is concerned with different origins. It focuses on local origin stories connected to the landscape in the second chapter, demonstrating their importance for medieval Irish culture regardless of whether they are staged on a micro- or macro level. Thus, the focus of this study is on formative rather than normative texts (to employ Jan Assmann’s jargon), and the formative function of such texts for the textual tradition (intertextuality) must not be underestimated. This falls under the functional definition of myth summarised by Egeler as “a founding narrative” that “gives orientation, legitimizes and explains the order of

them are the Fir Bolg and the Túatha Dé Danann [the people of the goddess Danu], who are the last settlers before the coming of the Gaels. The narrative then returns to the Gaels: Íth mac Míled reaches the land promised to him, but is slain by the sinister Túatha Dé Danann. His brothers, the other sons of Míl, predecessors of all important Irish families, arrive, exact revenge for their brother’s death, and finally take possession of the island (Poppe and Schlüter 2011, 128–129).  The chronology of Irish high kings is studied in great depth by Hemprich (2015).

1.3 Medieval Practices and Modern Theories

23

the world, explains the foundations of the cosmos and the direction in which it is heading” (Egeler 2017, 19). As the following chapters argue, this might function on the macro-level of world history, or it may serve to explain a minor place-name or material structure ostensibly still in use at the time the narratives took shape or were received by the audiences. A focus on origins is noticeable in texts of all periods, but the twelfth century may have occasioned a more reflective engagement with origins for political and religious purposes. This is the time to which the earliest manuscripts – the great compendia Lebor na hUidre, the Book of Leinster and Oxford, Bodleian MS Rawlinson B 502 – are dated and in which texts were not just included in manuscripts but consciously reworked. The (long) twelfth century also saw important political and religious shifts in medieval Ireland. The Norman invasion of 1169 is perhaps the most well-known event, but the incoming of continental orders may have engendered just as much impetus to preserve the distinctly Irish past. The manuscripts containing genuinely Irish material in the Irish language therefore emerged at a time of cultural shifts and a perhaps heightened interest in Irish identity and history (see chapter four). Such thoughts have been raised particularly in relation to the Book of Leinster (Schlüter 2010b) as it “has long been recognised that the Book of Leinster is the last Irish manuscript still preserved today which has been compiled in a monastic scriptorium” (Poppe and Schlüter 2011, 142). The manuscript has fittingly been called “the last fling of the learned ecclesiastics of the unreformed Irish church” (O’Sullivan 1966, 26). Uáitéar Mac Gearailt was “the first to apply this suggestion to the interpretation of a text in the Book of Leinster, in his discussion of this manuscript’s version of Cath Ruis na Ríg (The Battle of Rosnaree), which he believes to be at least to some extent a response to the Anglo-Norman invasion” (Poppe and Schlüter 2011, 142). Whether the negotiation of Irish identity in the extant manuscripts that preserve the earliest versions of many of the texts studied in this book took shape in conscious dialogue with Norman culture has yet to be determined, but the possibility of a deliberate response should at least be kept in mind.

1.3 Medieval Practices and Modern Theories: Memory between Lived Experience and Scholarly Discourse Despite the immense richness and sheer wealth of medieval Irish literature, the tradition is not well represented in interdisciplinary studies on the European Middle Ages. This is also reflected in the more recent emergence of medievalist Memory Studies. Given that there still remains editorial work to be conducted, it is not surprising that the medieval Irish tradition has not yet been fully contributing to cur-

24

1 Introduction

rent cross-disciplinary debates. Furthermore, Celtic Studies is somewhat slower than other disciplines to engage with theoretical concepts (see Tymoczko 2002). The reluctance to frame analyses through theoretical frameworks at times makes it more difficult to relate medieval Irish textual culture to other medieval literary traditions. This means that interdisciplinary Medieval Studies still face an Irelandshaped gap when talking about memory cultures of medieval Europe. This study highlights the contribution that medieval Irish literature could make to debates in pre-modern Cultural Memory Studies by deliberate links to questions that have occupied medievalists in other fields, particularly in Scandinavian Studies. Irish culture of the modern period has, on the other hand, for some time now been explored with a view to identity constructions and cultural memory. However, to date academic engagement with Irish cultural (or national) memory in an interdisciplinary context has been focused largely on the modern period, on English-language sources and on political contexts (see Guy Beiner 2003; 2007; 2018; Pine 2011). The adaptation of medieval Irish-language literature in the Revival period has brought the medieval textual tradition to wider attention, especially in relation to the formation of an Irish cultural identity after political independence in the early twentieth century. The emphasis on English language sources in this debate is regrettable because it has led to an international understanding of Ireland as effectively (culturally) monoglot, in which the Irish language (and its literature) at best occupy a marginal status, at worst represent a backward, nostalgic, and primarily mythical outlook. Such perceptions risk disregarding the historical and cultural diversity of Irish identity construction, an issue which is slowly being addressed, for example by the interdisciplinary Making Ireland research theme at Trinity College Dublin.32 The view of Irish culture as nostalgic and retrospective has been associated with both medieval and modern Irish literature (in Irish and English). So closely is this backward orientation associated with Ireland, it even subtitled one of the most ambitious of Irish literary histories: A Short History of Irish Literature: A Backward Look by Frank O’Connor (1967). The literary history is framed as a private backward look over one and a half millennia of Irish literature. Despite adding the epithet “look back to look forward” in the dedication, Frank O’Connor’s assessment of the medieval period is one of a conservative, retrospective era in which the professional classes “aimed at producing not the man with the best brain, but the man with the best memory” (O’Connor 1967, 14). Nagy stresses the

 The Making Ireland research theme explores the complex inheritance of modern Ireland in its local and global manifestations. https://www.tcd.ie/research/themes/making-ireland/ (accessed 1. 5. 2023).

1.3 Medieval Practices and Modern Theories

25

link between Frank O’Connor’s subtitle and the Classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. He relates this to the “pre-modern Irish literary tradition’s tendency, shared perhaps with Irish traditional culture in general, to look to the past as in one sense lost, but in another sense as still profoundly ‘present in the present’, even possibly to return as a surprisingly familiar future” (Nagy 2018, 885). However, without the added interpretation provided by Nagy, Frank O’Connor’s subtitle may perpetuate the stereotype amongst readers unfamiliar with the intended Classical allusion, especially since Frank O’Connor himself does little to express the concern for both present and future. The present study proposes that a profound interest in the past is a strategy of self-reflection and self-exploration and presents a way of engaging with Irish culture through a complex temporal framework. Such observations are based on earlier work in Celtic Studies, which has addressed the construction of the past in individual texts and genres. And as the work of Herbert (1989) and others at the Cork school of hagiography has shown, an engagement with the past need not have been a strictly antiquarian pursuit.33 Instead, “different versions [of the same text] developed to suit the changing circumstances which come about with the passage of time” (Ó Corráin 1986, 144). Herbert argues that there “is ample evidence of the revision and rearrangement of early Irish historical materials into new verse and prose compositions throughout the period from the tenth to the twelfth century” (Herbert 1989, 78). Herbert discusses the Middle Irish text Fled Dúin na nGéd (The Banquet of the Ford of the Geese) as an example of “a tale influenced by, and seeking to be influential in, its contemporary society” (Herbert 1989, 78). Moreover, the redactor of Fled Dúin na nGéd “chooses to represent the  Ó Corráin distinguishes three layers of pastness in these sources: “A pedigree can be divided into three portions: (i) the present and the remembered past (i.e. extending to the oldest dead ascendant remembered by the oldest living descendant) and this while varying in value and extent in response to social structure and kinship perception, is usually trustworthy; (ii) the remote past – the age of heroes, dynastic founders and nation-eponyms – usually relatively stable, if only because it is widely known – and generally a high-level aetiology which responds only to major historical changes; and (iii) the middle ground of ambiguity, beyond the discipline of memory or public ‘knowledge’. Here the pedigree may be revised, consciously or unconsciously” (Ó Corráin 1985, 83–84). For the annals, Kelleher long ago suggested that “it can be shown that everything in the annals up to about 590 and a large number of entries from thence to 735 (the entry on Bede’s death) were either freshly composed or wholly revised not earlier than the latter half of the ninth century” (Kelleher 1963, 122). Sims-Williams made similar observations in relation to origin stories in Welsh literature, arguing that “origin stories had a more than antiquarian interest because they embodied and encouraged views about the equality or subservience and the friendship or enmity of peoples and their royal dynasties” [. . .] and that “origin stories explained and justified political geography and enhanced the prestige of particular dynasties within Wales” (Sims-Williams 1985, 119).

26

1 Introduction

present in terms of the past, recreating a narrative of political events of the seventh century in order to communicate the concerns of its own day” (Herbert 1989, 86). In another study on Irish written culture around the turn of the first millennium, Herbert argues that the past was used (and even refashioned) to legitimise concerns of the present. She observes that [h]istorical activity may also have been stimulated by contemporary Irish political circumstances. As long-established power structures were being opposed, political propagandists sought support in historical precedent. Thus, the legendary past was historicized, and royal dynasties and institutions were credited with a continuum of power that stretched back beyond the horizon of Christianity. Another contemporary preoccupation, perhaps more removed from contemporary politics, was world history, and the place of Irish history within its framework. (Herbert 2007, 99)

Of particular interest here are the time conceptions that Herbert proposes when she argues that the legendary past was historicised. This observation indicates that the past was not homogenous but had different layers: both chronologically and in terms of which group of beings (mythical beings, heroes or saints) were associated with a particular point in time. An awareness of these conceptualisations can help modern audiences to become sensitised to the complexities of pasts in medieval culture(s). That the Irish engaged with the past for specific purposes is also evident in studies on other texts. In an article on synthetic history, Carey argues that both the seminal Lebor Gabála Érenn and texts relating to it were written to address a specifically Irish need: they sought do develop a vision of history which would accommodate, and reconcile with one another, the rich corpus of native legendary lore and the Latin learning introduced into Ireland by the Church. In this they were outstandingly successful – indeed, the very complexity of the evidence testifies to the versatility of the underlying scheme, and to the enthusiasm with which it was adopted and developed by generation after generation of historians, antiquaries, poets, and storytellers. (Carey 1994, 24)34

An amalgamation of material in a conscious re-fashioning of the past is also observable in later centuries, when changing demands of the present led to continuous appropriations of the past. This endeavour is widely seen as important for reconciling the Irish past with the conceptual framework of the past of all Christian peoples, perhaps particularly since they all also shared a common Christian future (the Last Judgement).

 To describe this practice – and perhaps also to distinguish it from ‘history proper’ – Mac Neill introduced the term synthetic history (Mac Neill 1921, 40).

1.3 Medieval Practices and Modern Theories

27

That an engagement with the past was not simply an antiquarian pursuit but held significance for local politics and the legal system has also been well argued. Gleeson shows that “[t]he past, its attendant mythologies and synthetic histories, and their interpretations and (re-)imaginings, were fundamental aspects of the legitimisation of power and kingship” (Gleeson 2012, 9). In a similar vein, Wadden suggests that although the twelfth century composition Cath Ruis na Ríg (The Battle of Ross na Ríg) “is set in the heroic past, the images of kingship and of interprovincial politics depicted in Cath Ruis na Ríg were shaped by the twelfth-century struggle for dominance amongst the various contenders for the high-kingship of Ireland” (Wadden 2014, 11). A similar point was made about genealogical material as early as 1985 by Ó Corráin, who proposed that the “genealogists, like similar castes elsewhere, constantly re-interpreted political reality, justifying the contemporary holders of power and willingly giving retrospective validation to those who had only recently achieved it” (Ó Corráin 1985, 69). Ó Corráin proposes a conscious creation on the part of the genealogists, a consciousness that is quite explicit in the work of the poet-genealogists of the eleventh and twelfth centuries [. . .] and these (above) encounter the well-stocked mind of the literate scholar, who sets himself the professional task of explaining and unifying present and past – lead on directly to the imaginative re-creation of that past. (Ó Corráin 1985, 69)

Schlüter’s analysis of the twelfth-century manuscript the Book of Leinster shows that the scribal activity in the manuscript “has nothing to do with an uncritical antiquarianism on the part of the scribes, preserving every scrap they could gather, as has been assumed frequently, but rather with an active engagement with the past, in order to construct, by means of the past, their own standing in the present and in the history of salvation” (Schlüter 2014, 76). Schlüter’s work makes a strong case for highly conscious scribal activity across a whole manuscript, a point which supports the argument for critical and conscious treatment of the past. The understanding that texts might appropriate the past, or even “construct a past to suit the present” (to quote the title of Gísli Sigurðsson’s 2015 article), is therefore not new to Celtic Studies. These observations refer to the composition of texts, but how the texts themselves engaged with the past and its transmission can provide further insight into medieval Irish memory culture. Furthermore, political motivations are by no means the only stimulants for the formation of cultural memory, and anxieties about forgetting and the lived-in landscape can prove equally powerful. Across the centuries and at different centres of learning the Irish learned caste thus drew on a variety of strategies, from learned to oral

28

1 Introduction

culture and from human-made stone structures to the natural environment in order to engage with the past. Close readings of texts grounded in the texts’ cultural context and transmission further our understanding of how (and why) the past is interpreted, mediated and formulated to legitimise power-structures of the present, or to critique the status quo. Such an approach acknowledges different versions of texts as individual, culturally responsive artefacts deserving of further study. This stance challenges earlier views of the extant medieval Irish texts as poor copies of a once flawless original which were “so mishandled by ignorant transcribers that it is often difficult even to guess what the original text was like” (Frank O’Connor 1967, 2). Instead, my approach appreciates that the texts represent various layers of narrative artistry and meaning but also problems and re-interpretations, each providing a unique insight into a complex and fluid memory culture. As such, The Backward Look may disclose an inward gaze, a conscious engagement with the past and its influence on the present and the future: [m]emory has an immense social role. It tells us who we are, embedding our present selves in our pasts, and thus underpinning every aspect of what historians often now call mentalities. For many groups, this means putting the puzzle back together: inventing the past to fit the present, or, equally, the present to fit the past. (Fentress and Wickham 1992, 201)

Fentress and Wickham’s use of the word invent is questionable, since such conceptualisations often draw on existing ideas and strategies and are rarely a genuinely new product. Furthermore, such conceptualisations must generally adhere to certain frameworks or conventions to be believable. By and large, the narratives treated in the following chapters constitute an introspective medium for engaging with spatio-temporal identity construction. During the Middle Ages, when the experience of time was intimately linked to the Sex Aetates Mundi as well as to the Christian annual calendar, the present and perhaps even the past also entailed an anticipation of the future: of the last judgement, and of one’s position in the fulfilment of a Christian world history that spanned past, present and future (see Tristram 1985). After all, the medieval Irish wrote themselves into Christian world history to share a past with other Christian nations, perhaps because they were aware of their shared future in the Last Judgement. Nagy made a similar point when he argued that the fili “knows about the past and future history of society and also about the other worlds which surround it” (Nagy 1981/1982, 135). After all, a focus on the future can certainly influence our understanding of the past. Medieval identity construction was therefore not simply a case of ‘constructing the past to suit the present’, but one to also suit the future. This can become evident, for example, in a concern about the salvation of one’s pre-Christian an-

1.3 Medieval Practices and Modern Theories

29

cestors, but can also be more clearly voiced, for example when the transmission of oral knowledge in written form is ensured. It may also be linked with geography, more precisely the expansion of the Christian faith to the very edge of the known medieval world. Such issues may considerably shape the outlook that the texts present. This suggests that at times, cultural memory is instrumental even for conceptualising the future, leading to a simultaneous forward and backward look that resembles Janus rather than Orpheus.

1.3.1 A Retrospective: Memory Studies and Celtic Culture Since this monograph is aimed at a transdisciplinary readership, it is beneficial to outline the fundamental ideas underpinning (Cultural) Memory Studies and their previous influence on Celtic Studies. It should be stressed, however, that the present study is not a study of cultural memory in medieval Ireland, but of medieval Irish memory culture. For one, this study examines all three forms of memory proposed by Jan Assmann: personal memory, collective memory and cultural memory (Jan Assmann 2005 [1992], on which see below). Therefore, the more neutral term memory is used in its title.35 The consideration of both personal and collective remembering is necessary because the sources do not always align with the distinctions outlined by modern scholars. In addition, Jan Assmann’s understanding of cultural memory does not aptly frame the vibrant Irish tradition, particularly if it is applied uncritically. It is therefore more fruitful to consider memory discourses in their plurality rather than confine the analyses to a single frame of thought from the outset. Such a pluralistic approach also underlies much recent research in (Cultural) Memory Studies. Although frequently referred to as a field, Memory Studies are better described as a school of thought, as they are practiced in such diverse disciplines as Art History, Sociology, History, Medieval and Modern Literatures, and Cultural Studies. Scholars thus utilise field-specific methods to discuss their sources but are driven by an interest in “the interplay of present and past in sociocultural contexts” (Erll 2008, 2). For Memory Studies, “[o]ur knowledge of the past is less a question of our empirical grip on the past than on our apprehension of the past as we represent it through the lens of the present” (Kritzmann 1996, xii). Broadly speaking, current Memory Studies challenge a monocausatic, historical  Like Hermann, I use Memory Studies as an umbrella term that encapsulates a wide variety of theories, cases and methods from a number of different disciplines, ranging from sciences (Neurosciences and Psychology) to the humanities (including Literature and History) (Hermann 2022, 9).

30

1 Introduction

perception of the past. Instead, the focus turns to “the multiple ways that groups of people [. . .] remembered their past and to an investigation of what modes were preferred when reference was made to times gone by” (Hermann 2010, 69). A focus on the media associated with memory and remembering, an investigation of the processes of remembering and the looming questions of who remembers what for which reason(s) thus typify much recent research. In what follows, the key figures and concepts of (Cultural) Memory Studies are briefly outlined. The summary is by no means exhaustive but introduces the approaches that have informed my own readings of the texts. It therefore provides some coordinates for those less familiar with (Cultural) Memory Studies (much more detailed outlines of thoughts and thinkers are found in the edited volume by Erll and Nünning 2010). In the 1920s, the works of the art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) and the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945) had already ignited an interest in collective remembering. Halbwachs coined the term mémoire collective (collective memory) and with that provided the first analytical tool for future research. He proposed that individual acts of remembering (and hence the memories of individuals) are always part of social frameworks of memory (cadres sociaux de la mémoire). These frameworks have a strong impact on personal and social recollections of the past. Halbwachs’ observation suggests that even this very private process is shot through with social significance. He also first turned attention to the role of physical places in remembering. Halbwachs’ study of ‘living memory’ (as opposed to Jan Assmann’s more abstract cultural memory) paved the way for an interest in memory as a social phenomenon. The differences between memory and history were of key importance to Halbwachs. Collective memory, he argues, tries to preclude change. It ensures, as Aleida Assmann puts it, “the uniqueness and continuity of a group and always exists in the plural” (Aleida Assmann 2011, 121). History, on the other hand, exists in the singular, tries to neutralize the dimensions of affect and identity and specializes in change (Aleida Assmann 2011, 121). This distinction rests on the narrow definition of history propagated by a guild of historians who, for a long time, were thought to be (and thought themselves to be) the sole qualified interpreters of the past. Such an understanding may not apply to the medieval period, when history was a practice rather than a defined scholarly concept. The difference between history and memory may therefore be conceptualised differently in the Middle Ages, a matter that should always be kept in mind. The second impetus for Memory Studies was framed from within a modern theory of culture, albeit from an art historical perspective. In the 1920s, Warburg introduced the term ‘social memory’, which is roughly equivalent to Halbwachs’ collective memory in its usage. Warburg’s studies were preoccupied with a European memory of image(s) (Bildgedächtnis) and proposed that “the central medium

1.3 Medieval Practices and Modern Theories

31

of cultural memory [is] not oral speech but rather works of art, which can potentially survive for long periods of time and traverse great spaces” (Erll 2011, 21). Warburg’s understanding of memory thus “accommodates the historical variations and local imprints of cultural memory, while at the same time not losing sight of its embeddedness in the European-Asian community of memory” (Erll 2011, 21). Warburg’s approach differs markedly from that of Halbwachs in so far as he did not formulate a conclusive theory, and because Warburg put the material dimension of memory (and culture) centre-stage. In his attention to particular manifestations of memory and his bottom-up approach (starting with the sources), Warburg’s work inspired the approach followed in this book. Yet it was Halbwachs’ thoughts which were prominently taken up again in the 1970s and 1980s by the French historian Pierre Nora, a member of the Annales school. In the tradition of the ancient loci memoriae, Nora (1989) instigated the study of the lieux de mémoire of the French nation, which he argues are distinct from its history. Lieux de mémoire “can be understood as loci in the broadest sense of the term, which call up imagines, the memory images of the French nation” (Erll 2011, 23). Nora’s work took shape within the French national identity crisis of the Mitterrand era, which he argues exposed a lack of milieux de mémoire, true environments of memory (Nora 1989, 7). His work is a response to this crisis and is explicitly nation-centred (Erll 2011, 26). Its aim was to “search out the principal loci, material or immaterial, in which this memory had become embodied and which, through the actions of men or the work of centuries, remained their most specific representations and most dazzling symbols” (Nora 2001, xviii). Among these sites of memory Nora includes Paris, Voltaire or the French Café, all of which are explored by various authors in their three-volume work (entitled La République, La Nation and Les Frances). Nora himself provides a complex definition for the lieux de mémoire: [l]ieux de mémoire are simple and ambiguous, natural and artificial, at once immediately available in concrete sensual experience and susceptible to the most abstract elaboration. Indeed, they are lieux in three senses of the word – material, symbolic and functional [. . .] Lieux de mémoire are created by a play of memory and history, an interaction of two factors that results in their reciprocal overdetermination. To begin with, there must be a will to remember. (Nora 1989, 18–19)

Lieux de mémoire therefore do not have to be concrete entities but may be understood more metaphorically: [c]ontrary to historical objects, however, lieux de mémoire have no referent in reality; or, rather, they are their own referent: pure, exclusively self-referential signs. This is not to say that they are without content, physical presence, or history; it is to suggest that what makes them lieux de mémoire is precisely that by which they escape from history. In this sense, the

32

1 Introduction

lieu de mémoire is a double: a site of excess closed upon itself, concentrated in its own name, but also forever open to the full range of its possible significations. (Nora 1989, 23–24)

The lieux de mémoire mark a cornerstone in French cultural history, yet despite Nora’s striving for plurality in their selection, they do not represent all facets of French culture. Ho Tai (2001) has comprehensively criticised Nora’s construct of nation-mémoire, stating that he succeeds only on presenting “a French national memory, which ignores, despite its striving for poliphony, ‘la France d’outre mer’ (The French Colonies)” (Erll 2011, 26). Consequently, today Nora’s work echoes most widely in Memory Studies for exposing the perspectives of cultural memory research. His work also directed attention to the processes by which groups remember: “Pierre Nora has shown that what steers the memory of the group is neither a ‘collective soul’ nor an ‘objective mind’, but a society with its signs and symbols. Through these shared symbols, the individual participates in a common memory and a common identity” (Aleida Assmann 1999, 122). Jan Assmann’s seminal work Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung, und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (1992, published in English as Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination) helped to popularise Memory Studies in the German- and English-speaking world. The work is concerned with two memory cultures – ancient Egypt and the Torah – but frames its observations in a much broader context. Jan Assmann distinguishes between three kinds of memory: 1) 2)

3)

inner, subjective, individual memory which is primarily cognitive and which dies with a person communicative memory which reaches back three generations, is used in social interactions, sees persons as carriers of social roles and is based on everyday communications and informal traditions cultural memory, which makes reference to a historical or mythical time (an ‘absolute past’ in Jan Assmann’s words) and embodies cultural identity.

The focus of Jan Assmann’s own studies lies predominantly on the third of these memories, which is characterised by “a high degree of formation and ceremonial communication mediated in texts, but also in other media, the use of ‘classical’ or otherwise formalized language(s), the existence of a group of specialized carriers of memory” (Rekdal and Poppe 2014, 11), as well as by rituals or repetition. This understanding necessitates a hierarchical social structure and presupposes a memory that, once fixed, is both authoritative and static, reliant mostly on the accurate recall of authorised individuals.

1.3 Medieval Practices and Modern Theories

33

Das kulturelle Gedächtnis outlines five fundamental points of cultural memory: a concretion of identity (a unity and peculiarity of a group in relation to other groups); a defined capacity for reconstructing the past (and the limits of this capacity), the formation of communicated meaning and collectively shared knowledge, an organised mediation of memory (visible in an institutionalisation of memory and specialised, authoritative ‘carriers’); and that the relation to a normative self-image of the group engenders a clear system of values and differentiations making use of peripheral and central symbols. It follows that Jan Assmann’s understanding of cultural memory encompasses both the organisation and the mediation of knowledge about the past, two aspects which will be discussed in chapters two and three respectively. The culturally specific ways in which groups created their identities and self-perception across generations have always been stressed by Jan Assmann. Medieval practices of cultural remembering differ substantially from those in the modern era. They are also fundamentally different from ancient Egyptian culture or from the understanding of a fixed sacred text like the Torah. For example, the tripartite system of personal, collective and cultural memory just introduced does not hold for medieval Irish culture. In the texts from this period, issues concerning the deep past can be settled through the personal memory of an authoritative (and miraculously old) figure. Furthermore, it may be argued that on all three levels of remembering, memory is knowledge about oneself whether “as an individual or as a member of a family, a generation, a community, a nation, or a cultural and religious tradition” (Jan Assmann 2010, 112–113). This incorporates both a synchronic and a diachronic aspect, the former in the shared present of the individual or group, the latter in their understanding of their origins and/or past. Who we are depends not only on our present culture but also on the aetiological dimensions of where we and “our group” come from, where our customs, places and forms of expression originate and how we got to be culturally distinct from other groups (for example in the symbols we use). In explaining the socially and culturally binding force of cultural memory, Jan Assmann proposes the existence of a connective structure (konnektive Struktur) which fulfils a binding function on two levels: the social (synchronic) and the diachronic (Jan Assmann 2005 (1992), 16). In short, it binds the contemporaneous members of a culture together as a social unit (synchronically). This concerns, for instance, mutually shared views, norms, symbols, and rituals, leading to shared knowledge and experiences of events. Yet, it also links a group to its predecessors and the traces they left in the world. Jan Assmann stresses the role of repetition in the diachronic structure, yet he does not devote much thought to how such a structure may be created and can be sustained over centuries and across cultural

34

1 Introduction

shifts. This, however, is a key question in this monograph that will be discussed in relation to the Irish landscape The connective structure may also be the aspect of cultural memory that is most familiar to us in our everyday lives. As groups or nations, we may commemorate important figures or events, think back to the foundation of institutions or the states which we inhabit. As families we may remember the death of a loved one or a wedding anniversary. In these cases, we frequently remember together: with our nearest and dearest, groups, or whole nations. In line with Halbwachs’ observations, although we physically remember as individuals, this can be orchestrated as a common experience of the past through collective engagement. We therefore all participate in a memory that is cultural, and which entails an engagement with our identity as members of this culture that transcends the present and incorporates temporal depth. We might feel a particular need for such memories not just at anniversaries but at times of crises and upheaval. In such cases, remembering becomes heavily mediated by pictures, stories, official narratives, rituals, or places. Far from being spontaneous and neutral, these acts of remembering (and their media) are heavily value-laden and reveal particular perspectives and power-structures. It is in these issues that the humanities and social sciences are particularly interested. The literary scholar Aleida Assmann has made an equally important contribution to Cultural Memory Studies. First, Aleida Assmann separated memory as ars (artificial, spatially-oriented memory) from memory as vis (natural, temporallyoriented memory) in her discussions. Second, Aleida Assmann turned the focus to the role of literature in cultural memory. In particular, her distinction between the preservation of ‘the past as past’ or ‘the past as present’ has generated much fruitful debate. The distinction is commonly expressed by the terms canon and archive, which refer to active memory and passive memory respectively. This may best be visualised as a museum, with the canon being the items on display while the archive is the storeroom or cellar. The concept also draws attention to active forgetting and passive forgetting as counterparts to active remembering (canon) and passive remembering (archive). To the canon belong “works of art, which are destined to be repeatedly re-read, appreciated, staged, performed, and commented” while to the works in the archive “are de-contextualized and disconnected from their former frames, which had authorized them or determined their meaning” (Aleida Assmann 2010, 99). Of equal importance is Aleida Assmann’s assertion that there “is no self-organization and self-regulation of cultural memory – it always depends on personal decisions and selections, on institutions and media” (Aleida Assmann 1999, 6). The concept of canon and archive is important particularly in relation to the medieval Irish tale lists and will be referenced at various points in this study.

1.3 Medieval Practices and Modern Theories

35

Aleida Assmann’s interest in how memory cultures operate stands in opposition to the work of Jan Assmann, who has repeatedly been criticised for its lack of attention to the ‘workings of cultural memory’, i.e. the individual media and engagements with these media that guarantee its longevity. Rekdal notes that while Jan Assmann is right in purporting that “things do not ‘have’ a memory of their own but trigger our memory”, this individual process is, however, hardly discussed by him and seems generally not to be taken up in the discussion of cultural memory, possibly because the debate in itself deals with so many questions. One problem which is avoided by keeping this process out of the discussion is the fact that the individual memory does not necessarily coincide with the social memory of the group or society to which that individual belongs. (Rekdal 2014, 109)

To engage with how cultural memory works therefore necessitates attention to the role of individual media, and the cognitive processes of their encoding and decoding. This in turn challenges the assumption that memory is somehow “held” in monuments and then simply retrieved. Rather, the process of remembering is a complex, unstable and fluid one. In this regard, this book is as much about cultural remembering as it is about cultural memory. In the pre-modern period, cultural memory becomes visible where the material and the narrative environment stand in constant interaction with each other. This reflects a current shift in Cultural Memory Studies (influenced by Media Studies) where the leading question “is not ‘what is memory? (or forgetting?)’ but ‘what can function as an aid to memory (or forgetting) to whom, under which circumstances and under which specific conditions” (Glauser 2018, 22). This is clearly a scholarly question and not one posed by the sources themselves, even if some medieval Irish texts reveal an interest in how the past is communicated and mediated. My own approach follows the premise that discussions of memory “raise – and are raised by – epistemological questions regarding history, experience, and truth” as much as “they raise, and are raised by ontological questions of selfhood and identity” (Antze and Lambek 1996, xxi). This might be of particular importance for medieval cultures, in which these questions may be framed through the Christian and classical learned traditions, but the answers remained deeply rooted in local landscapes and traditions – revealing an amalgam of local and ‘global’ perspectives. In the past decade, studies by Hermann, Glauser and Stephen Mitchell have shown the potential of incorporating pre-Modern Norse culture into Memory Studies debates. This has not only led to insightful close readings of individual texts but also advanced our understanding of how people in the past related to (and imagined) their past. For example, Glauser, Hermann and Stephen Mitchell evoke a tripartite distinction in his framing of Cultural Memory Studies. For

36

1 Introduction

them, the distinction lies between the past (as an abstract concept), historical reality (the factual content) and memory of the past: the focus is neither on the past itself, nor on the social or historical reality of the past, but exactly on the memory of the past, on how people remember, and why. This further implies that cultural memory is upheld by the selections and choices that are made by groups of people; there is no ‘self-regulation’ of this type of memory, which makes it relevant to focus on the complicated and multiple focuses and powers that stand behind it. (Glauser, Hermann and Stephen Mitchell 2018, 8)

This alerts to the question of agency, as behind a specific mediation of the past stand institutions and individuals with specific interests. The question of who “produces” an individual conceptualisation of the past must therefore also be posed, augmented in Medieval Studies with the related question of who may have “modified” that version as texts were transmitted. As mentioned above, medieval Irish literature (in the sense of written culture) up to the twelfth century was produced by an elite, often in a religious and ecclesiastical context, and it bears the mark of these outlooks. My own understanding reflects the assertion that cultural memory (re)presents particular outlooks, choices and power structures and these in fact lie at the heart of medieval memory culture. For the pre-modern period, investigations of cultural identity or cultural memory also entail an interest in the relationships between individuals and groups, and between groups and their environment: Cultural memory metaphorically implies that culture has a memory of its own, i.e. that memory is not merely to be conceived of as a phenomenon that resides inside individuals, but as a collectively shared phenomenon, which takes external form, i.e. in poetry, narratives, rituals, or other representational forms. Only when memory is transferred from the individual to collectively shared forms, embedded in various media (orality, writing, picture), is it possible to reach the past that lies beyond experience. (Hermann 2014, 31)

Paying attention to the media of cultural memory – and of memory in general – is therefore a necessary prerequisite for acknowledging the cultural specifics of memory discourses and for understanding how especially pre-modern cultures related to the world they inhabited through memory. Surprisingly, the term culture that is so freely evoked in these studies is hardly ever defined in Cultural Memory Studies. Consequently, it is seldom addressed whether there is a strict correlation between one culture and one cultural memory, or whether one culture may incorporate several cultural memories, for example through sub-cultures and counter-cultures. Such thinking defies modern ideas of national identities and hence of cultural homogeneity, which are often implicitly informing discussions of cultural memory. Ho Tai’s (2001) critique of Nora’s chosen lieux de mémoire is a case in point and raises issues of politics (co-

1.3 Medieval Practices and Modern Theories

37

lonialism), class and gender. For some time now, “scholars in the humanities as a whole and in Cultural Studies specifically have emphasized that there is no pure culture, that all cultures are heterogenous, even those long dwelling in one small place” (Tymoczko 2014, 47). When talking about medieval Irish culture, cultural identity, and cultural memory, we may therefore question how heterogenous medieval Irish culture was, and how it related to neighbouring cultures, particularly to other Celtic-speaking areas such as modern Scotland and Wales. Utilising the idea of medieval Irish culture does therefore not suggest that beliefs, practices, and knowledge about particular places or events were homogenous across Ireland, or radically different from those of neighbouring areas. Schlüter’s work has, in many ways, paved the way for such research. Her combination of perceptive source criticism and theoretical sensitivity led Schlüter to argue that the texts in the twelfth-century manuscript the Book of Leinster “describe and embellish specific aspects of a medieval Irish perception of its country’s past” (Schlüter 2010b, 17). This observation shed light on the engagement of the scribes and “their” texts as actively re-created negotiations of the past that are dependent on specific situations. The Book of Leinster “can thus justifiably be called a document of remembrance” (Schlüter 2010b, 17) rather than a simple collection of texts – a finding which may also be applicable to other manuscripts. Schlüter works on the macro-level of manuscript production while this monograph explores the micro-level of the texts which these manuscripts contain. While the grouping and copying of texts, scribal activities and paratextual elements are topics deserving of further attention, studying the function these texts might have held in medieval (memory) culture is valuable basic research to contextualise studies on manuscripts. Wherever necessary, the relationship between the texts and their transmission and position in manuscripts will be taken into consideration here, even if the focus remains on close readings. However, issues about medieval Irish memory culture(s) first need to be more widely, and more specifically, acknowledged. And there is precedent for engaging with medieval Irish constructions of the past, despite this not taking theoretical shape. Implicitly, scholars have addressed many issues which are central to cultural memory. For example, a central presupposition of the theoretical framework of cultural memory is that he past is not reconstructed for its own sake, but for the use of the present. This is a methodological parallel to the approach of the Cork school, as exemplified in the works of Máire Herbert and Pádraig Ó Riain. In a number of publications, they argued that narrative texts from the Irish Middle Ages reconstruct a picture of the past in order to convey a – mostly political – message for the time and audience when a specific text came into being. (Schlüter 2010b, 20)

38

1 Introduction

Herbert’s work on medieval hagiography (see pp. 25–26) shows that each production of a text “rewrites history for its own particular purpose” (Herbert 1988, 179). This means that a work is (re-)shaped for the purpose of the times in which it is written, not the times about which it narrates. This observation not only questions the value of the sources as historical documents, it shows a reflective and perspective-driven engagement with the past that is typical for current Cultural Memory Studies. Herbert reaches such conclusions solely on the basis of the texts and does not reference any broader conceptualisations of the past, either with a historiographical outlook or related to memory. Such a perspective is common in Celtic Studies, which is traditionally reluctant to engage with theoretical models. This has had a serious impact on the field’s wider visibility and possibly also on its future survival. Tymoczko stresses the need for Celtic Studies to integrate the results of all the sophisticated humanistic work on cultural production and on texts into their research or the discipline will become so out of step with the rest of the humanities and of academe in the twenty-first century that the field may cease to be viable except where it is a protected preserve, underwritten by old endowments or governmental subsidy, always a precarious source of support at best. (Tymoczko 2002, 20)

Although in general Celtic Studies is slow to engage with emerging theories in the humanities, there is precedent for a critical discussion of cultural memory. The edited volume Medieval Irish Perspectives on Cultural Memory (Rekdal and Poppe 2014) maps potential areas for discussion and identifies substantial problems with a narrow application of Jan Assmann’s cultural memory to medieval Irish sources. Based on a symposium at the University of Oslo, the volume aims “to assess the potential of Assmann’s ideas about cultural memory for a better understanding of Irish and Welsh cultural traditions” (Rekdal and Poppe 2014, 7). In their introduction, the editors assert that Jan “Assmann’s ideas both provoke and invite quite substantial rethinking of various facets of charged and fluid concepts like tradition, culture, and memory in general, and of how these notions work in the various Celtic traditions in particular” (Rekdal and Poppe 2014, 7). The contributors to the volume critically dissect Jan Assmann’s concept and provide suggestions to reframe its use much in the same way as the present study proposes. Of particular value is Tymoczko’s chapter on the wider questions of how cultural memory may be related to medieval Irish sources, and where theoretical and methodological problems arise. Tymozcko raises two major issues that are of relevance beyond Celtic Studies (Tymoczko 2014, 16–17). First, that Jan Assmann seeks to distinguish between tradition (primarily associated with ritual) and cultural memory and completely bypasses the need to consider the nature of individual human memory and its role in collective remembering. Second, that by referencing

1.3 Medieval Practices and Modern Theories

39

texts such as the Torah Jan Assmann propagates a view of the text as fixed that does not chime well with medieval Irish (or indeed much of medieval) literature, where textual latency and instability are important factors to consider. While textual change and a changed use of a text within cultural memory must not necessarily coincide, the former can indicate a new audience, or a new cultural or political role assigned to the text. As Tymoczko stresses, “one must acknowledge that texts archived in cultural memory may remain textually invariant but nonetheless change in meaning when reused” (Tymoczko 2014, 27). It is through paratextual comments or through intertextuality that these changes can become particularly relevant, although often such matters cannot be conclusively assessed. These observations show that a particular text can fulfil different functions at different points in time, or it can be appropriated by different groups for specific purposes. Further issues in the application of Jan Assmann’s cultural memory to Irish sources are Jan Assmann’s focus on ritual and repetition and his failure to acknowledge that “cultural forms can be handed down outside institutionalized structures” (Tymoczko 2014, 18, 15), which precludes the existence of counter cultures or divergent versions of the past. Jan Assmann’s valorisation of writing is opposed to Tymoczko’s belief that “the literary qualities and vitality of most of the early Irish narrative and poetic texts are anchored much more in a living oral tradition than in a written tradition rooted in sacred texts” (Tymoczko 2014, 16). Tymoczko further draws attention to the neglect of the study of personal memory and its relation to collective remembering in Assmann’s work, a point which is of particular relevance for chapter three of the present study. To this we could add a lack of interest in the working of cultural memory and its transmission, an issue which is raised at length throughout the following chapters. Despite the need for considerable “adjustment, enlargement, and augmentation” of the theory (Tymoczko 2014, 23), it is important to acknowledge the tremendous contribution which early Irish sources can make to Memory Studies: Irish culture is an excellent case study of the examination of tradition and cultural memory for two specific reasons. First, there is a great deal of evidence about Irish forms of cultural knowledge spanning a long period of time, approximately two millennia. [. . .] Second, the wealth of diverse data and evidence about cultural knowledge in Ireland is superb for illustrating the workings of cultural memory and thus for interrogating theories of cultural memory, notably those developed with reference to the cultures of antiquity. Irish evidence is also comparatively well documented, especially during the early Middle Ages, such that it supplements perspectives based on many other early cultural contexts. At the same time demonstrable continuities from the early period to the present make it possible to track shifts in cultural knowledge, cultural memory, and the cultural archive in Ireland and its culture area. (Tymoczko 2014, 28–29)

40

1 Introduction

Poppe makes a related point. For him, a “comprehensive analysis of the culture(s) of memory in medieval Ireland still needs to be produced, but even a first cursory glance at some sources indicates the cultural and societal values attributed to memory and remembrance” (Poppe 2014, 135). Such a comprehensive analysis is still a desideratum in the field, yet smaller studies such as the one presented here may also go some way towards demonstrating the value of including the early Irish corpus into Memory Studies. Early Irish culture can also offer an incentive to (re-)assess important observations on orality and literacy. Tymoczko asserts that the “documented existence for almost 1500 year of an authoritative set of native learned classes [the filid] using oral and written modes in a population that had no fully unified nationstate as such is another significant feature of Irish culture that is central to its system of cultural knowledge and cultural memory” (Tymoczko 2014, 32). This in turn offers a diverse “model that seemingly contradicts Jan Assmann’s (2000, 82, 85–87) dictum that written cultural memory is associated with nation and the establishment of a state” (Tymoczko 2014, 32). Such a critical stance in relation to theoretical approaches is important because medieval culture differs drastically from its modern counterpart but also from the cultures around which many of those theories were formulated. The fact that many theories are normative rather than descriptive considerably complicates things. This normativity at times makes it necessary to “disassemble” theories and determine which aspects of it may be successfully applied and reformulated, and which ones may not. While this may be dismissed as a “pick and mix”-method, it allows scholars to make use of productive aspects of theories rather than disregarding it as a whole. In turn, such an engagement might even question any underlying, often distinctly (post-)modern definitions of terms such as cultural memory or gender that are silently implied in the original concepts. The plurality of texts from the medieval period can encourage us to think about the perspectives of the people who produced and utilised the specific sources, whether as individual human beings, as carriers of social roles, or as dwellers in locales. For the purpose of the present study, I understand cultural memory not “as knowledge stored in a collection of retention bins” but “as continually constructed and reconstructed by humans interacting with each other and their organizational environment” (Casey and Oliveira 2011, 306). I therefore view it as a flexible and adjustable concept reliant both on contexts of the present, individual interests in the past, and prevalent concerns for the future. Far from being a weakness of the medieval tradition, textual fluidity can prove one of the most exciting points to consider. Nagy even views “the exploration of the processes by which the guardians of these traditions – poets, writers, and scholars – adjusted their texts, their compositional methods, and their sense of the past to the politi-

1.3 Medieval Practices and Modern Theories

41

cal and cultural changes that came with the late Middle Ages and the early modern period” as “one of the most fruitful areas in the study of literature written in Celtic languages” (Nagy 2006b, 7). Furthermore, in line with new philology and the appreciation of the variance and mouvance of medieval texts in Scandinavian literature (see Rösli and Gropper 2021, 10), the complex question of conscious redaction and medieval concepts of ‘authorship’ may further diversify our view on cultural memory’s position within a culture’s identity construction. Before the analyses proper I would therefore like to briefly ponder the cultural component in cultural memory, even if Cultural Memory Studies generally do not engage with the term in any depth: culture appears a given, while its memory is that which needs to be defined.36 The issue with culture was raised in other (sub-)disciplines, such as cultural geography, mainly because the term had become confusing and lacked any conceptual specificity (Jacobs and Nash 2003, 265). In 2000, Don Mitchell went as far as to suggest that the term culture had become conveniently tautological and culture “seems to be little more than a list of activities that the analyst has deemed ‘cultural’” (Don Mitchell 2000, 73). For the present purpose, one might propose that culture incorporates a shared understanding, and use, of symbols and a shared past. Lotman and Ispenskij (1984, 3) specifically link a culture to memory, defining culture as “the memory of a society that is not genetically transmitted”, but mediated by external symbols, both material and immaterial (Lotman and Ispenskij 1984, 3; cited in Aleida Assmann 2010, 97). Throughout this study, culture remains a category of analysis, referring to both the people who populated medieval Ireland and to their material and immaterial output.37 My understanding therefore stresses that culture is not an abstract concept removed from human agency, but the (conscious) product of such agency. Evidently there is more to culture than customs

 Like many others, Jan Assmann evades a definition of culture, simply using culture as the macro level on which memory can function (as opposed to the micro-level of person and the intermittent social sphere).  The fact that in common usage, culture may refer to either an abstract concept or a group of individuals raises further questions: whether one individual can participate in more than one culture at a time and how to distinguish different cultures (or to allow for hybrid cultures), for example in the case of American Irish or Swiss Italian. Related questions permeate the chapters: were both a native (and perhaps also a heroic) Irish and an ecclesiastical Irish cultural memory at play in medieval Ireland, or should both the secular and the religious texts be perceived as an expression of one cultural memory that was ‘Irish-Christian’, i. e. both local and international? To investigate this question, culture is understood here as an analytical category rather than as a definition, a parameter to explore (and to be explored) rather than as a finite concept.

42

1 Introduction

and beliefs, but the dual focus on insubstantial and performative as well as material issues is a reminder to consider how – i.e. by what media – cultures become visible and accessible for us to study. This leads us back to questions about agency and about what groups (or subgroups) may be represented in cultural memory. Speaking of medieval Irish culture as whole does not necessarily imply that beliefs, practices, and knowledge about particular places, people(s) or events were homogenous across the island, or radically different from those of neighbouring Celtic-speaking areas. After all, medieval Ireland was politically fragile and home to a complex system of kingdoms which had an interest in land and local histories. Such local histories become apparent for example in place-lore (Dindshenchas), but even these can be simultaneously linked to the macro-history of Ireland (incorporating all five provinces Ulster, Leinster, Munster, Connacht and the geographically somewhat elusive Mide) under the rule of an over-kingship. According to Ó Corráin “the Irish had developed a sense of identity [. . .] as early as the seventh century and had begun to create an elaborate origin-legend embracing all the tribes and dynasties of the country” (Ó Corráin 1978, 35); an endeavour which raises questions of cultural hegemony and perhaps also of explicitly Christian concerns.38 Ó Corráin therefore proposes that “the Irish were profoundly conscious of themselves as a larger community or natio [and] that their learned classes were preoccupied with this very notion” (Ó Corráin 1978, 4). The same self-consciousness is represented also in the literature which they composed, copied, and reworked (see Kelleher 1963). Therefore, when scholars like Ó hUiginn use the term “national impact” they do so with an awareness that the term has “cultural rather than political weight” and refers to “traditions shared by a people who had a common language and who felt they had a common origin” (Ó hUiginn 2012, 152). Despite the self-consciousness of the Irish, the individual manifestations of the past differ depending on which sources we study. May we therefore propose conflicting memories of particular dynasties or monastic foundations, high and low cultural memories (for example of the same event), or propose a cultural

 As distinct pillars of such an identity (which may not be congruent with modern understandings of identity) can be listed a legal system that was clearly distinct from their neighbours, an origin myth in which the Gaels descended from the Milesians (Míl Espáine), the Irish language, a tradition of provincial kingship and a complex organisation in tribes and tribal relationships. Supporting this argument is orthographic evidence, for when Irish first appears in writing around the seventh century CE, it exhibits a remarkably standard orthography and language (on this see Thurneysen 1946, 12), perhaps reflecting a learned desire to create a standard literary culture akin to learned Latin culture.

1.3 Medieval Practices and Modern Theories

43

memory that is so fluid and flexible that it can incorporate a multitude of engagements with the past? Although these issues cannot be conclusively answered on the basis of one analysis alone, such questions continuously inform the close readings in the following chapters. Despite these limitations, the engagement with the past in the texts I discuss is so rich that the glance at the particular is still valuable. The resulting picture is by no means a surveying landscape painting, but a few pieces of a mosaic to which, hopefully, others will feel encouraged to add to in the future.

1.3.2 Philological Approaches to Memory The philological study of memory in medieval literary texts can take multiple forms, from an analysis of the terms used to refer to memory, remembering or forgetting to learned concepts or the media associated with memory. Like Hermann, however, I find that a philological study of memory should not “be limited to a search for literal terms of memory and remembering but must include symbolic expressions and circumlocutions as well” (Hermann 2022, 2–3). For medieval Ireland, the terminology of memory has been considered in depth by Poppe (2014) and Quaintmere (2017). The current study builds on their understanding and therefore focuses on the discourses of memory and its symbolic expressions. The following comments on the vocabulary of memory therefore suffice for contextualisation. The principal nouns denoting memory in medieval Irish (both Old and Middle Irish) are cuimne (the faculty of memory; remembrance; memorial; a Celtic term) and mebair, related to mebrugud (act of remembering; committing to memory; learning; recalling; recording; a term borrowed from Latin memoria and the verbal noun of mebraigid, “commits to memory, learns”).39 Nagy also devotes some space to the terms mebair and mebraigid and concludes that “Irish literati viewed remembrance and speaking as mutually implicated or even as in inseparable” (Nagy 1997, 16; see also Nagy 1986, 290–296). Poppe (2014, 136–138) further cites legal texts (Berrad Airechta), hagiography (Betha Colmáin maic Lúacháin (The Life of Colmán mac Lúachán)), the Triads and a Dindshenchas poem which all refer to mebraigid (commits to memory; learns; rehearses; recites), mebrugud or cuimne. Quaintmere suggests that in their usage the verbs mebraigid and cuimnigid(ir) (derived from mebrugud and cuimne respectively) both mean “committing to mem-

 These are discussed in more detail by Quaintmere in his PhD thesis (2017).

44

1 Introduction

ory”: “From the overall evidence collected it appears that the nouns mebair and cuimne are overall synonymous and this is evidenced from the earliest textual examples dating to the Old-Irish period” (Quaintmere 2017, 1, 3). He adds that “(a)part from the verbs formed from mebair and cuimne there are also a handful of others concerned with concepts of memory: ad-muinethar [remembers, calls to mind; also commemorates, calls on, invokes] and do-aithminedar [calls to mind, recalls, mentions], later replaced by a simplified form taithmetaid, and for-aithminedar” (Quaintmere 2017, 59). These lexemes either stress the role of memory in social contexts (for example in legal issues or in highlighting the role of the historian with a good memory, fer coimhni cuimnech) or they provide paratextual comments on remembering (Poppe 2014, 137).40 Lexicography can provide valuable insights into semantic distinctions and divergent concepts. However, such mentions do not need to coincide with cultural or collective memory (and remembering) or conceptualisations of the past within texts, which are frequently discoursively constructed rather than explicitly marked with particular lexemes. Discursive developments are often more insightful for attitudes towards memory and forgetting since they stage memory in particular contexts. Both lexical and more discursive mentions of memory are related to speech acts of characters in the texts (for example the eyewitnesses), while authorial metacomments are less common. Addressing who talks about memory, remembering or forgetting and why is a vital step for examining “how memory is narratively and dialogically organized” (Antze and Lambek 1996, xv). It also allows one to foreground “the relationship of narratives to more embodied or practical forms of remembering” (Antze and Lambek 1996, xv), which permeate many medieval Irish texts. The methodology of contextualised close readings is particularly suited for this kind of analysis. Close readings “zone in on remarkable parts of a text on which the rhetoric complexity and semantic inexhaustibility of the text become apparent” (Glauser 2007, 15).41 This entails linguistic and semantic analysis of textual passages, as well as of their wider place in textual culture: do they create, uphold or subvert established discourses? By what narrative means do the texts communicate particular issues? And what perspectives can be revealed from these passages in relation to the narrative as a whole? In presenting close readings of texts, it is not always necessary – or even possible – to consider the full text. Rather, individual aspects relating to memory and places are foregrounded

 The latter is stressed in the case of a dindshenchas poem, which recount “the history and origin of places and their names” (see Poppe 2014, 137; Theuerkauf 2023).  See also Mao (1996) as well as Lentricchia and DuBois (2002).

1.3 Medieval Practices and Modern Theories

45

and contextualised, with the unfamiliar reader referred to editions and translations to gain a fuller picture. However, in the close readings the passage or theme is always viewed in its relation to the text, since this often helps to explain a particular development or perspective. The contextualisation of this textual work with the cultural and temporal background of both text and narrative is a key part of the methodology employed here. A similar approach was recently championed by Etchingham, Sigurðsson, Ní Mhaonaigh and Ashman Rowe (2019) and also underlies my earlier monograph (Künzler 2016). While the approach proves useful for Memory Studies or Body Criticism, the work with edited texts is always one step removed from the genuine experience of medieval texts. Editors may conflate manuscripts and therefore create texts that never existed in this form in the medieval period, or they may obscure aspects through editorial conventions. I will point out such matters in this analysis whenever this applies to the texts. More sustained studies of texts based on individual manuscripts would reveal further insights into the changing contexts in which the texts were copied and received and a more detailed picture of medieval memory discourses. However, such an approach lay outside the scope of the research project on which the current study is based. However, material philology has increasingly raised such issues. In her recent study of Norse sources, Hermann also refers to the standard datings of medieval texts but acknowledges that they are but one factor in the contextualisation of the texts. The textual tradition is dominated by copies and rewritings that most likely are conscious constructs themselves and it is therefore “possible, even quite likely, that details in the texts reflect the time of the manuscripts rather than the time of the first texts (Hermann 2022, 5). Moreover, as previous work has noted (Poppe und Rekdal, 2014), in medieval Ireland several socio-cultural contexts operated with regional and diachronic variation. An engagement with cultural memory must therefore be theoretically nuanced, responsive to fluidity, and based on in-depth considerations of individual sources and their contexts. And finally, it must appreciate the texts as individual representations of a cultural output that was much richer in the medieval period than we can ever imagine today.

2 Ancestral Topographies? Memory, Places, and Landscape(s) The whole of the Irish landscape, in John Montague’s words, is a manuscript which we have lost the skill to read. (Heaney 1980, 132) A past lacking tangible relics seems too tenuous to be credible. (. . .) To be certain there was a past, we must see at least some of its traces. (Lowenthal 1985, 247)

2.1 Narrative Landscapes Landscapes have been of interest to Cultural Memory Studies since its inception. Halbwachs (1992, 130) purports that landscapes and cultures mutually influence each other while Jan Assmann includes landscapes in his list of “things” that can trigger memory, together with “dishes, feasts, rites, images, stories and other texts” (Jan Assmann 2008, 111). For the medieval Icelandic tradition, the work of Lethbridge (2016), Hermann (2014), and Glauser (2000) proposes a strong link between landscapes and cultural memory. Glauser asserts that in “saga literature it is first and foremost the landscape and the events localised in it which play the decisive role as guarantors of memory” (Glauser 2000, 209). Previous research has therefore viewed (material and literary) landscapes as both triggers for remembering and guarantors of memory and has stressed their importance for premodern cultures. Landscapes can function as prompts for recalling stories as much as they can be a method of ordering knowledge about the past in a spatial mode (see Lethbridge 2016) and they are often intimately linked to the narrative tradition. Lethbridge fittingly terms the landscapes which oscillate between the texts and the lived-in landscape sagascapes. In the Old Norse-Icelandic tradition, sagascapes are often (but not always) linked to the colonisation of Iceland (c. 870–930 AD): “(t)he natural, topographical contours of the previously uninhabited land, together with the settlement patterns of those who colonised the island from the late ninth century onwards, were an important source of inspiration for the composition of narratives about these first settlers and their descendants” (Lethbridge 2016, 52). Glauser views this transformation of nature into culture as a “trope of memory”; nature is endorsed with signs and filled with significance and therefore becomes part of cultural discourse of power (Glauser 2000, 209).

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110799132-002

2.1 Narrative Landscapes

47

In talking about medieval Icelandic sources, Hermann suggests that the idea of landscapes (or landscape features) serving as triggers for remembering is reminiscent of the Classical topos of mnemonic places and ars memoria (Hermann 2014, 28). This mnemotechnical method “combined loci and imagines (places and images)”, and by linking what is to be remembered to spatial arrangements “focused on space and filtered out the dimension of time” (Aleida Assmann 1999, 17). While the Classical method operates with mentally constructed spaces (e.g. a house and its rooms), the medieval Old Norse-Icelandic sources utilise the landscape as a structuring force: [w]hereas in the classical world, mnemonic places were inspired by architecture – buildings, temples, and public places – mnemonic places in Old Norse-Icelandic literature most obviously reflect the spatial environment of the Icelandic landscape, and it is not least the topography of saga-texts and their literary mapping of the natural and cultural landscape which is crucial when considering the relation of saga-texts to mnemonic places. (Hermann 2014, 28)

Hermann’s proposition of mnemonic places embedded in the landscape is put to the test in relation to medieval Irish literature in this chapter, while the question of whether this may be occasioned by a knowledge of Classical mnemotechnics is put to the side. I am therefore less interested in where and when the understanding of the landscape as a mnemonic aid arose and more concerned with how landscapes function within mnemonic discourses in the texts under consideration in this study. Similar conclusions were reached in relation to other sources. For the (Icelandic) oral tradition Gunnell asserts that “[f]olk legends have always lived in and grown out of living context” because before “the advent of the modern media at least, one might say that they ‘were’ the landscape that people lived in, both geographically and mentally” (Gunnell 2009, 307). Andrén emphasises that “[o]ral culture was never only oral, since oral traditions were usually based on and interacting with the material world around humans, for instance, landscapes, monuments, settlements and objects” (Andrén 2018, 137). In addition, archaeology (a discipline that traditionally focussed on places) increasingly turns to the relationship between human-made artefacts and landscapes and stresses the importance of the material culture as a vehicle of memory, as the work of Andrén (2018) as well as of Bolender and Oscar Aldred (2013) shows. Perhaps the most important message of such studies is that the temporality of landscapes (Ingold 1993) is intimately linked to social practices. Toponomastic, religious, political, mythological and narrative discourses enable the landscape in the narratives to become a driving force in cultural memory. This study raises basic questions about how landscapes in narratives (termed

48

2 Ancestral Topographies? Memory, Places, and Landscape(s)

“narrative landscapes” here) are constructed and how they relate to the lived-in, material landscape (i.e. the landscape that people inhabit) as well as how they relate to cultural (and ultimately even agrarian) practices associated with the landscape.42 This allows insights into the “interplay of texts and monumentality in social remembrance” (Williams 2006, 214). It also begs the question of how places and landscapes relate to each other in mnemonic discourses. In many cases, it is places that make the link to a particular event – and hence to a particular point in the past – tangible. Interdisciplinary approaches concerned with how landscapes, places, place-names, and place-lore, topographies, material culture, literature, oral narratives and cultural memory relate to each other have proven a worthwhile endeavour, even if these categories cannot at all times be neatly separated from each other. For this reason, my own analyses oscillate between the narrative landscapes and the places that are embedded in them. Despite the scarcity of landscape descriptions in early Irish secular narratives (see 2.1.3.), landscapes are a fertile analytical category in relation to medieval Irish memory culture. This is true not least because of the large corpus of Dindshenchas (place-lore; lit. lore of high or notable places), attested both as independent texts and within larger narratives (Toner 2019, 57–75; see also Theuerkauf 2023, Muhr 2006, Nagy 2006a, Schlüter 2017). Dindshenchas-narratives outline the origin of a place-name, often with the same ingenuity that Isidore demonstrates in his Etymologiae. In doing so they frequently provide intricate stories that are linked both to prominent figures and known events as well as to particular landscape features. Because of the wealth of the textual tradition, the present study can only analyse a small number of texts and consequently provides a partial insight into the landscapes of medieval Irish secular literature. Yet, it aims to outline some of the most prominent topics in these texts and links these to current discussions in other fields. This chapter is divided into a consideration of places and an examination of landscapes more broadly. It also follows a twofold distinction in terms of temporalities: it starts with conceptualisations of the pre-Christian era in Ireland and moves on to the incorporation of knowledge about the pre-Christian era into Christian culture. Finally, I will draw more detailed comparisons with current re-

 The term ‘narrative landscape’ is used here much the same way as ‘literary landscape’ is used in other studies, to denote the landscapes which the narratives create. The use of narrative instead of literary or textual emphasises that these issues are present also (and perhaps especially) in oral tradition, i.e. that they are tied to narratives rather than simply to their written form. In line with landscape studies, the term ‘lived-in’ landscapes denotes the physical and geographical landscape which people inhabit.

2.1 Narrative Landscapes

49

search on sagascapes in Icelandic saga literature. I also briefly raise the question of whether, in relation to medieval Irish literature, we are dealing with mnemotopographies (rather than mnemotopes), that is, with larger narrative entities in a mnemonic mode that encompass both places and spaces and are grounded in local topographies. However, before the textual analysis, a few introductory remarks about the relationship between material landscapes and their counterparts in literature, as well as about landscapes as cultural signifiers, will help to place the discussion in a broader context. The aim of this chapter is twofold. On the one hand it seeks to contribute an Irish perspective to broader interdisciplinary debates about the connection between landscapes and (cultural) memory by examining by what narrative and cognitive strategies narrative landscapes become a culturally binding form of memory. On the other hand, it stresses the importance of landscapes and places in the formation and mediation of cultural memory with a view to exploring how this brought cultural memory in the immediacy of human experience. I too am therefore interested in “the connection between layers of landscape and layers of thought” (Benozzo 2004, 3).43 Additionally, I aim to delineate the underlying spatio-temporal mechanisms which allowed the medieval Irish to relate to their past through narratives about their places/landscapes in order to form a distinct Irish identity that was at once local and linked to the wider Christian world. This issue has recently been addressed by Mulligan (2019) but with no direct consideration of cultural memory. Furthermore, while Mulligan focused on the poetics of space I am primarily concerned with mnemonic discourses in topographical mode. By introducing various kinds of monuments and places before discussing broader landscape representations the chapter moves from the micro- to the macro-level. However, it will emerge that these two levels are not always sharply distinguishable and hence connections are stressed over differences. The analysis has a pronounced focus on the description of material structures (e.g. monuments) but also takes into account natural features, particularly those altered by actions in the narrative. It quickly becomes obvious that landscape does not equal nature (a common view, see also Benozzo 2004, ix), but rather refers to the product(s) of human culture(s), including alterations to existing monuments or

 A greater number of interdisciplinary projects such as those conducted by Fitzpatrick would aid our understanding of how narrative and lived-in landscapes were linked in human perception. Fitzpatrick (2018, 93) examines Finn mac Cumaill’s association with formaoil places in literature and oral tradition, relating them to topographies and territorial settings and the prehistoric archaeologies that their landscapes generally contain. Fitzpatrick therefore analyses how the literary and tactile landscapes of fíanaigecht relate to each other, a worthwhile approach with great potential for future research.

50

2 Ancestral Topographies? Memory, Places, and Landscape(s)

cultural (e.g. mythological or religious) readings of natural features. Landscape implies “a more-than-human materiality; a constellation of natural forms that are independent of humans, yet part and parcel of the processes by which human beings make their living and understand their own place in the world” (Lund and Benediktsson 2010, 2). The last of these points in particular – being able to situate ourselves spatially, temporally and culturally in the places, landscapes and world which we inhabit – emerges as important in this context. For this topic, Cultural Memory Studies provides some interesting frameworks to consider, from Jan Assmann’s connective structure to Nora’s lieux de mémoire, sites of memory (see pp. 32–33). My selection of texts was driven by two factors. For one, the examples focus on a reflective engagement with places and landscapes, for example in episodes where they are consciously linked to the past or, in paratextual comments, to the present of the medieval audience on which past events have a lasting impact. In addition, the examples should make visible the abundance of topics through which these concerns are expressed: burial markers or places of battles, temporary encampments, body-parts, and even births. This will hopefully aid the reader unfamiliar with early Irish literature to appreciate the immense wealth of this literary tradition. Future studies with narrower foci – such as monuments associated with specific figures (see Muhr 2013 on Queen Medb), the land-taking of Ireland or the importance of riverine landscapes – will offer an opportunity to consider many of these issues in more detail. Therefore, rather than providing a (seemingly) comprehensive analysis, the chapter focuses on particularly notable narratives and a reflective engagement with the landscape.

2.1.1 Between Landscapes and Places Any study engaging with landscapes must first address the difficult question of what landscape means, and how landscapes in narratives may be defined. “In the strict meaning of the word [. . .] landscape is the natural environment, acted upon and fashioned by the economic, cultural, and social practices of humanity in the past” (Duffy 2007, 15). Duffy’s definition includes local, economic, cultural, ideological, and environmental aspects, all of which continue to shape landscapes. However, the landscape should be conceptualised “not only as a passive receptacle of cultural meaning but also as a factor that itself has an effect on the culture which has shaped it, or as something that those with the power to do so can manipulate to have such effects” (Egeler 2019, xv). Jordan characterises the relationship between cultures and landscapes as follows:

2.1 Narrative Landscapes

51

cultures can make use of natural resources, they might reflect themselves in space(s, and places), they might shape space(s) and create a cultural landscape or a cultural group may receive a part of its identity through the cultural landscape. To this one might add the representation of landscapes, places and spaces in tradition and art, and the conceptualisations of this relationship in critical thinking.” (Jordan 2012, 117–118)

People and cultures thus stand in a continuous and mutual relationship with the landscapes they inhabit (and in a globalised world perhaps even with the landscapes that produce their goods). However, things are somewhat different for the landscapes that are described or evoked in cultural artefacts such as texts, paintings or films. In literature, landscape may denote “a materially grounded textual representation of human experience in a locale” (James 2017, 14). In the case of narrative landscapes, the power to shape the landscape lies with the writer/redactor of texts, even if they are also subject to experiencing landscapes in their daily lives. In addition, an audience would always read narrative landscapes based on their own experience and knowledge. Both authors/redactors and audiences therefore bring particular (and perhaps conflicting) perspective(s) to narrative landscapes – landscapes that may be fixed in a text but which nonetheless can be subject to fluid readings. Place also needs to be defined at the outset but any definition cannot be separated from individual and mediated experiences of places: in a generic sense, a place is a geographical locale of any size or configuration, comparable to equally generic meanings of area, region or location. In human geography and the humanities more generally, however, place is often attributed with greater significance. It is sometimes defined as a human-wrought transformation of a part of the Earth’s surface or of pre-existing, undifferentiated space. It is usually distinguished by the cultural or subjective meanings through which it is constructed and differentiated, and is understood by most human geographers to be in an incessant state of “becoming [. . .]”. (Henderson 2009, 539)44

In this definition, human experiences of place (rather than the places themselves) become important. For Henderson, such experiences include “perceptions of place, senses of place and human dwelling in and memories of place” (Henderson 2009, 539). Humanist geographers like Tuan (1977) and Relph (1976) have long “approached place as a subjectively sensed and experienced phenomenon” which is

 The “potential interchangeability of place with other concepts is a sticking point”, however, as “place, region, area and so on all can denote a unit of space that has discrete boundaries, shared internal characteristics, and that changes over time and interacts with other similar units” (Henderson 2009, 539).

52

2 Ancestral Topographies? Memory, Places, and Landscape(s)

“formative of the unique experiences of individuals, while also being specific to different cultures” (Henderson 2009, 539–540).45 It will become clear that, just as Henderson implies for cultural geography more broadly, many medieval Irish texts engage with the change of meaning associated with a place/place-name. This is important for the study of cultural memory, as various memories can be ascribed to one place (for example, when variant explanations for a place-name are listed). On the other hand, a place may change its nature according to new mnemonic associations, although it may not necessarily change in material form. Mapping such fluid engagement with shifts and rifts is particularly important for cultural memory, since it refutes the idea of a static, singular cultural memory and embraces the context-specific nature of mnemonic discourses in which plurality of meaning and palimpsestic notions are acknowledged. Mnemotopographies and mnemontopes thus oscillate between the stable/material and the fluid, drawing on both to mediate a culturally binding picture of the Irish past. The question by what narrative and cognitive strategies place becomes (rather than simply is) “‘a shared form of meaning’ providing the space for an intense dialogue with the past” (Egeler, 2016/2017, 8; Egeler refers to Overing and Osborne 1994, xvi–xvii) is central to the approach taken in this study. Furthermore, this chapter seeks to relate this dialogue both to the text-internal (intradiegetic) context of what is narrated in the texts and to the wider cultural issues in which the texts participate (the extradiegetic or text-external level). This reflects a new kind of Cultural Geography, which understands places “as specific to particular racial, and gender-, sexual- and class-based, identities” (Henderson 2009, 540). In relation to the texts discussed here, this may be expanded to representations of heroic or religious identity, and the potential role such representations play within medieval Irish memory culture.

2.1.2 Medieval Irish Perspectives In the Ireland of the twenty-first century, the term landscape is perhaps most readily associated with scenic routes and tourist brochures. In the medieval period, however, intimately knowing a landscape was imperative for travel and survival, and various forms of memory (social, cultural, and pragmatic) played an integral part in this. People needed to remember what crops grew where (i.e. on

 The simultaneous personal and cultural re-production and experience of places has long been a hot topic, even if the former is commonly thought to be determined by the latter.

2.1 Narrative Landscapes

53

which field or in what kind of soil), where it was (relatively) safe and profitable to fish, which areas were safe or dangerous to traverse, and where houses would be sheltered from the elements.46 Unlike today, the riverine landscape would have been particularly important for many of these concerns and hence it comes as no surprise that rivers and lakes are frequently represented in written sources, in anything from mythical to threatening contexts (Toner 2019). Equally important were religious buildings (from small beehive huts to churches) and their surrounding landscapes, while natural features such as holy wells localised Christianity in particular places. In similar fashion, various kinds of stone monuments (termed ráth (standing monolith), cairn (mound, grave) or dún (fort, stronghold)) visualised an earlier (read: ostensibly pre-Christian) presence on the land.47 Mounds in particular were the habitat of supernatural figures (the síde) and could be places of unease or danger well into the modern period. These monuments and their places sometimes should not be separated from the landscapes in which they are embedded, as both can mutually influence each other. Before the textual analysis one may also briefly consider what the spatial horizon in medieval Irish might have been like and what cultural markers the livedin landscape might have carried. Because of its organisation into tribal territories, medieval Ireland had a large number of political boundaries, from those of the five provinces to countless smaller kingdoms governed through a complex tribal kingship system. While political boundaries are mental constructs, man-made structures or natural features (such as rivers or mountain ranges) could make them visible in the landscape, connecting topographies and territories in the process. Liminal areas were likewise important for social practices as they were used for burials, which imbued them with political, temporal, and highly personal meaning (see, for example, McManus 1991). The exceptionally prevalent Dindshenchas (place-lore) tradition not only provided an incentive to remember (even an invented) origin of place names but further encouraged a connection between the past and the land(scape), whether as a scholarly, written pursuit or as part of lively oral storytelling. In literature, the widespread topos of the landscape prospering under the rightful king suggests that cosmic balance and righteous rulership are linked to the prosperity of nature. In fact, certain medieval sources comprehend the island of Ireland as an anthropomorphic, female figure (or a triad of the female figures: Ériu, Banba and

 On food production and consumption in medieval Ireland see Peters (2015) and Sexton (1998).  The term monument is used here in a broad sense, referring to any material structure of stone. Monument derives from classical Latin monumentum/monimentum (commemorative statue or building, tomb, reminder, written record, literary work), which in turn stems from monēre (to remind).

54

2 Ancestral Topographies? Memory, Places, and Landscape(s)

Fótla). Specific places such as the Paps of Anu (Co. Kerry) could even represent specific body parts of such figures (in this case Anu’s breasts).48 Even these brief observations question the applicability of the common (modern) divide between culture and nature, a point which may be kept in mind throughout this chapter. This cursory introduction demonstrates that in medieval Ireland, landscapes were imbued with social relations as well as with religious, mythological and learned traditions. Those who composed, memorised, wrote down and told narratives embedded in the landscape would have participated in at least some of this landscape knowledge and, in turn, they and their audiences re-experienced the landscape they inhabited through such associations. From small wells to the whole of Ireland, the references to past events and ancestral figures provided a temporal layer to the experience of landscape, a temporal layer that could be deeply embedded both in Christian and in native tradition. Furthermore, these perspectives need not be mutually exclusive but interrelate in the formation of an Irish cultural identity, as has been argued in the introduction. A few words of caution are also advisable. First and foremost, we must be aware that those who produced, transmitted and received the narratives and texts had a different familiarity with the Irish landscapes. We as modern, officedwelling researchers are therefore always removed from their landscape experience and can never fully share their view on it. No (post-)moderner could ever fully comprehend the medieval understanding of landscapes or places: too different are our knowledge and categories of thought, too different are the landscapes and places which we inhabit, too different is the world in which we move and which we experience. However, perhaps pre-modern texts can still give us an insight into how the past was constructed in a particular medium for a particular audience and what perspectives this particular medium reveals, perhaps particularly along the transmission of these texts. Furthermore, despite their intimate relationship, the landscapes in the texts must not be equated with the lived-in landscapes. Artistic representations of landscapes “are selective and partial, and often highly ideological, ways of seeing and knowing” (Tilley and Cameron-Daum 2017, 4) and this certainly holds true for the medieval Irish tradition also. Yet, even if we can never fully reconstruct all the facets that medieval authors/compilers or tellers of tales brought to the landscapes they evoked or described, any study of landscapes in texts can reveal indi-

 The “concept of Ireland personified as a woman whether known as Ériu or by another name appears to be older than the written literature and to have had analogues in other lands of Celtic language and culture” (Mac Cana 2011, 294).

2.1 Narrative Landscapes

55

vidual engagements with the past, since landscapes can embody various concerns and discourses even in narratives. Echoing current work in landscape studies, the chapter takes into account the essential and interrelated roles (of) material forms, cultural practices and narrative representations and focuses on the specific interests communicated through the landscape (e.g. religious or political). In this respect, “landscape might be said to be produced in two senses, materially and metaphorically: materially, in the sense that the landscape is a legacy of past economic and social order; and metaphorically in the sense that it produces meanings which vary over time as different ‘readings’ or constructions are put on it” (Duffy 2017, 15). In this chapter, it might emerge that narrative landscapes are, in fact, even more multi-layered, particularly with regards to medieval spatio-temporal constructions of identity. The continued presence of place-lore into the modern period testifies to the importance of these issues across linguistic and temporal boundaries. Newman stresses the historical depth of the Irish engagement with their landscapes and even proclaims that (p)ublished European case studies, however, often pertain to landscapes that are rather mute, that lack a mythological and early historical dimension. In contrast, the enormous corpus of early Irish literature places Irish researchers in a uniquely favourable position to re-compose past landscapes with a toponymic dimension. Many natural and man-made features are explained with reference to myth and legend. (Newman 2005, 364)

While especially the larger, apparently royal sites such as Tara or Emain Macha clearly hold an important place in medieval cultural memory, a shift to less significant smaller places (i.e. those marked by a single standing stone) opens novel perspectives on how the whole of the Irish landscape functioned as a cognitive mappa Hiberniae that linked the past to the present and the future.

2.1.3 An Absent Presence? Landscapes in Early Irish Texts Roy polemically proclaims that “Celts of the pagan and early Christian era had a fascination with landscape and topography” (Roy 1996, 228). However, on first glance, medieval Irish texts – written in the Christian era – present a rather different picture, since descriptions of landscapes are, by and large, absent from secular literature: “[t]he conventional modern view of early medieval literary landscape is that there was none” (Siewers 2009a, 82). Some variations according to textual ‘genres’ may be observed, as Ní Bhrolcháin asserts that “(u)sually, the environment of traditional stories is unimportant, but the Irish tales describe the beautiful or

56

2 Ancestral Topographies? Memory, Places, and Landscape(s)

frightening landscapes of the Otherworld in detail and often place the events in the real landscape of Ireland” (Ní Bhrolcháin 2009, 95). To this might be added the early Nature or Hermit Poetry, which often features evocative references to places, flora and fauna. However, neither nature nor hermit poetry are part of the present study and they display very different interests in landscapes and nature than do the texts discussed here. Given the lack of landscape descriptions it is therefore not surprising that before Benozzo’s (2004) and Mulligan’s (2019) monographs, landscapes had not been systematically addressed in Celtic Studies. Commenting on the Ulster Cycle of tales, Matasović notes that it immediately becomes apparent that landscapes are never described in our tales. In so far as the texts tell us, the action of these tales could be taking place on Mars. The fact that we do not have any descriptions of landscapes, nature, or physical setting of any kind, in which the action takes place in these tales, is by no means trivial, nor does it mean that people in the Early Middle Ages were somehow insensitive to nature. Indeed, we know that they were very sensitive to nature, since we have a significant corpus of Irish nature poetry from the same, or a slightly earlier period. (Matasović 2009, 96)49

Benozzo likewise concludes that in the Ulster Cycle tales, and in Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley) in particular, we find “mere allusions to landscapes, sometimes so vague that they seem to belong to a stylised convention (which I would consider in this case an ‘epic convention’)” (Benozzo 2004, 145–146). However, since human engagement with landscapes goes beyond the merely visual it has been suggested that an absence of elaborate landscape descriptions does not in itself express an absence of landscapes or a lack of interest in landscape(s). Siewers, for example, asserts that “the cultural landscape of Irish narrative cycles was a rich tapestry including physical terrain and monuments, oral tradition, literary tradition and Christian cosmography” (Siewers 2009a, 82). The pronounced focus on the aetiology of place names in relation to these issues prompted Scowcroft to conclude that “this is toponymic, not topographical literature” (Scowcroft 2006, 486), literature that is interested in place-names (toponyms) rather than in the environment in which the place-names are situated. To this we might add place-making and a desire to link the landscape to events and personages, rather than to visualise its appearance. Mulligan even proclaims that

 Matasović’s choice of twelve texts (out of the c. 80 of the Ulster Cycle) is based on his own translation activities and is not representative. For example, he leaves out the longest texts, Táin Bó Cúailnge, which may have considerably shifted his conclusions. The equation of landscape with nature, which Matasović implies here, diverts considerably from the understanding of landscape presented here, but it also seems to underlie other studies on the subject.

2.1 Narrative Landscapes

57

“the texts produced by and about the medieval Irish contain perhaps the highest concentration of literary topographies in the wider medieval European milieu” (Mulligan 2019, x) – a clear contradiction of earlier assessments which focused primarily on landscape descriptions. Such observations invite us to more openly consider landscape constructions in medieval texts. Rather than reflecting the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century interest in visualising landscapes, texts can also evoke landscapes (presuming that the audience knows the landscape well), or portray individual places, natural features or monuments that combine to a mental picture of a landscape during the reception of the narrative. However, narrative landscapes are more than the mere sum of these places: they are created by a human response that is guided by individual and cultural knowledge, our understanding of the text’s context and function, and our embeddedness in the landscapes which we inhabit. In fact, the “importance of place-myth in establishing and defining the Irish landscape can hardly be underestimated” and medieval Ireland “is replete with stories set in, and attached to, the landscape” (Toner 2018, 57). Diverging from the previous assessments, Kinsella proposes that topography is “a continuing preoccupation of early and medieval Irish literature’ (Kinsella 1985 [1969], xiii), while Siewers asserts that although Táin Bó Cúailnge “in successive versions does not feature modern-style landscape, it is grounded and focused on places, spaces and the terrain of Ireland, mythically contextualized around the time of Christ” (Siewers 2009a, 81). Siewers continues that reading Táin Bó Cúailnge as a literary landscape in a modern sense means that its landscape “is ‘not there’ but nonetheless integrates tradition with physical topography” and that it is best “‘read’ in analogy with early medieval Christian visual art and perception” (2009a, 82). He concludes that the “Táin narratives link the spiritual realm of the Otherworld to both the ancestral history and physical topography of one of the richest physical landscapes of Ireland, the region of Ulster” (Siewers 2009a, 82). Matasović’s catchy reference to Mars, cited above, must therefore be fundamentally reassessed, as the frequent references to ráths, dúns, standing stones or known places such as Tara, Emain Macha and Cruachain make Mars an unlikely place for heroic feats and saintly miracles. This is the case even if many of the places mentioned can no longer be identified geographically, or may never have had a geographical referent (Ó Coileáin 1993). The lack of clear referents may necessitate not only a willing suspension of disbelief on behalf of modern readers, but also a suspension of a modern understanding of placeness, which is too frequently focussed solely on the identification of a place’s cartographic coordinates. In the foreword to his translation of Táin Bó Cúailnge, Kinsella 1985 [1969], 20) wittily comments that “the strange events of the Táin may be pure fantasy or they may have some basis in fact – it is impossible to

58

2 Ancestral Topographies? Memory, Places, and Landscape(s)

know. But even if they never happened, we know fairly accurately where they didn’t”. In acknowledging the “differing geographies” of early Irish texts, Ó Coileáin muses in response that it “might equally be said of the events of the fianaigheacht, at least from the twelfth century onwards, that even if they had happened we would scarcely have any idea where they did” (Ó Coileáin 1993, 45). Landscapes in Irish texts are therefore not just frequently fragmentary, evocative and episodic, they are also elusive and resist modern attempts to be put neatly on a conventional (modern cartographic) map.50 Geocritical approaches are of limited value when applied to medieval Irish sources, since they are primarily interested in “the interaction between texts and the physical places that humans experience” (Egeler 2015, 68). This is clearly problematic if places cannot – or can no longer – be identified, since it is unclear whether even a medieval audience ever had a clearly identifiable geographic referent.51 Furthermore, island-wide travel was limited to a small group of people (clerics and filid) in medieval Ireland and most of the audiences of the texts/narratives would have been familiar only with a small part of the Irish landscape. I would therefore not propose an intimate knowledge of a particular place as the basis of an understanding of these texts. Rather, one might assume a more general idea that places or landscapes were familiar conceptually (e.g. standing stones, cairns, rivers or valleys) could be part of the experience of cultural memory through the landscape. Important for this understanding is the idea that landscape symbolises both permanence and change, thus symbolically embodying the ‘kontrapräsentische’ and ‘kontinuierliche’ function Jan Assmann views as central to cultural memory. Texts such as Acallam na Senórach (The Colloquy of the Elders or Ancients) show a particular awareness of the landscape as being continuously shaped by subsequent inhabitants of a locale. In early Irish literature there is “a wide range of stories in which the formation of the topography is attributed to gods, ancestors, imagined precursors, animals, or undefined cosmic forces” which outline “the medieval Irish view of mythical origins of the landscape” (Toner 2018, 58). Much like in medieval Icelandic saga literature narrating of the settlement period, the creation of the physical landscape is consequently

 James (2017, 16) reaches a similar conclusion for the landscape of the Biblical Song of Songs.  Most recently, Ireland’s Ancient East tourist initiative (operated by Fáilte Ireland, the National Tourism Development Authority) compiled a list of tourist spots that reflect historical or literary places. The list is informative with regard to a new kind of appropriation of places, even if the Tourist Bord’s definition of East is rather all-encompassing (see https://www.irelandsancienteast. com/ (accessed on 16. 3. 2020)).

2.2 Imagining the Pre-Christian Past

59

viewed in terms of the civilisation of the wilderness and the creation of domestic space, but also as tangible evidence for the presence and actions of former inhabitants of the land that links medieval writers and audiences to both historical and mythical time and space. (Toner 2018, 58)

While Toner engages with the former in relation to the Irish origin legend(s) extant in Lebor Gabála Érenn, in the mnemonic interest of the present study the latter is foregrounded. At least at times, an enjoyment of a fantastical or amusing episode that links the landscape to grotesque happenings might also have played an important role in the preservation of narrative episodes. Egeler urges us to “put some levity back into landscape theory” by that “we should not forget that underlying the profound there is also the everyday, and that there is a lot that is done in everyday life which is simply done for the joy it gives” (Egeler 2016–2017, 14). Similarly, some stories or episodes discussed here might have been included in larger texts for comic or other effects which are hard to unearth centuries later, or this might have been part of a reception which at the same time also invited a deeper engagement with moral messages. These brief introductory comments alert us to the complexities of studying landscapes in medieval texts and in particular in medieval Irish literature. Many aspects (such as humour or personal response to place-lore) can no longer be discerned, but what is left for us to decipher leaves enough interesting traces to make following this path a worthwhile journey.

2.2 Imagining the Pre-Christian Past 2.2.1 Stones for the Dead: Materialising Memory in the Irish Landscape A prevalent kind of place-making in secular early Irish literature is the assertion that a figure died here and that this place is named after them as a result. This is often associated with depictions of pre-Christian burial rituals featuring the erection of stone monuments such as pillar stones or cairns. In the texts, pillar stones erected at burials may be inscribed with the Irish ogham script to commemorate the dead by name.52 While c. 360 ogham-inscribed stones are found in Ireland

 Standing stones inscribed with ogham are found in a variety of contexts, from freestanding pillars to slabs re-used in churches or secular building activities. The script consists of a bundle of 1–5 strokes placed relative to the stemline, typically the arris (angle) of an upright stone. The inscribed texts of the monuments surviving in Ireland are short and remarkably formulaic, consisting only of a male name in the genitive and a patronymic and/or tribal affiliation, i.e. “of X son of Y (of the tribe of Z)”. Monument, stone, grave name or property of X is hence implied be-

60

2 Ancestral Topographies? Memory, Places, and Landscape(s)

today, Mallory (1992, 130) admits that he is “unaware of a single example where an ogham stone in Ireland had been found directly associated with actual burial remains.”53 Although the archaeological ogham stones are all dated to the Christian era, in the texts ogham is written also by pre-Christian characters. Oghaminscribed memorials thus provide an insight into how the Christian population imagined pre-Christian memory culture (see Künzler 2020b).54 In other cases, heroic or mythical figures alter the landscape by erecting structures or interacting with existing structures in a way that results in visible ‘traces’ of their presence. In most cases, the landscape is therefore visibly altered, and this alteration is remembered in the re-telling of a narrative. There are countless examples of such incidents in medieval Irish literature yet three short discussions will provide some insight into how the narratives are linked to the places they create. The Ulster Cycle text Aided Óenḟir Aífe (The Death of Aife’s only One) narrates of the tragic fight between Cú Chulainn and his son Connla. The texts which modern scholars group in the Ulster Cycle are set in the northern province of Ulster and portray a heroic society in which (single-)combat and honour are important pillar stones of social interaction. Many Ulster Cycle tales are dated to between the eighth and the eleventh century and thus present a comparatively early body of texts. They are set around the lifetime of Christ and hence before Christianity reached its shore, although occasional glimpses to Christian world history are extant (for example in Aided Chonchobair, the death tale of King Conchobor). Thurneysen (1921) list 80 texts for the Ulster Cycle, but if the texts composed after the seventeenth century are added to the corpus, it includes over 100 texts over a period of 1200 years (Ó hUiginn 2006, 1709).

fore the name. These earliest monuments, datable on linguistic grounds to between the fifth and seventh century, are termed orthodox oghams. They present the closest parallel to depictions of ogham stones in literary sources. The script was used very sporadically in manuscripts from the eighth century onwards, and from this use later reverted to stone monuments (scholastic ogham). There are also references to ogham in early Irish saga which are unconnected to memorial inscriptions and the “practical capacity of Ogam inscriptions is confirmed in particular by Early Irish law” (McManus 1991, 156–166).  The pillar-stones could also be associated with cremation burials. This point was voiced by Swift (1997, 31) but is hitherto unsupported by archaeological evidence.  McManus rightly cautions that “early Irish saga as we know it, whatever about its possible oral precursors, is the product of the monastic scriptoria and one must always reckon with the possibility that references in it to writing may be no more than projections into the distant past of what was contemporary practice at the time it was written” (McManus 1991, 153–154).

2.2 Imagining the Pre-Christian Past

61

Aided Óenḟir Aífe is preserved in an earlier version dated to the ninth century (Meyer 1904, 113) and a later, much abridged version.55 As a young warrior, Cú Chulainn goes abroad to train arms under Scáthach and leaves a young woman called Aífe pregnant. Before he returns to Ulster he instructs Aífe to send the boy to him once the thumb ring he leaves as a token fits the boy but that he must not reveal his name to anyone and must not refuse any challenger single combat. Presumably unknowingly, he has just spelled out his son’s early death. Connla, as the boy is called, grows up overseas and when he finally finds his father’s people, honour compels them to fight the boy, who is under instruction not to identify himself. Although warned by his wife Emer that this may be his son (Findon 2004), Cú Chulainn approaches the boy and faces him in single combat to defend the honour of the Ulstermen. The two engage in a wrestling match during which the boy throws the hero to the ground three times. However, because Connla is only seven years old, he stands on two stones during the wrestling match: Rogob in mac for dá cloich, co tarad Coinculaind eitir na dá coirthi fo thrí 7 ní roglúais in mac nechtar a dá chois dona corthaib co ndechudar a traigthi isna clochaib conici a dá nadbrond. Atá slicht a dá chos and béos. Is de atá Tráig Ési la hUltu. (Aided Óenḟir Aífe, 1904, p. 118)56 He got upon two stones, and thrust Cuchulinn thrice between two pillar-stones, while the boy did not move either of his feet from the stones until his feet went into the stones up to his ankles. The track of his feet is there still. Hence is the Strand of the Track in Ulster. (Aided Óenḟir Aífe, 1904, p. 118)

The strange boy thus immediately leaves his mark in the territory of Ulster. Weary and humiliated, Cú Chulainn finally kills the boy with his special weapon (the gae bolga) but recognises him as his son at the moment of his death. He carries Connla to the shore where the boy bids farewell to the men of Ulster, stating that if he had only been allowed to live among them for five years he would have expanded the Ulster territory as far as Rome. At the very end of the short text, Connla is buried by the men of Ulster: “Rolád tra a gáir guba 7 a fert 7 a lia ocus co cend trí tráth nicon reilghe láig día mbúaib la hUltu ina díaid” (Aided

 Van Hamel has suggested a late ninth or early tenth-century date (van Hamel 1933, 9). The earlier version is preserved in the Yellow Book of Lecan (late fourteenth and early fifteenth century) while the latter version is found in Trinity College Dublin MS 1316 (sixteenth century). The narrative is also found in a Dindshenchas of Lechtá Óenfhir Aífe (The Grave of Aoife’s only One) and in a legal text preserveed in Trinity College Dublin H. 3 17 (fifteenth or sixteenth century), where it is used to outline legal matters (see Thurneysen 1921, 406–407).  Meyer bases his edition on the earlier version found in the Yellow Book of Lecan.

62

2 Ancestral Topographies? Memory, Places, and Landscape(s)

Óenḟir Aífe, 1904, p. 120) (“then his cry of lament was raised, his grave made, and his stone set up, and to the end of three days no calf was let to their cows by the men of Ulster, to commemorate him”) (Aided Óenḟir Aífe, 1904, p. 121). The burial features the making of a grave and the raising of a stone, presumably a pillar stone to mark the place at which the boy is buried. The death is immediately placed in a discourse of remembering through the bovine ritual, and the link between the lament and the erection of the stone monument is a common feature in such burial scenes. Connla leaves a bodily trace on a natural feature on the strand (the imprints of his feet on the stones) and he is also afforded the honourable burial ritual including a standing stone. Even comparatively unimportant figures in a text can be afforded this burial ritual. In the longest of the Ulster Cycle text, Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), Cú Chulainn is also a prominent hero. In Táin Bó Cúailnge Cú Chulainn single-handedly defends his province against the men of Ireland, led by King Ailill and Queen Medb. Their aim is to drive away the Donn Cúailnge, the black bull of Cooley, a remarkable animal that Queen Medb wants to possess. Cattle raids (tána) are a distinct group of texts in the Tale Lists and were a common occurrence in medieval Ireland. Medb and Ailill are accompanied by an exiled Ulster hero, Fergus mac Roích, who possesses intimate knowledge of the Ulster territory and its inhabitants. All the men of Ulster except Cú Chulainn suffer from an illness (ces noínden). The hero therefore has to stall the advance of the raiding army through guerrilla tactics and single-combat fights until the Ulstermen recover from their illness and face the invaders in battle. Despite their best efforts, the men of Ireland succeed in driving away the coveted bull, but it dies in a fight with its Connacht counterpart, Finnbhennach. Táin Bó Cúailnge is the centrepiece of the Ulster Cycle and many other shorter texts relate to it as pre-tales or sequels, or simply refer to it to explain certain matters. There are three extant recensions of Táin Bó Cúailnge, of which the first two are of importance for the present study:57 Recension I is edited and translated  According to Thurneysen (1921, 99–219), the text is preserved in four different versions, three of which contain a more or less complete narrative while the fourth presents an independent development of one episode only. Recensions I and II (henceforth referred to as Táin Bó Cúailnge I and II respectively) are both likely to derive from earlier material. Cecile O’Rahilly (1976, ix) has seen the earliest recension of the tale as “a conflation of two ninth-century versions” (found in Lebor na hUidre) but dates the story itself to the first half of the eighth, Thurneysen (1921) even to the middle of the seventh century. The manuscripts they are preserved in, however, are dated to the twelfth century: Recension I in Lebor na hUidre (LU, c. 1100) and Recension II in Book of Leinster (LL, also twelfth century). Táin Bó Cúailnge I is extant in three other Mss, the Yellow Book of Lecan (late 14th century), Egerton 1782 (early sixteenth century) and O’Curry Ms 1 (late sixteenth century paper Ms). Táin Bó Cúailnge II is, in addition to the Book of Leinster version, also extant in

2.2 Imagining the Pre-Christian Past

63

by Cecile O’Rahilly from Lebor na hUidre and Recension II (also edited and translated by O’Rahilly) from the slightly later Book of Leinster (both twelfth century). Táin Bó Cúailnge I and II are distinguished also in that Recension II presents a less contradictory and repetitive but a more elaborated and expanded version. Táin Bó Cúailnge is unusual in its length and may deliberately imitate Classical sagas, to which it makes reference (Thurneysen 1921, 96). Given that the narrative features countless killings, it is perhaps unusual that these are relatively rarely marked by burials, although Cú Chulainn installs grizzly monuments to visualise his victories (see Künzler 2015). However, the death of a minor Connacht hero, Úalu, is marked by a standing stone and a place-name, even if heroic combat is not the cause of his death. Rather, Úalu tests the depth of a river but is swept away by its current: Ocus atraacht óenláech prósta mór di muntir Medba, hÚalu a chomainm, 7 gebis nerlía cloche fria ais 7 dotháet, aide dia fromad na Glassi 7 focheird in Glaiss for cúlu é, marb cen anmain, a lía for[a] druim. Rádis Medb ar co tucthá anís 7 ara claitte a fert 7 ara túargabtha a lía. Conid de atá Lía Úaland i crích Cúalnge. (Táin Bó Cúailnge II, 1984 [1969], ls. 1353–1358, p. 37) A great and valiant warrior of Medb’s household called Úalu, rose up and took on his back a huge rock, and he came to test the depth of the stream. And the river Glais swept him back, dead and lifeless, with his stone on his back. Medb ordered him to be brought up (out of the river) and his grave dug and his stone raised. Whence the name Lia Úaland in the district of Cúailnge. (Táin Bó Cúailnge II, 1984 [1969], ls. 1353–1358, p. 175)

The setting up of a stone is clearly part of a description of a burial rite, a rite which connects the dead figure in the narrative to the monument and to the place, which is subsequently called Lia Úaland (the stone of Úalu). Just like in Aided Óenḟir Aífe (The Death of Aoife’s Only One), the place is linked both to the memory of the individual figure who died and to the heroic narratives in which they feature. A mnemonic engagement with a grave is also found in texts of other cycles, for example in those referencing the Fenian period. The tales of the Finn Cycle are set much later than the Ulster Cycle tales, ostensibly in the third century AD, and hence still in the pre-Christian era. However, the texts only become abundant (and thus probably popular) in the twelfth century, at a time of cultural, religious and political change in Ireland. Fenian texts are often referred to as fiannaíocht

RIA Ms. Cvi 3, and this is also known as the Stowe version. Recension III is extant in two later Mss, British Museum Egerton 93 (fifteenth to sixteenth century) and Trinity College H 2.17 (fifteenth century) and presents a fragmentary acephalous and will not be considered in the present analysis.

64

2 Ancestral Topographies? Memory, Places, and Landscape(s)

(earlier spellings are fíanaigecht, fíannaigheacht) and may represent a “complex of smaller cycles having to do with various local heroes that grew out of, or were fitted into, a larger cycle centred on Finn mac Cumaill (Fionn mac Cumaill in later spelling), a mixture of warrior, leader, and poet-seer, and on the institution of the fían [. . .] the hunting-warring band which serves (not unlike King Arthur’s court) as a showcase for the rise (and sometimes fall) of promising young heroes” (Nagy 2005, 744). This cycle became popular in the later medieval and early modern period and formed part of the repertoire of Irish and Scottish story-tellers well into the twentieth century. Unlike the heroes of the Ulster Cycle, the Fenian heroes are not tied to a province but roam all of Ireland. They are often associated with forests and uncultivated spaces as their habitat and fían is also not unfrequently found in place names (Meyer 1910, viii). One text that references Finn mac Cumaill’s exploits is The Chase of Síd na mBan Finn, so named by Meyer in his edition (1910). It is set during a hunting exploit in the wilderness, when suddenly all the hunted animals (wild boars, wolves, hares, badgers and deer, roes and fawns) disappear. Bewildered, the fían gather around Finn mac Cumaill, who sits down at the grave of Failbhe Finnmaisech (a former chief of Finn’s household). Failbhe Finnmaisech was killed seven years ago by the giant boar of Formáel. In addition, the boar killed fifty warriors and fifty hounds on the same day. Finn then composes a lay in memory of Failbhe Finnmaiseach and the other victims, at the end of which it is said that at the time of the previous hunt: “gleó dar claided in fertán” (The Chase of Síd na mBan Finn and the Death of Finn, 1910, p. 54) (“a combat whence this grave was dug”) (The Chase of Síd na mBan Finn and the Death of Finn, 1910, p. 55). The great killing is commemorated in the text by the place (the grave on which Finn sits) as well as by the poem which Finn composes, and which links their current hunting to a similar exploit seven years previously. Finn then urges his men to chase that particular boar the next day. They find it but it again kills several men, until one of Finn’s followers kills it with his bare hands. Thereafter “roclaidedh lechta 7 ferta na fénnidh 7 na feróglach ro marbad lesin muic annsin” (The Chase of Síd na mBan Finn and the Death of Finn, 1910, p. 66) (“the graves and tombs of the fian-chiefs and common warriors who had been killed by the pig were dug there”) (The Chase of Síd na mBan Finn and the Death of Finn, 1910, p. 67). This mirrors the scene earlier in the text, as the present of the frame-tale now may also become the scene of future remembrance. No mention is made here of stones being erected but the place is nevertheless marked out as a burial site at which oral remembrance is practiced within the narratives. The text thus simultaneously creates new places for remembering and celebrates this remembering through Finn mac Cumaill. It also perhaps provides

2.2 Imagining the Pre-Christian Past

65

a precedent for engaging with monuments in the lived-in landscape similarly to Finn’s commemoration. Such an engagement is also found in other early Irish texts. In historical and legal sources, “[b]urial mounds hold special significance for territorial inheritance in general, and sacred kingship in particular” (Huckins MacGugan 2012, 191). For standing stones inscribed with the ogham script McManus suggests that they primarily marked land and boundaries, but since burials often took places at boundaries the stones may simultaneously have commemorated group/kin identity and marked ownership of land (McManus 1991, 165). These aspects are by and large absent in the sagas but may be of relevance in relation to Dindshenchas. But it is possible that such representations allude to a continued significance of these aspects in wider Irish culture. What aids such a connection is the prevalence of stone monuments in the lived-in Irish landscape. On the c. 70,000 km2 on the island of Ireland, O’Sullivan, McCormick, Kerr, Harney and Kinsella estimate about 60,000 settlement enclosures, c. 47,000 individual sites and approximately 120,000 monuments from the early medieval period alone (O’Sullivan et al. 2014, 1, 48). Cooney (2000, 92) contends that over 1,500 megalithic tombs survive in Ireland, many of which are clearly visible today and would likely have been so also in the medieval period. Many of the tales of the Ulster Cycle, for example, (set in in the Iron Age, c. 300BC – AD 500 and around the time of Christ more specifically) “refer to places which were significant in earlier prehistoric periods, i.e. the Neolithic (approximately 4000–2000 BC), and Bronze Age (c. 2000–300BC)” and hence the narratives “seem to have been early monumental settings long after these places were marked with stone and earthen structures” (McKenna 2009, 262). The texts present an engagement with existing (and newly erected) monuments in mnemonic mode: the narratives explain the creation of these places in the heroic past and hence the marking of the landscape with meaning. Regardless of whether this reflects genuine information or is a later fabrication, it creates a strong mnemonic tradition of the heroic era embedded in the landscape. One place one may start looking for burial markers are the death tales (oitte) of the medieval tale-lists (see pp. 19–20). It is remarkable, however, that only three of the eight death tales of the Ulster heroes edited by Meyer in 1906 feature references to burial rituals, and only one of them refers to a funerary monument.58 These heroes are outstanding enough for their death to be preserved in  The tale list found in the Book of Leinster mentions eight oitte (tragical or violent deaths): the death of Cú Chulainn, Conall Cernach, Celtchar, Blái the Hospitaller, Lóegaire, Fergus mac Róich, King Conchobor and Fiamain (Meyer 1906, v). The death-tale of Fiamain appears now lost (Meyer 1906, vi).

66

2 Ancestral Topographies? Memory, Places, and Landscape(s)

the repertoire of the filid, yet with a few exceptions in the narratives they have no lasting influence on the landscape and their burials go unrecounted. Furthermore, the death tales are preserved only in a small number of manuscripts, some only in a single attestation (Meyer 1906, v). It is possible that they circulated more widely in oral culture or that no toponomastic legends are associated with the heroes commemorated in the death tales, or it may be that other death tales, now lost, would have featured further references to burial markers. Three references in the death tales are quite interesting to consider in relation to medieval Irish memory culture. They occur in Aided Fhergusa maic Róich (The Death of Fergus mac Róich), Aided Chonchobuir (The Death of King Conchobor) and Aided Cheltchair mac Uthechair (The Death of Celtchar mac Uthechar). The first of these, Aided Fhergusa maic Róich mentions a grave, but not a gravemarker. Fergus is familiar from Táin Bó Cúailnge, where he leads the Connacht army into Ulster and is a trusted advisor to (and lover of) the married Queen Medb. Medb’s jealous husband Ailill is responsible for Fergus’ death, as he makes his blind brother throw a spear at the lovers when they swim in a lake. Mortally wounded, Fergus manages to swim ashore, but dies on top of a hill. At the very end of the short text, it is mentioned that “atá a lige ann fós” (The Death Tales of the Ulster Heroes, 1906, p. 34) (“his grave is there still”) (The Death Tales of the Ulster Heroes, 1906, p. 35).59 The comment stresses the durability of grave monuments and links the text to its time of reception. Such linking devices will be discussed throughout this chapter and are by no means unusual in medieval Irish literature. The second Ulster death tale in which a grave is mentioned is Aided Chonchobair, a tale preserved in four recensions (referred to as A, B, C and D by Kobel 2015; see also Thurneysen 1921, 535–539). Aided Chonchobair is the only death tale that has “reached us in fairly numerous copies” (Meyer 1906, vi).60 In Aided Chonchobair, Conchobor’s death connects him to Jesus Christ, but the mention of a burial monument poses some problems. Conchobor is the king of Ulster in Táin Bó Cúailnge and several other Ulster Cycle texts. His Death Tale is set in the typical Ulster Cycle past, that is, around the lifetime of Christ, and Christ plays an important role in the text, albeit in absentia. In version A of the death tale, when the Ulster king Conchobor is wounded by Cét mac Magach (who slings the dried brain of Mesgegra into his head) the erec-

 Fergus’ death-tale is preserved in a single manuscript, Edinburgh, National Liberary of Scotland, Advocates MS 72.1.40 but is retold by Keating in his History of Ireland. To date, it has not received much scholarly attention.  Kobel (2015) discusses eight manuscripts preserving the tale, three of which were unknown to Kuno Meyer.

2.2 Imagining the Pre-Christian Past

67

tion of a (burial) monument is described: “For brú Átha Daire Dá Báeth is and dorochair Conchobar. Atá a lige and baile i torchair 7 corthe fria chend 7 corthe fria chossa” (The Death Tales of the Ulster Heroes, 1906, p. 6) (“On the brink of the ford of Daire Dá Báeth it was that Conchobor fell. His grave is there where he fell, and a pillar-stone at his head, and another at his feet”) (The Death Tales of the Ulster Heroes, 1906, p. 7). The stones (corthe) effectively visualise the height of the king, adding a corporeal dimension to the monument and perhaps also highlighting the exceptional size which is often attributed to pre-Christian figures in early Irish literature. However, Conchobor does not die here since he is subsequently brought back to his residence at Emain and remains in a sedentary state for seven years. The term lige, translated by Meyer as grave, may therefore better be rendered in its more literal sense as “bed, couch” or a place where he fell down after being wounded. Since Conchobor is subsequently immobilised and does not perform his royal duties (although he is allowed to retain the kingship) it is possible to read this passage as a figurative death of his identity as a ruler. It is also possible, however, that his death at Daire Dá Báeth is simply another version of the king’s demise that was incompletely integrated into the death tale. Aided Chonchobair is remarkable for another reason: it synchronises the lifetime of the Ulster king with the death of Christ. Version A outlines the scene in some detail after Conchobor is wounded and immobilised: Robói dano isin chuntabairt sin céin robo beó .i. secht mbliadna 7 nírbo engnamaid, acht a airisium inna suidi nammá .i. naco cúala Críst do chrochad do Iudaidib. Tánic and side crith mór forsna dúli 7 rochrithnaig nem 7 talam la mét in gníma darónad and .i. Ísu Críst mac Dé bí do chrochad cen chinaid. “Cráet so?”, ar Conchobur fria druid. “Cia olc mór in gním sin,” ar Conchobur. “In fer sin dano”, ar in drúi “i n-óenaidchi rogein 7 rogenis-[s]iu .i. i n-ocht calde Enair cen cop inund bliadain.” Is andsin rochreiti Conchobar. Ocus issé sin indara fer rochreti do Día i n-Hérinn ría tiachtain creitmi é .i. Morand in fer aile. (The Death Tales of the Ulster Heroes, 1906, p. 8) In that doubtful state, then, he was as long as he lived, even seven years; and he was not capable of action, but remained in his seat only, until he heard that Christ had been crucified by the Jews. At that time a great trembling came over the elements, and the heavens and the earth shook with the enormity of the deed that was then done, even Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, to be crucified without guilt. “What is this?” said Conchobar to his druid. “What great evil is being done on this day?” “That is true, indeed,”, said the druid [. . .] Awful is that deed,” said Conchobar. “That man, now”, said the druid, “was born in the same night in which thou wast born, even on the eight before the calends of January, though the year was not the same.” It was then that Conchobar believed. And he was one of the two men that had believed in God in Ireland before the coming of the Faith, Morann being the other man. (The Death Tales of the Ulster Heroes, 1906, pp. 9–10)

The remembrance of the great Ulster king is thus coupled with the memory of the Death of Christ, a parallel which is explicitly developed in the text. However, it is

68

2 Ancestral Topographies? Memory, Places, and Landscape(s)

not clearly stated that Conchobor dies on that day, although this may be inferred in his death tale. The parallel is linked specifically to Conchobor’s death only in version C, which first outlines a different exchange between king and druid. In version C a druid relates the news that Christ had died and links his death to the redeeming of mankind’s sins. Version C tells us that at this time, stewards were sent around the world with such news: “Arb a Cuma bádar reachtuireadh rígh an domuin isinn aimsir sin for meadhón an beatha 7 a n-innsibh fuinidh gréine 7 turgabála, co m[b]a comhderbh isin bith uili nach sgél airderc foscumadh ann” (The Death Tales of the Ulster Heroes, 1906, p. 14) (“For at that time stewards of the king of the world were equally over the centre of the world and in the islands of the setting and rising sun, so that every famous story that happened was equally known in the whole world”) (The Death Tales of the Ulster Heroes, 1906, p. 15). The metatextual comment geographically links the islands at the end of the known world (to which Ireland belongs) to the centre of Christianity and asserts that Ireland received all important information during the Christian era. The episode ends with the assertion that Conchobor believed in Christ, but version C adds an alternative ending after this, introduced by the lapidary comment “Nó is amlaid so atcaemnacair hé” (The Death Tales of the Ulster Heroes, 1906, p. 16) (“Or ‘tis thus it happened”) (The Death Tales of the Ulster Heroes, 1906, p. 17). This intimate relationship between Ireland and Christian lands is emphasised when Christ’s and Conchobor’s death are recounted together. On hearing about Christ’s crucifixion, the previously immobilised king jumps up from his seat, which dislodges the brain of Mesgrega: Ocus as iarsin asbert Concubur: “Rofeasdais fir in beatha mo cumang ac cathugud fri hIudaidhibh tre crochad Críst dia mbeinn a comfogus dó. Is iarsin attraacht 7 rosgobh forsin deargail cur’sceinn incinn Mesgeagra as a cinn 7 conearbailt Concubur fochétóir. Conadh [d]esin adber[a]t na Gaeidhil conadh hé Concubur cét-geinntlide docóidh docum neimhi a nÉirinn, fobíth robo baithis dó in fuil dobidg as[a] cinn. (The Death Tales of the Ulster Heroes, 1906, p. 16) And thereupon Conchobar said: The men of the world would know what I can do in fighting against the Jews for the sake of the crucifixion of Christ, if I were near Him.” Then he rose and made the onslaught, until Mesgrega’s brains jumped out of his head, so that Conchobar died forthwith. Hence the Gaels say that Conchobar was the first pagan who went to Heaven in Ireland, for the blood that sprang out of his head was a baptism to him. (The Death Tales of the Ulster Heroes, 1906, p. 17)

In version C, Conchobor’s death does not coincide with the death of Christ, but is a response to the decisive event in Christian world history. Imhoff points out that “[o]ne of the most influential Fathers in medieval western Christianity, Augustine of Hippo (354–430), also agreed in principle that be-

2.2 Imagining the Pre-Christian Past

69

fore the coming of Christ, faith was possible because it was revealed to some” (Imhoff 2009, 177). The death tale thus serves the purpose of aligning events in Ireland with biblical history, linking the death of the king to the major Christological event of Christ’s death, and the figure of Conchobor to Christian worldhistory. Aided Chonchobair shows how the Irish past could be conceptualised through the wider frame of world history and be responsive both to local and global needs, as both the king of Ulster and the King of the World are commemorated alongside each other. It is striking, however, that apart from the obscure reference to Conchobor’s bed or grave (lige) in the first part of the tale, no burial monuments are mentioned in the death tale. Cairn refers to a heap or a pile and is often used for a pile of stones that marks a grave. Cairns are less frequently erected during burial ceremonies in literary texts than standing stones, although the Dindshenchas preserves various toponyms that include carn (see, for example, Carn Fráech, below). When cairns are mentioned in texts as diverse as Aided Cheltchair mac Uthechair (The Death of Celtchar mac Uthechar), Buile Shuibhne (Suibhne’s Frenzy), and Togail Bruidne Da Derga (The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel), the narratives offer divergent explanations of their origins and the associated practices. Aided Cheltchar mac Uthechair is the third Ulster Death tale to mention a burial. It is “found in a very fragmentary and illegible condition in the Book of Leinster” (Meyer 1906, vi) and in the Edinburgh manuscript, but the tale has not yet received much interest. Celtchar has to free Ulster from three pests in order to atone for his killing of Blái the Hospitaller, another Ulster hero afforded a death tale. In Celtchar’s death tale, the burial rite of a head is narrated as a communal act carried out by local inhabitants: after killing Conganchness (Horn-skinned) mac Dedad (the first ‘pest’), Celtchar “co tall a cend de, co tardad carn for a cend .i. cloch cacha fir tánaic ann” (The Death Tales of the Ulster Heroes, 1906, p. 26) (“cut off his head, over which a cairn was raised, viz. a stone was placed by every man that came there”) (The Death Tales of the Ulster Heroes, 1906, p. 27). It is only the head which is buried underneath the stones, perhaps an ominous detail that catches the audience’s attention. The cairn becomes important later in the narrative when a litter of puppies is found inside it by cow-herds: “Ocus in lá a cinn bliadna iarsin bátar búachailli a táib cairn Congoncnis, co cúaladar iachtad na cuilén isin cairn 7 rotochladar in carn 7 fúaradar trí cuiléna ann” (The Death Tales of the Ulster Heroes, 1906, p. 26) (“And that day, at the end of a year afterwards, cow-herds were by the side of the cairn of Horny-skin, and heard the squealing of whelps in the cairn. And they dug up the cairn and found there whelps in it”) (The Death Tales of the Ulster Heroes, 1906, p. 27). Intradiegetically, this implies that the cairn presents a ‘known-place’ within the narrative that was named after the one buried beneath. The place is

70

2 Ancestral Topographies? Memory, Places, and Landscape(s)

created as an ominous locale in which a future pest is born. Celtchar is eventually killed by one of the dogs’ poisonous blood. For his burial, a different burial rite associated with a lia (standing stone) is narrated: “7 rolaa(d) a gáir guil 7 rotógbad a lia 7 a lecht ann” (The Death Tales of the Ulster Heroes, 1906, p. 26) (“And his lament was set up and his stone and tomb were raised there”) (The Death Tales of the Ulster Heroes, 1906, p. 27). Aided Cheltchar therefore references differing ways of burying dead heroes and/or their heads, customs likely occasioned by toponymical needs. In Togail Bruidne Da Derga (The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel), a placename underlies another mention of a cairn which is raised in a collaborative effort. Thurneysen (1921, 622) dates this text to the earliest stratum of Irish literature that is already alluded to in the eight century, and it is one of the longest early texts that has come down to us.61 The tale may have been known by its main elements already in the eighth or ninth century; it is first fully preserved in manuscripts from the thirteenth century, namely the Yellow Book of Lecan and Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, D. iv. 2) but is attested also in many later manuscripts (Busse and Koch 2006, 1678). At the centre of Togail Bruidne Da Derga is the rise and downfall of King Conaire Mór, a prehistoric king of Tara (Teamhair) whose downfall depends on him pronouncing a false judgement on his foster-brothers, whom the king should have killed for marauding but instead sends into exile. They return as marauders until Conaire finally faces them in open combat when the king resides at Da Derga’s hostel. At the very end of the text, after the epic battle between the king and his foster-brothers, the aftermath is described: Imthús immorro na [n]dibergach, cach óen terna díb o Brudin dollotar cosin carnd dondrónsat isind aidchi remideogaid, 7 bertatar cloich cach fir béogáiti leo ass. Conid ed ro márbad dib oc Brudin, fer cach cloche fil hi Cernd Leca. (Togail Bruidne Da Derga, 1901, § 167, p. 329) Now as to the marauders, every one of them that escaped from the Hostel went to the cairn which they had built on the night before last, and they brought thereout a stone for each man not mortally wounded. So this is what they lost by death at the Hostel, a man for every stone that is now in Carn Lecca. (Togail Bruidne Da Derga, 1901, § 167, p. 329)

 The text does not fit easily in the modern classification of Cycles as it exhibits traits of the Ulster Cycle, the Kings’ Cycle and the Mythological Cycle: “Nominally, it is part of the Ulster Cycle, though the setting is in Leinster and the main character, Conaire Mór, the prehistoric king of Tara (Teamhair), is an important figure in the legendary framework of the Irish genealogies” (Busse and Koch 2006, 1677). The medieval tale-lists, on the other hand, mention togla (destructions, Sg. togail) as a category of tales.

2.2 Imagining the Pre-Christian Past

71

Why the marauders had erected the cairn the night before is not explained, but the motif of subtracting a stone for each living man from the cairn is an inversion of the cairn built in Aided Cheltchair. In Togail Bruidne Da Derga the cairn symbolises the death-toll of a battle – an at once symbolic and material representation of the consequences of violence. The episode affords a physical and sensual way of engaging with their aftermath as the human destruction becomes visible and tangible in the form of a monumental structure. In this case, the place marked by the monument is not associated with individuals but with an event, and perhaps precisely with the human death-toll in a heroic society. The very end of the text brings the events down to a place, Carn Lecca, and therefore to a concrete entity in medieval Irish experience. A commemoration of an individual through a cairn is found in the Metrical Dindshenchas of Cairn Furbaide (The Cairn of Furbaide). The poem starts with the invocation of place and grave, and a short introduction to Furbaide’s genealogy and death: “Atá sund Carn uí Chathbath / fors’rimred arm imathlam, / lechtán láechda láich col-lí,/ fertán fráechda Furbaidi” (Carn Furbaide, 1924, p. 30) (“Here stands the Carn of Cathbad’s grandson / against whom a nimble weapon was wielded; / Furbaide’s heath-clad grave, / martial monument of a glorious soldier”) (Carn Furbaide, 1924, p. 31). Furbaide is the son of King Conchobor of Ulster and his wife Ethne (sister of the Connacht Queen Medb) and grandson of Cathbad the druid, all well-known figures of the Ulster Cycle. The juxtaposition of glory and tragedy is continued throughout the poem. Furbaide (who has two unexplained horns on his head) grows into a wise and valiant youngster, and at age 17 he kills Lugaid’s mother in revenge of the killing of his own mother by Lugaid. Lugaid in turn kills Furbaide, whose burial ritual is briefly mentioned: “Cloch cach fhir roraind in fadb, / is de dorónad in carn: / bás maic ind ríg tre chin mná, / is é sin in gním diatá” (Carn Furbaide, 1924, p. 30) (“A stone for every man that the axe clove – so was the carn built: the king’s son died in revenge for a woman: that is the origin of the Carn”) (Cairn Furbaide, 1924, p. 31). Since no battle is described, it is not clear who the axe-cloven men are, but the size of their cairn again reflects a human component: in this case the number of individuals that meet their death through Furbaide. Talking about medieval Scandinavian burial monuments and cultural memory, Stenholm concludes that the “burial mound is the ultimate monument of memory” (Stenholm 2018, 607). Linking such thinking to literary sources, Siewers (2009b, 23–25) observes that in the Íslendingasögur (Sagas of the Icelanders), burial mounds are ever-present; they loom large, serving as literal and figurative reminders of ancestry on the landscape. The same can be said for medieval Irish burial monuments, which saturate the landscape with the presence of those who lived in the past. Bennett observes that memorials in medieval Scandinavian liter-

72

2 Ancestral Topographies? Memory, Places, and Landscape(s)

ature “are a means of communication that speak to the living about the continued significance of the dead” (Bennett 2018, 616). The awareness that the monuments prompt people to speak and remember, rather than monuments metaphorically speaking themselves, is indebted to Cultural Memory Studies, and it is this idea that becomes visible in the Irish tradition. In medieval Irish texts, burial monuments not only mark places, they can at times be openly associated with commemorative practices and rituals in the texts. Fry considers such literary references to burials instructive, “for they indicate how a medieval audience would have wanted to believe the great legendary Irish kings, queens and warriors of a ‘golden age’ had been buried, and what would have been considered appropriate markers for their graves” (Fry 1999, 138). In early Irish sources, a wealth of lesser-known figures in the annals and genealogical tracts are commemorated in a past that spanned from the Noachian Flood to the present of the literati. In this regard, the individual places associated with ancestral figures portray Ireland as deeply connected with the past, a past which, in some cases, could also span world history. That this might have been particularly productive when trying to link the Christian present with the pagan past will be argued in the next subchapter, but the material continuity was important even for texts which do not explicitly engage with this matter. The engagement with monuments in literature may frequently be inspired by a creative (re-)analysis of still observable monuments and place-name components. A relatively large number of place-names in the texts are understood to include a personal name, at times coupled with terms for pillar-stone (lia), cairn (carn), or other structures, which reflects genuine naming practices. While it is generally doubtful that the texts present historically accurate information of an eponymous ancestor (said to be) buried beneath, this provided incentives for narratives outlining what led to the death of these figures, and how these events fit into the larger conceptualisation of the past.62 Muhr (1994, 1996, 2009, 2013) has presented detailed analyses of the Ulster Cycle place names that are highly sensitive to the topographical and cultural embeddedness of place names, but she repeatedly draws attention to the difficulties localising these places on a modern map. In these examples, toponymy, narratives and materiality are linked in a mnemonic discourse that is reminiscent of a deep map and the past is conceptualised through its durable aspects. Toner asserts that man-made structures “form an important element of the historical and mythical landscape” and just like natural fea-

 Whether this is etymologically true or whether other place-name elements that were no longer understood were re-interpreted as personal names is hard to say. The latter has, however, been suggested for medieval Icelandic place-names.

2.2 Imagining the Pre-Christian Past

73

tures “are afforded construction myths that explain either their existence or some peculiarity about them, and most often these are related to the deeds of gods and ancients” (Toner 2018, 66). The narrative tradition also offers a convincing explanation for their location in the landscape: the question of why a particular monument was erected precisely in this place could readily be answered if the place was thought to mark a place of death, or of a battle or other encounter, particularly if multiple stones are involved. It is therefore important that the pre-Christian figures are said to have been buried where they died as only in this way could the many (and often singular) monuments in the Irish landscape be explained. It is worth stressing that a variety of monuments – pillar stones, cairns and tombs – are described in literature, yet only some of these are archaeologically associated with (medieval or pre-medieval) burials. But regardless of the presence of burial remains at these sites, in the tales the monuments appear to have provided a material incentive for a cognitive link to those who had erected them. And there is precedent in archaeology to link this to a fluid accumulation, rather than linear transmission, of knowledge about these monuments as “medieval communities defined themselves through their remembered and imagined histories and mythologies”, and “stone monuments were a varied but important mechanism for constituting, communicating and reproducing these social memories” (Williams, Kirton and Gondek 2015, 8). The Irish sources suggest that, as a whole (if not in their individual stories), such monuments could fulfil a productive role in cultural memory by creating a landscape that was saturated with meaning and the presence of previous generations. That pillar stones and cairns might also have linked the Irish landscape to the biblical landscape is suggested by Blustein (2007) in her analysis of Cath Maige Tuired Cunga (The First Battle of Moytura at Cong). The text centres on the battle between the pre-historical supernatural races Túatha Dé Danann and the Fir Bolg. It belongs to the group of catha (battles) in the medieval tale-lists and forms a central text of the Mythological Cycle in the modern classification. It must not be confused with Cath Maige Tuired (The Second Battle of Moytura) which “survives in two versions: the better-known Late Old Irish/Early Middle Irish saga and the sixteenth-century Cath Muighe Tuireadh” (Koch 2006a, 350). In the First Batte of Moytura, the battlefield, “Mag Tuired, is by this point filled with the pillar-stones” because, from the beginning of the tale, both sides have “been putting up the stones as memorials to warriors who have died in the battle” (Blustein 2007, 23). Blustein (2007, 25) notes a preoccupation of the text with preserving the names associated with these places, as “the text carefully notes the name of each cairn and pillar, and the name of the warrior it commemorates”. Furthermore, the Túatha Dé Danann fix pillar-stones into the earth, so that none of them should

74

2 Ancestral Topographies? Memory, Places, and Landscape(s)

flee before the stones flee – a symbolic gesture in which the immovability of pillar-stones should inspire the same quality in combat: “rosaithset a cairthedha ar daig nach teched nech uaithib noco techtis na cloche” (The First Battle of Moytura, 1916, p. 44) (“fixed their pillars in the ground to prevent any one fleeing till the stones should flee”) (The First Battle of Moytura, 1916, p. 45). The “stones do not merely anchor the warriors on the field of battle and provide perches for poets – they also inscribe the memory of the warriors and the story of the battle itself into the landscape, linking history, poetry, land, battle, and narrative” (Blustein 2007, 23). That “the biblical landscape is dotted with stone pillars and altars commemorating significant events” may have provided a welcome incentive for the Irish to understand their own landscape through a Christian parallel (Blustein 2007, 35). In such a reading, the stones in Cath Maige Tuired “have both native and biblical significance” (Blustein 2007, 35) and would link the Irish landscape to the wider world just like Aided Chonchobair did. Blustein proposed parallels to Jacob’s rock or the fight between David and Goliath (Blustein 2007, 28). To the Irish literati, it would hardly have gone unnoticed that their own landscape mirrored the one described in the Bible. That this is reflected in texts of the mythological deep past might have proven a particularly powerful analogy, with even the deep past mirroring Christian times. More detailed research would be needed to establish whether exact parallels are indeed as evident as Blustein suggests, but it is at least possible that the mnemonic discourse of landscapes and places in early Irish literature were influenced by biblical landscapes. In a similar vein, it could be asked whether Isidorian thinking influenced the prevalence of Irish place-lore, which in essence provides etymological explanations for toponyms. For one, Isidore classified all peoples “in terms of the places they inhabited” (Mulligan 2019, 3). This might have prompted a deeper engagement with their environment for the medieval Irish learned class, which included many ardent admirers of Isidore’s Etymologiae. Whether they could have subjected their place-names to etymological exercises to create an environment that was imbued with meaning has not yet been proposed but it is a topic deserving of further attention.

2.2.2 Monuments Not Related to Death Not all monuments in early Irish literature are linked to deaths, as, for instance, Mesca Ulad (The Intoxication of the Ulstermen, or Ulaid) proves. Mesca Ulad was originally composed around 1100 (Mulligan 2019, 95) but only survives in frag-

2.2 Imagining the Pre-Christian Past

75

mentary form.63 It is a prime tale of the Ulster Cycle in which Cú Chulainn looms large, albeit not as a heroic figure but as one informed about Irish geography. The drunkenness is brought on because the Ulstermen have to attend two feasts in one night. Having already been inebriated, they go astray in foreign territory on their way to the second feast. To make matters worse, they are hit by a snowstorm: I comfhat ro batar immi sain snigis tromshnechta dermár for Ultaib, co rránic co formnu fer & co fertsib carpat. Do-rigenta furopra ic aradaib Ulad, colomna cloch do thócbáil eturru ar scáthaib a n-ech, eturru & in snechta, cundat marthanaig béos ‘Echlasa Ech Ulad’ ó shin ille. Cunad d’indchomarthaib in sceóil sin. (Mesca Ulad, 1889, p. 16) Whilst they were so engaged, tremendous heavy snow poured upon the Ulidians, until it reached to the shoulders of men, and to the shafts of chariots. Defences were made by the charioteers of Ulad, who between them raised stone columns to shelter their horses, between them and the snow; so that the echlasa of the horses of Ulad remain still, from that time to this. And these are the tokens of the story. (Mesca Ulad, 1889, p. 17)

Echlas is the term used for a shelter for horses or cattle or a stall, and also occurs as a place-name in Acallam na Senórach (The Colloquy of the Ancients) (a hEchlais Banguba, Acallam na Senórach, l. 363). That the episode might explain a placename now lost (and not mentioned in the tale) is possible, just like this possibility must be kept in mind for all place-names no longer geographically identifiable. Aside from such assumptions, there are two other noteworthy aspects in this short episode, one textual, the other paratextual. The first point worth noting refers to the end of the quoted passage, namely the assertion that the echlasa still remain as tokens (inchomartha, a sign or indication) in the present of the narrator/writer, and that they are proof of the events just narrated. In Mesca Ulad, the stones are openly linked to memory discourses that utilise material structures as proof of their accuracy. The assertion that the structures “could still be seen at the time of writing suggests that they actually existed, and so the story neatly accounts for the surviving monument” (Toner 2018, 68). These particular stones certainly do not mark a culturally binding place of national importance, yet the comment makes it clear that they are read as material markers of truth and therefore serve an important function in medieval Irish memory culture. Such reflective paratextual remarks linking the past of which the story relates to the present of the narrator are important to note, regardless of whether the events are fictional or factual. And even if few texts in-

 The first part of the text, in which the episode discussed here features, is preserved in the twelfth-century Book of Leinster.

76

2 Ancestral Topographies? Memory, Places, and Landscape(s)

clude such direct comments, it may be suggested that such an understanding underlies much of early Irish literature. The second point is the pragmatic nature of the structures, and a lack of desire to commemorate the comparatively unremarkable event through them. Mulligan briefly discusses the episode, concluding that the men of Ulster can “permanently alter alien landscapes to preserve stories of their feats” (Mulligan 2019, x). Mulligan suggests that perhaps the episode commemorates the presence of the Ulstermen in foreign territory. The structure is occasioned by a pragmatic need, even if it may have proved the strength and prowess of the Ulstermen for observers of the echlasa. It is likely that the episode simply reanalyses an existing place-name in line with heroic narrative. The short episode testifies to a general desire to locate even quite unremarkable events associated with a heroic past in places and it may be read alongside the spectacular previous alteration of the landscape which the horses of the Ulstermen caused before they are stalled by snow.

2.2.3 Animals Leaving Traces Humans are not the only ones which leave a lasting effect on the landscape and immortalise their presence in material, toponomastic and narrative form. In Mesca Ulad, the horses and chariots of the Ulstermen alter the foreign territory much more dramatically than the stone structure erected by the charioteers. When the chariot-horses break out in a frenzy: Cach tailach dar a tictis na múrtis co fáctais ina foenglentaib [. . .] cach fidbad dar a tictís nothesctais rotha iarnaide na carpat frema na ralach romór, comba crích machairi da n-éis. Cach sruth 7 cach áth 7 cach inber dar a tictís ba lecca lomma lántirma dar a n-éis ra hed cian 7 ra drechta fata, ra mét nabertís a n-echrada ra n-irglúnib na h-essa 7 na h-átha 7 na h-inbera ass a corpaib fodein. (Mesca Ulad, 1889, p. 14) every hill over which they went they levelled, so that they left it in low glens; every wood through which they passed, the iron wheels of the chariots cut the roots of the immense trees, so that it was a champagne country after them; the streams, and fords, and pools which they crossed were fully-dry bare flags after them for a long time, and for immense periods, from the quantity which the cavalcades carried away with their own bodies out of the contents of cascade, ford and pool. (Mesca Ulad, 1889, p. 15)

The landscape alteration is caused by the extreme prowess of the horses, as the chariots plough through, rather than traverse, the landscape. Mulligan alerts to the episode’s intrinsic contradiction in terms of landscape change:

2.2 Imagining the Pre-Christian Past

77

The Ulaid’s transformative trek across Ireland on one level participates in a network of stories that tell of converting wild, hilly and forested territories into arable land [yet] that the landscape becomes bone dry suggests something more sinister, and makes it impossible to read the Ulaid’s apocalyptic, flattening passage as an agriculturally fructifying conversion of dense forests into cultivated earth. (Mulligan 2019, 96)

It is unclear whether a medieval audience would have foregrounded the positive (agricultural) or the negative (barren) aspect of the new landscape. However, at least the loss of life-giving water and the destruction of natural habitat should be acknowledged as drastic changes. Tellingly, this grotesque alteration of the landscape by both horses and chariots is not associated with particular place-names or places. Rather, it represents a general reference to familiar landscape features. This distinguishes it from the specific reference to the echlasa and also from other instances where animals physically alter the landscape. A similarly memorable episode is described at the end of Táin Bó Cúailnge when the two bulls Donn Cúailnge (the brown bull driven away from Ulster) and Finnbhennach (King Ailill’s white bull) meet each other. The episode takes place when the Men of Ireland have retreated back to Connacht after the successful cattle raid. The fight of the bulls becomes the second most memorable body of Dindshenchas in Táin Bó Cúailnge and is linked to Co. Roscommon through place-names (Muhr 2009, 121). The first recension traces eight place-names to this fight, while the second lists six toponyms. However, most of the place-names in the recensions differ from each other, perhaps a reflection of a storyteller’s desire to make the material more relevant to audiences in particular areas.64 The place where the two bulls meet for the first time is named after them when Donn Cúailnge “co comarnic fri Findbeannach hi Tarbga hi Muig Aí .i. tarbguba nó tarbgleó. Roí Dedond a chétainm in c[h]nuic sin. Nach áen trá adroindi isin chath ní feith ní acht déicsin in dá tarb oc comruc” (Táin Bó Cúailnge, [1976] 2003, ls. 4125–4128, p. 124) (“met the bull Finnbhennach in combat in the place now called Tarbga in Mag nAíi – Tarbga means Bull-sorrow or Bull-battle. — Roí Dedond was the former name of that hill”) (Táin Bó Cúailnge, [1976] 2003, p. 237). The reference to the former toponym is a stark reminder that place-names can be overwritten and that places can acquire new meaning, even in early Irish literature. The short metatextual comment stresses that the texts are self-aware that the newly created landscape is not fash-

 Ó hUiginn notes that only Áth Luain is found in both recensions, but that “Taul Tairb and Áth Truim of Recension II may possibly be equated with Étan Tairb and Tromma of Recension I” (Ó hUiginn 1992, 41).

78

2 Ancestral Topographies? Memory, Places, and Landscape(s)

ioned from undifferentiated space, but in relation to (and sometimes as an overwriting of) an already established topography and toponymy. The theme continues when Slíab nAdarca (The Mountain of the Horn) is named after Finnbhennach’s horn: Focairt [a] chos in Duind Chúailngi ar adairc a chéle. Láa co n-aidchi ná tuc a c[h]ois fris conidgred Fergus 7 co n-imbert slait iarna sethnaig. [. . .] La sodain dosrenga a chois fris co mebaid a fergaire 7 co sescain a adarc dia chéle co mbaí asain tsléib ina farad. Sléb nAdarca són íarom dono. (Táin Bó Cúailnge, [1976] 2003, ls. 4133–4140, p. 124) The Donn Cúailnge’s foot was impaled on the horn of the other bull. For a day and a night he did not draw his foot away, until Fergus urged him on and struck his hide with a rod. [. . .] Thereupon Donn Cúailnge drew back his foot. His leg broke and his opponent’s horn sprang out on to the mountain beside him. So Slíab nAdarca was afterwards the name of that place. (Táin Bó Cúailnge, 2003 [1976], p. 237)

Whether “this represents a natural feature in the shape of a bull’s horn or a real or imagined horn once found there is impossible to determine, but in either case it implies a change in the physical form of the mountain, not just a change to the name” (Toner 2018, 71). The original reason for the place-name will elude us as the place remains unidentified. It is clear, however, that the medieval tradition provides evidence how it was re-interpreted in later times in line with the heroic tradition, which in turn remained present through the physical landscape. The Donn Cúailnge subsequently defeats Finnbhennach in a lake and emerges with parts of the loin, shoulder blade and liver of his opponent impaled on his own horns. He wanders back to his own territory, Ulster: Ibid dig i Findleithiu ic tuidecht. Is and fácaib leithi a chéli. Findleithiu didiu íarom ainm in tíri. Ibis dig n-aile i n-Áth Lúain. Fácaib lúan a chéli and. Is de itá Áth Lúain. Fácaib lúan a chéli and. Is de itá Áth Lúain. Atnaig a gém n-ass for Iraird Chuillind. Roclos fón cóiced nuile. Ibis dig i Tromuib. Is and docher tromchride a chélli dia díb n-adarcaib. Is de itá Troma. Dolluid do Étan chéli dia díb n-adarcaib. Is de itá Troma. Dolluid do Étan Tairb. Dobert a étan frisin tealaig oc Áth Da Ferta. Is de itá Étan Tairb i Muig Muirrthemni. Luid íarom combo marb itir Ulto 7 hUa Echach ic Druim Thairb. Druim Tairb dano ainm in puirt sin. (Táin Bó Cúailnge, [1976] 2003, ls. 4145–4155, p. 125) As he came, he drank a draught in Finnleithe and left there the shoulder-blade of his opponent [Finnleithe means fair/white shoulder(blade)]. That land was afterwards called Finnleithe. He drank another draught at Áth Lúain. and left the other bull’s loin there. Hence the name Áth Lúain. [