Int class trad DOI 10.1007/s12138-015-0371-5 BOOK REVIEW

Ralph O’Connor (ed.): Classical Literature and Learning in Medieval Irish Narrative Studies in Celtic History XXXIV. D. S. Brewer, Cambridge, 2014, viii + 244 pp., £60 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-84384-384-9 John Carey1

 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

The literature of early medieval Ireland includes several vernacular versions of narrative works from Classical antiquity. In some cases, such as In Cath Catharda (‘The Civil War’, based on Lucan’s Pharsalia), these follow their sources with considerable fidelity; while in others the material is treated with remarkable freedom, as in the brief tale Merugud Uilixis (‘The Wandering of Ulysses’). Such adaptations continued to be made into the fifteenth century, when Caxton’s Recyuell of the Historyes of Troye was translated into Irish; the earliest appear to date from the tenth century, rendering Ireland the first European country to produce literature of this kind. Texts in this category have never been ignored by Celticists. Thus editions of In Cath Catharda, of Togail Troı´ (‘The Destruction of Troy’, based on Dares Phrygius), and of Sce´la Alaxandair (‘Tidings of Alexander’) formed part of the discipline-defining Irische Texte series in the years just before and after 1900; and a trickle of studies dedicated to such works and to the influences that they reflect has continued through the subsequent century and beyond. But their place in the canon has always been a peripheral one, with pride of place being generally accorded to tales with an Irish setting and with a context in indigenous tradition. In recent years, however, medieval Irish adaptations of Classical narratives have been the object of renewed attention. Thus 2006 saw the publication of Translations from Classical Literature: Imtheachta Æniasa and Stair Ercuil ocus a Ba´s, a collection of essays edited by Kevin Murray; followed in 2011 by Brent Miles’s Heroic Saga and Classical Epic in Medieval Ireland (in the same series as the volume here under

& John Carey [email protected] 1

University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

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review). The latter book in particular has been widely acclaimed, and is generally regarded as having placed the whole subject on a new footing. The gathering of essays being considered here, arising from a workshop held at the University of Aberdeen in 2011, reflects the same quickening of interest in this material. Brent Miles was not himself a participant, and I do not think that his monograph had yet appeared when the workshop took place; but his views are extensively acknowledged in the published versions of the contributions. The book is divided into three sections: ‘The Irish Classical Sagas’ is devoted to some of the adaptations themselves; ‘The Dynamics of Classical Allusion’ explores ways in which elements from Classical tradition have been deployed in other areas of Irish literature; and ‘Classical Models for Vernacular Epic?’ considers the extent to which ‘native’ heroic tales may have been shaped by Latin influence – a line of speculation going back at least to Rudolf Thurneysen, writing in 1921, and developed in considerable detail by Miles. These three sections are preceded by a lucid and comprehensive introduction by the editor, Ralph O’Connor. While noting that the earliest of the ‘Classical sagas’ in Ireland appear to be older than anything comparable elsewhere in Europe, O’Connor does not indulge in chauvinistic pride in mere priority, finding more interest in the fact that ‘the movement as a whole developed in Ireland independently of translation-movements on the European continent’. The resulting literature includes some of ‘the most accomplished literary productions of the central Middle Ages’, drawing on ‘as wide a range of Latin commentaries, grammars, treatises and encyclopaedias as anywhere in Europe’. O’Connor includes a useful catalogue of the texts themselves, arranged as far as possible in chronological order. The resulting overview brings some interesting patterns to light: thus the first of the adaptations were made from prose works, with versions (themselves in prose) of verse epics only being attempted from the late eleventh or twelfth century onward; and – whatever the date of the earliest specimens may be – the genre only began really to flourish at around the same time. Erich Poppe begins the section on ‘Classical sagas’ with a study of Imtheachta Aeniasa (‘The Travels of Aeneas’, a rendering of the Aeneid). Building on Miles’s discussion, he argues that, paradoxically, the Irish version of Dares (Togail Troı´) shows a greater stylistic debt to Vergil than does Imtheachta Aeniasa: the latter in fact departs from the Aeneid in various ways, employing Old Testament imagery as well as formulaic patterns (alliterating phrasal clusters) which may originate in indigenous oral tradition. Helen Fulton focusses on Togail Troı´, concluding her contribution with a discussion of its later Welsh counterpart Ystorya Dared: both works, in her view, belonged to ‘a complex process of contemporary identity-formation’. By demythologizing the Troy story, pseudo-Dares made it easier to fit it into a (Christian) scheme of universal history; Togail Troı´, in turn, reflects historical attitudes for which Fulton discerns a background in Augustine and Boethius. Intriguingly, she goes on to juxtapose Togail Troı´ with Lebor Gaba´la, an account of the imagined past of Ireland and the Gaels; for her, the former is ‘a historia of ancient peoples which forms an analogy, in a parallel sequence, to the legendary history of Ireland and its people’. The cultural context of Ystorya Dared is more straightforward: a

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doctrine of the Trojan origins of the Welsh is already attested in the ninth-century Historia Brittonum, and reached a European public thanks to the enormous popularity of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (rendered into Welsh as Brut y Brenhinedd). The remaining two essays in the first section deal primarily with Merugud Uilixis, the idiosyncratic Irish version of the story of Ulysses. The first of these, by Robert Crampton, argues that both Merugud Uilixis and Fingal Chlainne Tantail (an account of the misfortunes of the Tantalids) represent ‘a deliberate programme of reworking by authors both highly learned and imaginative’. Of the learning and imagination of many medieval Irish authors there is no doubt, but the evidence advanced by Crampton is fanciful rather than persuasive: this piece is the weakest in the volume. Farfetched word-plays are used to support the yet more far-fetched view that much of the substance of the Odyssey (and for that matter, in a concluding footnote, Plato’s Republic) was known to the Merugud’s author. So confident is Crampton of this author’s Homeric/Platonic mentality that he feels that it is ‘not necessary’ to take ‘suggested folklore parallels’ into account – thereby dismissing an international tale-type, well attested in Ireland, which self-evidently dictates the greater part of the story’s structure. There is not the scope here to enlarge further on the weaknesses in Crampton’s position. This is also unnecessary, as it has already been done (with exemplary courtesy and restraint) by Barbara Hillers in her own contribution. Hillers, the foremost authority on Merugud Uilixis, provides an excellent commentary on the text which, while doing full justice to the Classical knowledge of the author, and to knowledge of Ulysses in medieval Ireland generally, makes the central importance of the folktale inescapably clear. ‘The use of oral materials in the quintessentially literate context of a classically derived tale is one of the saga’s most fascinating features.’ Two of the three essays in the second section are by Michael Clarke, only the first of these having figured in the original workshop. Clarke’s starting point here is a curious passage in Ta´in Bo´ Cu´ailnge, the prose epic which serves as the centrepiece for the heroic legends of Ulster, in which a bird-shaped war-spirit is called ‘Allecto, that is the Mo´rrı´gan’: in other words, an entity in a tale of the Irish past is identified as one of the Furies of Classical mythology, with her Irish name only following as a gloss. As Clarke goes on to show, equations of Irish and Latin demonesses figure repeatedly in the literature: sometimes, not surprisingly, in the writings of scholars negotiating the linguistic divide (Irish glosses on Prudentius and Isaiah), but also in the late battle-saga Cath Maighe Rath (where the native Badhbh is identified with Tisiphone). Not everything in Clarke’s analysis is equally convincing – thus the name of the witch Ernmas is amply attested as a word for ‘violent death’ (\ ia¨rn ? ba´s ‘iron-death’), rendering superfluous the conjecture that it originated as a misreading of *Erinas (\ Erinys). But the material passed in review is fascinating, and Clarke’s postulate of a ‘shared mythological grammar’ linking these disparate sources is a stimulating one. In his second essay, which considers the legend of the horse-eared king Labraid Loingsech in light of its obvious counterpart in the story of Midas, Clarke reminds us that ‘the canonical Latin texts were transmitted and assimilated in conjunction

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with a vast and ever-growing body of gloss-commentary…. This challenges our sense of genre categories.’ Thus, he argues, ‘the core text of Togail Troı´… is vastly expanded and poeticized from the bald prosaic Latin in the original text of Dares Phrygius’, raising the possibility that ‘the Latin text used by the Irish author was itself an expanded and embellished version of Dares’. Clarke goes on to find possible sources for various Irish tales in what Classicists might view as ‘secondary’ sources: stories of horse-eared kings can be linked with the version of the Midas myth in the Second Vatican Mythographer; an element in the tragic tale Fingal Ro´na´in may have been inspired by a quotation from Seneca’s Phaedra in a lost florilegium. The concluding study in the section on ‘Classical allusion’ is Ma´ire Nı´ Mhaonaigh’s examination of the identification of the Munster prince Murchad mac Brı´ain, famed for his heroic death in the battle of Clontarf (1014), as ‘the matchless, ever-victorious Hector of the many-nationed, heroic children of Adam’ in the tale Cogadh Ga´edhel re Gallaibh. In fact Hector and Murchad begin and end a catena of heroes in the Cogadh, including the Ulster warrior Conall Cernach and the euhemerized deity Lug La´mfhata, with Murchad as ‘the last man who killed a hundred in a single day’. Classical myth, Irish history and Irish legend are thus collocated within a single framework, which Nı´ Mhaonaigh aptly dubs ‘a chronology of heroes’. As she goes on to show, this can be related to the schema of the sex aetates mundi, and to the Eusebian system of synchronisms (according to the Irish version of which the Trojan war took place at the same time as the quasimythological ‘battle of the gods’ fought at Mag Tuired in County Sligo). The selfconsciousness of the author’s approach to the Hector comparison may, Nı´ Mhaonaigh suggests, be reflected in his use of the phrase intamlugud intliuchta (‘learned interpretation’), arguably a loan-translation of the Latin tag similitudo intellectus. The third and final section comprises two essays, the first of them by the volume’s editor Ralph O’Connor. Rather subversively, in a collection largely concerned with medieval Ireland’s appropriation of elements from the Classical heritage, O’Connor calls into question the widely held assumption that only the model of Latin epic can explain the ‘macro-form’ of large-scale Irish narratives. Much of his critique engages with Brent Miles’s recent reformulation of this position: while paying tribute to Miles’s achievements in the area as a whole, O’Connor feels that he ‘depends too much on detailed conjectures about lost earlier versions’. The so-called ‘watchman device’ found in Homer and Statius, and also in the sagas Ta´in Bo´ Cu´ailnge and Togail Bruidne Da Derga, has been seen as evidence for a formative Classical influence on the Irish tales; but, as O’Connor notes, closely similar scenes are also found in Welsh and in Old English, which are unlikely all to have been imitating Statius (or indeed each other) in the same way. ‘It seems much more likely, on balance, that the Irish ‘‘alternatives device’’ resembles the Welsh and Old English examples because they are independent (and highly literate) expressions of a common narrative template related to riddles and rooted in oral tradition, which subsequently – and in certain texts – took on Classical features’. Calling for a balanced assessment of the oral and written dimensions of the tradition, he reminds us that

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medieval Irish society was also as oral, and as aural, as any in Europe; and the evaluation of written texts, especially in a comparative context where textual influence is often an unlikely explanation, does invite some consideration of the international storytelling dimension. To do so brings us into the realm of informed speculation, but it need not be any more wild (and can be considerably tamer) than the baroque hypotheses of textual transmission and Urtexte in which textual scholars routinely participate. In the final contribution to this collection of studies of literary adaptation, Abigail Burnyeat offers an instance of its explicit acknowledgement: Jerome’s story that Vergil, when accused of stealing his material from the Greeks, replied that ‘it takes great strength to wrench the club from the hand of Hercules’. Surveying the later transmission of this topos through such writers as Isidore, she calls attention to its presence in the eighth-century Pauca problesmata de enigmatibus, also known as the ‘Irish Reference Bible’ – and also, remarkably, in a couplet in which the eleventh-century poet Flann Mainistrech expresses his debt to his predecessor Eochaid Eo´lach u´a Ce´irı´n. Isidore associated the Vergil anecdote with the process of compilatio, or the recombination of earlier materials to form new texts; Flann’s allusion situates it in ‘exactly the kind of milieux in which the transfer of critical attitudes and interpretative approaches from Latin to the vernacular might be possible’. Ernst Windisch, in his foreword to Whitley Stokes’s 1909 edition of In Cath Catharda, observed that ‘what is characteristic of the Irish spirit emerges nowhere more clearly than in the Irish adaptation of foreign material’; while O’Connor urges that ‘the sagas are more than just northern prefigurations of a Renaissance achieved with more widely recognized accomplishment further south. In their blend of Latin and native modes and content, they present a distinctive, perhaps even unique body of literature, not just a precocious one.’ In approaching such material one could have no better guide than this wide-ranging, insightful, judicious and appreciative book.

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