Notes Introduction: Medieval Causes 1. Cf. Goddard Henry Orpen, Ireland under the Normans 1169–1333 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005) 70–71. 2. Orpen, Ireland under the Normans 1169–1333 15–16, 91–106. 3. As Cambrensis’s account does not include specific dates, those included in the description below come from Orpen, Ireland under the Normans 1169–1333. 4. The other significant contemporary version is Goddard Henry Orpen, The Song of Dermot and the Earl, an Old French Poem from the Carew Manuscript No. 596 Edited with Literal Translation and Notes a Facsimile and a Map (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1892). 5. Keaveney’s comment signals a narrative link between Ireland’s medieval and modern history that views the twelfth century as the “beginning” of the modern story, a claim borne out by the vast number of historical texts that use this specific period as an object of study unto itself, or as a point of demarcation. Over the course of the twentieth century, numerous historical texts chose the Norman invasion as a dead end or as a point of departure, indicating the tendency to identify the Norman invasion as a watershed moment. 6. As Orpen notes, “The importance of the event was not duly recognized at the time by the Irish Annalists any more than it was perceived by the Irish chief- tains. The notices in relation to it in the Irish Annals are consequently few and meagre in the extreme.” Orpen, The Song of Dermot and the Earl, an Old French Poem from the Carew Manuscript No. 596 Edited with Literal Translation and Notes a Facsimile and a Map v. 7. Orpen notes that the existence of the French manuscript of what he pub- lished as The Song of Dermot and the Earl was known. Sir George Carew had summarized it in an English language abstract during the reign of James I, and this summary had been reprinted in the eighteenth century. Aside from a translation of the French text in 1837, the manuscript had not been trans- lated or annotated until Orpen’s edition. Orpen, The Song of Dermot and the Earl vi. 8. Cf. “As Vanquished Erin,” “Avenging and Bright,” “Dear Harp of My Country,” “Erin, Oh Erin, Erin!” “The Tear and the Smile in Thine Eyes,” “Forget not the Field,” “My Gentle Harp,” “Oh! Blame not the Bard,” “Oh! Breathe Not His Name” (a tribute to Robert Emmet) and, perhaps most famously, “The Harp That Once Thro Tara’s Halls.” 9. For more on the controversies surrounding Moore’s historical writings, which “managed to fall foul of almost everybody,” see Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century, Critical Conditions: Field 169 170 Notes Day Essays and Monographs (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996) 123–26. In his History of Ireland, Moore identifies Diarmuid Mac Murrough as “the prince whose ambition and treachery were the immediate cause of bringing the invader to these shores.” Thomas Moore, History of Ireland. Vol. 2, 4 vols. (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman, 1837) 200. In Moore’s version, Dervorgilla is “guilty involved” in her own abduction. Yet Moore preserves her from “that perverseness of nature which would seem to be implied by her choosing as paramour, her hus- band’s deadliest foe” based on the supposition that between Dervorgilla and Diarmuid existed “an attachment previously to her marriage with O’Ruark.” While Moore is careful to point out that “there exists but little, if any, authority for much of the romance of their amour” he emphasizes that the abduction plan was agreed upon by both lovers. Of the shift evi- dent in Moore’s History, Leerssen writes, “He had undertaken the History as a literary job, to be compounded from earlier authorities and with little original or archival work; it now [in 1838] became clear to him that he had followed in the well-worn tracks of a disintegrating paradigm ... and [he] became convinced that he had made a fatal error in not drawing on native manuscript sources which were just in the process of becoming available.” Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination 129. 10. A representative earlier example of just such a causal structure is Ireland’s Dirge, an Historical Poem, a seventeenth century poem written by the Reverend John O’Connell. The poem locates the narrative of Diarmuid and Dervorgilla within a period of moral decay in Ireland, where “Women, at pleasure barter’d, led loose lives, / And men, at will, forsook their wed- ded wives” (Rev. John O’Connell, Ireland’s Dirge, an Historical Poem, trans. Michael Clarke (Dublin: 1827) 33): McMurphy ravish’d, who was Leinster’s king, O’Rourke’s fair consort—what a barbarous thing. But soon the Monarch, to revenge the deed, Depriv’d of Leinster all McMurphy’s breed. Then Leinster’s king with fierce resentment sails To England’s monarch, and for aid appeals; Pledged his honor, and he gave his hand, That if he’d aid him he should share the land. ... The Leinster’s king with warlike courage sway’d, Got English troops, poor Erin to invade; With Strongbow’s lord conspicuous in the van, Who shortly conquer’d ev’ry Irish clan. The poem goes on to detail the subsequent persecution of Catholics in Ireland, the Penal laws, the 1641 Rebellion, the Cromwellian persecu- tion, the expulsion of the Irish to Connacht, and the disappearance of the noble families and warriors. Structurally, then, the abduction of Dervorgilla becomes a key moment in the emplotment of the initial pres- ence of the English in Ireland and in the conflicts between the twelfth century arrival of King Henry II and the seventeenth century composi- tion of the poem. Notes 171 11. For more on Maclise and romantic medievalism, see Pamela Berger, “The Historical, the Sacred, the Romantic: Medieval Texts into Irish Watercolors,” Visualizing Ireland: National Identity and the Pictorial Tradition, ed. Adele M. Dalsimer (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993). See also the essays in Peter Murray, ed., Daniel Maclise (1806–1870)—Romancing the Past. Cf. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, “Dreaming of the Middle Ages” (Orlando, FL.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986) where he discusses the term neo-medievalism. 12. Maclise’s own attitude in relation to the painting’s two populations has been the subject of intense critical debate. For a concise summary of this debate, see Tom Dunne’s essay on The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife in Peter Murray, ed., Daniel Maclise (1806–1870)—Romancing the Past (Kinsale, Cork: Crawford Art Gallery Gandon Editions, 2008) 70–75. John Turpin’s essay in the same volume, “Maclise and the Royal Academy,” offers a nuanced look at Maclise’s position relative to Ireland and the Royal Academy of Arts, London (147–59). 13. Cf. Michelle O’Mahony, The Famine in Cork City: Famine Life at Cork Union Workhouse (Cork: Mercier Press, 2005). Patrick Hickey, Famine in West Cork: The Mizen Peninsula Land and People, 1800–1852 (Cork: Mercier Press, 2002). The Cork Poorhouse was initially built for 2,000 but as of February 1847 housed over 4,400 paupers (Brendan O Cathaoir, Famine Diary (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999) 99). The dead were buried in mass graves or remained exposed on the roads. 14. As recent scholarship by Claire O’Halloran, Joep Leerssen and others has shown, the mid to late nineteenth century saw the explosion of transla- tions and printings of early Irish historical manuscripts in a manner that made translations of Irish language sources widely available in print culture for the first time. Prior to the work of George Petrie in acquiring Irish manuscripts, most of the material existed in private collections. Cf. Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century 106–07. 15. Balfour refers here to A. G. Richey’s Lectures on the History of Ireland, Down to A. D. 1534 (Dublin: E. Ponsonby, 1869). 16. Cf. Chris Jones, Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth Century Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). In “New Old English: The Place of Old English in Twentieth and Twenty- First Century Poetry” (Literature Compass 7, 1009–19), Jones traces the growing body of work inter- ested in what he terms the “New Old English” and argues that modern and contemporary poets have ignored historical boundaries in order to incorpo- rate the deep past. 17. Cf. Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren, eds., Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams, eds., Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Lisa Lamper-Weissig, Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies, Postcolonial Literary Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). 18. Joseph Nagy has noted the intersections between medieval Irish litera- ture and modern Irish folklore in his “Observations on the Ossianesque in Medieval Irish Literature and Modern Irish Folklore,” Falaky: Journal of 172 Notes American Folklore 114.454 (Fall 2001). While the title of Richard Wall’s edited conference volume Medieval and Modern Ireland gestures toward a very rich intersection, the chapters remain divided between those dealing with the medieval literature (chiefly poetics) and the modern writers (Friel and Shaw). This division prevents the volume from productively engaging the moments at which the medieval invades Ireland’s modern texts. Richard Wall, ed., Medieval and Modern Ireland (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1989). 19. As Joep Leerssen makes clear in Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century, the second half of the eighteenth century saw the height of Irish antiquarian- ism and shifted toward “native sources and native help” (70).