Global Positioning in Medieval Ireland
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
GLOBAL POSITIONING IN MEDIEVAL IRELAND Global Positioning in Medieval Ireland: Narrative, Onomastics, Genealogy I am mainly going to be talking here about people writing things down. I hope that by doing so, however, I can get a little closer to being able to describe the circumstances under which medieval Irish vernacular secular narrative got into the shape in which we find it and why it persisted in the particular shape it did. I want to focus on some specific features of the text (and associated marginalia) of Táin Bó Cúailnge as found in the Book of the Dun Cow and the Yellow Book of Lecan (The so- called “recension one”) as well as some of The Book of Leinster (LL) [“recension 2] text. The features that interest me are those which display various kinds of scribal intervention and commentary, (some of which I have discussed in a series of papers on the origins of the marginal notation .r.). What I hope to do here is a little broader than that: I want to try to tease out some of the assumptions that these scribes appear to be working with as they are confronted with various kinds of textual information and various kinds of text, and, beyond that to try to describe better a particular professional worldview of which these assumptions seem to be the outward and visible signs. There is a world of difference between, for instance, a probatio pennae such as that at the top of page 55 of the Book of the Dun Cow (probatio pennae Mail Muiri mc mc “this is a test of the pen of Mael Muire mac mac,”){1}, and a marginal comment on page 58 {2} such as “This is one of the three cleverest yet most difficult Copyright © 2000 Daniel F. Melia 1 GLOBAL POSITIONING IN MEDIEVAL IRELAND reckonings ever made in Ireland, the three being this reckoning of the men of Ireland made by Cú Chulainn in the Táin, the reckoning made by Lug of the Fomorians in the battle of Mag Tuired and the reckoning of the army Bruiden Da Derga made by Ingcel.” The first of these examples is at one level simply what it says it is: a test of a freshly prepared quill pen, though at another it might be seen as a kind of claim staked on an important manuscript by one of its principal scribes. [And it has, in fact, played a significant part in discussions of the identity of the scribes of this manuscript.] The second comment, however, is an explicit revelation of the reception of part of the main text itself by one of its “users” who seems anxious to place the text with reference to another traditional genre: the triad, and, in doing so, reflects the essential nature of the triad in medieval Irish intellectual life: thematic (rather than chronological, genealogical, or onomastic) cross-referencing. In this case, the reference is to one item which appears in LU itself but concerns a later pseudo- historical period than the Táin Bó Cúailnge (that is, the Togail Bruiden Da Derga [Destruction of DaDerga’s “Holster” as one of Pat Ford’s students once had it]), and to another which is a mythological tale not included in LU. The Táin Bó Cúailnge is a long, coherent narrative, episodic in form, composed of type- scenes, with a plot structure which bears strong structural resemblances to other early Indo-European epic (specifically, the Iliad and the narrative of the Great Bharata War which lies at the heart of the sanskrit epic, Mahabharata.) It is also clearly part of a larger complex of Irish tales, many of which serve to “explain” narrative features which have no explanation inside the text of the Cattle Raid of Cooley itself—notably the origin of the Ulster exiles and the relationship between the enchanted bulls which are the central point of contention. While there is not much dispute about the ultimate source of most early Irish vernacular being in oral tradition, difficulties arise when one takes the next logical step and asks just how the texts we have in manuscript reflect or are related to the now lost oral tradition. We can, of course, consult our own attitudes and techniques for judging texts in an attempt to reconstruct the rhetorical scene in which these texts lived in the middle ages. What I propose to do here, though, is to try to look at some of the Copyright © 2000 Daniel F. Melia 2 GLOBAL POSITIONING IN MEDIEVAL IRELAND ways in which medieval Irish scribes reacted to the texts which they found before them. A SHORT AND NOT ENTIRELY DIGRESSIVE RANT: It has been the custom in modern medieval studies of all kinds to avoid the use of the term “scribe” except when referring to a social position (“a scribe in the scriptorium at Corbie”) or to a “slavish copyist”. Less “slavish” copying was carried out by “redactors” and even more serious tampering by “compilers;” and it is only in rare cases (Bede, Hroswitha, Hildegard of Bingen) that someone working in a manuscript milieu rises to the level of “author” (in our sense). But who are all these people? Looked at as individuals there must have been a spectrum of real-life possibilities. Some individuals must have gone into a monastic scriptorium, learned to write, and spent the rest of their lives in simple exact copying of material selected for them by others. Others undoubtedly spent a short time learning to write, but moved on to other things as they grew older. Some, of course, must have gone on to be the people who selected the material to be copied by the lifetime copyists mentioned a couple of sentences ago. And a few, at least, of those who started out doing the simplest copying must have ended up as authors (in the modern sense) themselves, Bede, for instance.1 Thus, the situation with regard to the producers of medieval manuscript material is that all varieties of this material could be produced by a single individual at various times of his life or even in different parts of the same day on occasion. When we talk, then, of “redactors” versus “scribes” we are describing activities rather than people. We have what might be called a philological need to distinguish among these activities in order to meet present-day criteria for text-analysis. We are keenly interested in how much “original” or “borrowed” material is in a given text, or how “close” we may be to the “original.”2 But to get at these bits of information, we have projected a modern mental structure back into medieval life. Our very difficulty in discovering these things in most cases is an index of the extent to which we are pursuing something with a different mental shape, as it were. And 1 For the learning process, see B. Bischoff, Latin Palaeography, trans. by D. O Croinin and D. Ganz; Cambridge: CUP 1990, pp.41–2. 2 See J. Bedier, “La tradition manuscrite du Lai de l’ombre,” Romania 54 (1928). Copyright © 2000 Daniel F. Melia 3 GLOBAL POSITIONING IN MEDIEVAL IRELAND there can be no question that the producers of medieval manuscripts understood these activities as being just that, activities carried out by otherwise integrated individuals, and that for the most part they did not share our concern with “originals” and “borrowing” and “innovation”. We do not often find medieval scribes declaring “I am not just the scribe of this text, I am the redactor.” When we do get evidence of attention to a distinction between auctor and compilator3 it is usually put not in our terms, but as a kind of defensive claim of non-authorship. The Chaucer of the Canterbury Tales says more than once (and clearly disingenuously) “blameth nat me” because he is “none auctor”. And, for the most part, of course, the auctor is not a person, but a text; not Augustine, but City of God. By personifying these activities and speaking of this or that “redactor” or “scribe”, modern commentators have fallen into a tendency, I think, of undervaluing the unity of mind which undoubtedly underlies all aspects of “writing down” behavior in the Middle Ages. It is thus, in my view, safer and more descriptive to use the general term “scribe” for the people doing the writing down (of whatever kind) and to reserve the other terms for more exact descriptions of their activities. Such a distinction has the dual advantages of not accidentally projecting anachronistic attitudes onto the manuscripts themselves, and of avoiding a lot of fairly annoying qualification of every statement about the process of creating the texts. It is the attitudes of these scribes toward their source material that I want to investigate here. END OF RANT. If you look at your handouts, you will see two versions of a single section of the Cattle Raid of Cooley (TBC). {3} [Read both versions] How do we get at this particular pair of texts and why do they differ in the particular ways that they do? Was this strange episode supposed in the ninth century to be funny? [make fun of the old] grotesque? [caution the old], awe-inspiring? [there were giants in the earth in those days] It could be argued (as the archaeologist Anne Ross has done for similar passages) that we have here a word-picture derived ultimately from a description of some ritual object such as a statue or engraved cauldron or the like. And, if it was intended to be funny, how are we—a thousand years later—able 3 See A.