Global Positioning in Medieval Ireland

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. Minnes, Medieval Ideas of Authorship.

Copyright © 2000 Daniel F. Melia 4 GLOBAL POSITIONING IN MEDIEVAL IRELAND to tell?? [Clover anecdote re Onundr ‘trefoot’ grandf. of Grettir the strong.] {4} But because these tales were produced in a milieu far removed from our own, the possibilities for anachronistic misunderstanding are very great, and were, as I hope to illustrate, troubling to the medieval scribes and redactors who wrote down and modified these texts. Such apparent scribal difficulty with vernacular texts is a state of affairs not exactly unique to medieval Ireland, but it arises there in a way that may help to clarify some of the issues surrounding the transmission of vernacular literature in other cultures as well. The vagaries of scribal psychology and willingness to intervene in texts are merely the penultimate screen or filter in a series of screens which keep the modern reader from a satisfactory assessment of this material. The first screen is the medieval forms of the Irish language itself, the second is our ignorance of exactly how tales in the vernacular came to be written down in the first place, centuries after the establishment of a written tradition in Latin; the third is scribal attitudes toward the texts with which they were confronted (some in a language they themselves understood imperfectly and reflecting a pre-Christian cultural world long past); and the last our own willingness (or even eagerness) to impose inappropriate standards of critical judgment on a poorly understood literature. In the case of a peculiar bit of a story like this it is certainly not possible to have much confidence in our own intuitions about what it may mean either locally or globally. The texts as we have them were written down by monastics in the tenth to the 14th centuries and, unlike classical, biblical or vernacular legal texts of the same period, were apparently open to substantial modification throughout their manuscript life. It is thus impossible to produce a sensible Lachmannian manuscript stemma showing the relationships amongst the surviving versions of the tales. (10 major surviving MSS of the TBC and 10 families—8 lost—of MSS to account for them.) The impossibility of creating a sensible stemma via the “common error” method (coupled with LU’s repeated references to otherwise unknown “other versions”) illustrates something important about these

Copyright © 2000 Daniel F. Melia 5 GLOBAL POSITIONING IN MEDIEVAL IRELAND texts: namely that the concept of copying a “perfect” original version is missing from the scribal mentality with respect to vernacular “historical” (as they would have seen them) texts. These same scribes had no difficulty copying annal entries with reasonable exactitude, and both Latin texts and Archaic Irish law tracts were reproduced faithfully from the sixth century on in Ireland. Since we know that vellum was reasonably scarce/costly in medieval Ireland, and not wasted on trivial exercises, we can draw two conclusions from this state of affairs: 1) the people who wrote this stuff down thought it was important material which ought to be preserved in writing and 2) its importance did not reside in the fact that its text was fixed (as opposed, for instance, to the text of the psalms.) Thus, although we are dealing with a series of what are for us fixed texts here, we cannot evade the conclusion that for the people who created the texts we now read, each represents not a “final” version, but, as in an oral milieu, a single version out of many possible versions. The scribes of the Book of the Dun Cow text of the TBC frequently provide more than one version of an incident (“But others have it that,” “other books say”, “ut alii dicunt” etc.). Sometimes, of course, this may be a recording of an actual compilation from a variety of written sources. But in several cases, what seems to be going on is the scribe adding his own preferred version after relating the one found in his primary written source. Thurneyson, the last scholar to make a real stab at drawing a stemma for the TBC , in 1923, in Die irische Helden- und Koenigsaga , proposed the following model: 1. We know from classical sources that the Celts had a class of religious intellectuals (the druids) who kept tribal lore; 2. this lore must have existed in Ireland prior to the introduction of writing in the 5th century; 3. the introduction of Christianity to Ireland put an end to the druid class sometime in the 6th century; 4. the surviving vernacular tales contain language which can be dated in some cases to the ninth century (the classical Old Irish period); 5. therefore, someone in the ninth century must have written down a version or versions (Thurneyson actually plumps for two “original” versions of the TBC) of the stories which survive in later manuscripts and from that time on the oral

Copyright © 2000 Daniel F. Melia 6 GLOBAL POSITIONING IN MEDIEVAL IRELAND tradition (if it survived at all) had no influence on the transmission of these stories in manuscript. Now, the stemma Thurneysen developed, following the Lachmannian rules, produced a monstrosity of a tree in which it was necessary to postulate no fewer than ten groups of lost manuscripts to account for a dozen actual surviving manuscripts of the TBC. Thurneysen’s problem here, of course, is that he could not have been aware of the work on oral traditions and oral transmission of complex literary texts (e.g. Homer) just beginning, when he wrote, to be done by Milman Parry, and of Parry’s (and Albert Lord’s) later demonstrations of the difference in transmission which arises from oral assumptions about tradition. Common-error techniques work tolerably well on absolutely fixed texts with a discoverable (or ideally recreatable) text such as that of the Aeneid, but cannot make any sense out of traditions characterized by fluidity and multiformity. Even though we think of Cinderella as a single story, and most of us encountered it in a textually fixed form (books or movies), we feel perfectly free to create our own versions (in speech or writing) provided that each version--each performance--contains enough of the “essential” story elements in the correct order to make our version recognizable to our chosen audience as Cinderella. Even for serious literates such as ourselves, material like Cinderella is fluid (each performance can be different within certain limits) and multiform (the text of the story of Cinderella can be viewed as all possible performances conforming to the minimum recognizability criteria for the accepted tradition of this story.) Thus, one aspect of the “style” of these texts is that their compilers/redactors/authors regarded them as fluid and multiform texts and transmitted them in writing in many ways as if they were part of a living oral tradition. (Which, of course, they may simultaneously have been!) Furthermore, early epic texts, which must have been developed before the introduction of writing in their cultures, are all concerned with the legendary figures central to the historical self-image of the later stage of the culture which has preserved them in writing for us. The structure of these early written narratives is congruent with what we know of the structuring of long narratives in strictly oral modern traditions and different from later

Copyright © 2000 Daniel F. Melia 7 GLOBAL POSITIONING IN MEDIEVAL IRELAND written narrative in those same traditions. I hasten to add that I am not arguing that medieval Irish scribes were oral performers, nor that they were taking dictation from oral performers, but, rather, that they continue to express an aesthetic which shares its assumptions about narrative structure and textual fixity (in the vernacular) with the oral tradition from which it arose. There is, though, at least one piece of external evidence that scribal attitudes toward these texts is of a kind which can be associated with the assumptions of participants in oral traditions. Contemporaneous with the main period of manuscript production of the “Ulster” stories (to judge by the age of the bulk of the language), is a list of 120 “Prime Tales”, supposedly known by a fili i scelaib (“first-rank poet of tales”). The interesting thing about the list [I ignore here, as not strictly relevant to my argument, any discussion about the absolute ages and relationship between the two versions of this list] . . . the interesting thing . . . is that it is organized not by historical or pseudo-historical categories (e.g. “Ulster stories” or “ stories about Cuchulainn”, or “Stories about the ancestors of the Ui Neill kings of Tara”), but by what turn out to be structural categories of narrative types: tana, toghla, tocmarcha, (cattle raids, destructions, wooings). Since at least one manuscript version of better than half the tales mentioned in the list still exist, it is possible to compare the various tales in each category with each other. While it is impossible to say whether the list represents stories actually known by anyone, or is merely an ideal compendium, a comparison of the tales within each category shows that the categories are determined by plot- structure. That is, within each category the plots of any story will be substantially the same regardless of the heroes, provinces or other accidental elements involved. The Irish tales in these lists resemble one another in exactly the way that a Yugoslav guslar’s rescue and return songs resemble each other. That is to say that each category represents an ordered progression of motifs/type-scenes and that the order is pursued even if an individual motif appropriate to the story type seems to be at odds with the details of a particular tale. [e.g. women in death tales] Here we have a second kind of cross-reference database, but one different in kind from the Triads. This database consists of vertical (paradigmatic)

Copyright © 2000 Daniel F. Melia 8 GLOBAL POSITIONING IN MEDIEVAL IRELAND indexing of horizontal (syntagmatic) story elements, by means of which entirely new, but generically correct, items may be generated. What may seem silly to us as regular readers only of fixed texts is merely a measure of the differences in expectation about what narrative logic is between us and audiences accustomed to oral/traditional narrative. For the shape of oral/traditional narrative is largely determined by the apparent necessity for tradition to have a particular narrative form arising out of the circumstances of the constant recreation of texts extemporaneously by author/story tellers. Just as oral poets (like Homer) must compose by the use of a formulaic super-grammar which, however idiosyncratically developed, is not their own creation (any more than our own language is), so, too, in the creation of story patterns in an oral/traditional environment the elements of narrative development: motifs, themes [in the technical sense of structured repeated scenes], are determined not by the performer but by the tradition and the expectations that the tradition creates in the minds of the performers and audiences within the culture. [e.g. The glass slipper fitting one of the ugly sisters would be taken by most of us as a parody of Cinderella and it is interesting that even the British Christmas pantomime versions of the story do not violate the essential “minima” of the plot skeleton.] From the perspective of an essentially oral aesthetic, many of what appeared to Thurneysen and other textual scholars (e.g. C. O’Rahilly) to be great difficulties turn from things difficult to explain to things normal to the genre. To return to our main example, although the two versions of Mellgleo Ilach [“Remember the Ring?” that’s for the Anna Russell fans] are quite different, they both appear at the same point in each of these two manuscript versions and are recognizably the same story in most essentials (except the words they are told in!). But if we imagine that both are originally ultimately derived from a single original written exemplar (or even from two original variants derived independently from oral tradition by some unknown process) we have to cope with the facts that 1. the two original theory won’t cope with those cases in which word-for- word correspondences do not match “recensions” [excurse—people cannot be passing around snippets and their cannot have been a

Copyright © 2000 Daniel F. Melia 9 GLOBAL POSITIONING IN MEDIEVAL IRELAND googleplex of mss], 2. there are (see the boldface text in {3} ) some verbal correspondences which are hard to explain if the versions are entirely independent, but not enough to posit a close ms. relationship. At some point in the development of writing as the normal medium of preservation of narrative and other lore the notion of the definitive or perfectible fixed text superceding and rendering futile all subsequent individual performances—arises. A consequence of the notion of such a definitive text is that the origin of its fixity must be projected backward in time, accounting for the origin stories (dofallsiugud TBC / ganesh in the Mahabharata) we find imbedded in the tradition. It is interesting that this need is recapitulated in the attempts to apply Lachmannian techniques—presupposing an “O” text—to medieval vernacular material. While it is thus ultimately futile, I think, to try to establish a “correct”, or “earlier” or “substrate” text, the fact that we have two roughly contemporaneous medieval versions can help us to decode some of the ways in which this little story may have functioned. To begin with, what do these two versions share, and in what ways are they different? 1. The genealogical material in the opening section is different. 2. Most of the wording is different. 3. The LL Version contains considerably more “explanation” than the other. 4. The two versions give a different explanation of the name given in the rubric. BUT: 1. The rubric is the same. 2. Iliach’s decrepit equipment, nakedness, and fighting with rocks & dirt is the same as is some of the actual terminology used to describe these states. 3. Doche mac Magach alone of the Connachta treats him with respect. 4. Iliach makes an agreement that Doche shall kill him and gain possession of his sword to take to the Ulster hero Loegaire. 5. Iliach makes a “marrow mash” (smirromair) {5}of his enemies. This is compared to similar action by Cúchulainn in an earlier incident in the TBC (both versions) in which Cúchulainn gathers marrow from the animals of Ulster to heal a wounded warrior whom he then kills anyway.. First of all, consider the divergent genealogical information: in the R I version, Iliach [which may, by the way, mean the man/hero/titular deity from the Hebridean island of Islay, and is in any case otherwise unknown as a personal name] is simply called grandfather of the Ulster hero

Lóegaire Búadach (the Triumphant). This wouldn’t have conveyed much more than generic information to a tenth to twelfth century Irish audience since Iliach is depicted merely as the grandfather (otherwise unspecified) of Lóegaire and since Lóegaire is one of the heroes of the Ulster stories who is NOT an important figure in later genealogical lore. [Except as ancestor of the Osraige.] The R II version, on the other hand (which is not, by the way, necessarily “later” in any respect than the other) makes Iliach a very significant genealogical person indeed since he is the great grandson of Roderick, a legendary King of Ireland who, in the genealogical tracts, attaches the tribe known as the Dal nAraide to the genealogies listed in the tract, Senchus Sil Ir [Rawlinson B502, 136a5] and is thus part of the revised doctrine by which the Dal nAraide claimed identification with the original Ulaid, displacing the (now politically insignificant Dal Fiatach). This revision was necessary because the Dal nAraide came to a political prominence in the seventh or eighth century unexplainable by their ancestry in the traditional genealogical schemes of the Gaels. Thus the R II tradition of this text is coding information about Iliach which would raise his importance considerably for a part of the potential audience. Thus, one scribe has paid attention to a version validating the dynastic claims of the Dal nAraide to be the historical Ulaid, while the other scribe has opted for a version which ties Ilach to Leinster. And, interestingly, it is NOT the Book of Leinster, but the Book of the Dun Cow, which points to the non-leinster genealogy. On a more trivial level, R I mentions the place Rath Immail {6}without any explanation. This probably can be taken to mean that some redactor expected his audience to recognize the place (presumably the traditional ring-fortress home of Loegaire) without further explanation. Likewise, R. I does not explicate smirchomairt, {7} “marrow-tub” as a placename—apparently expecting the audience to be able to do so. Similarly, R I uses the expression Ol n-Echtmacht {8} (“beyond the fastness”) for Connacht. This may be very old, or it may be an archaizing feature, but it recognizes that some people in the audience would have realized that to call the western province Connacht (the place of the sons of Conn) would be anachronistic at the time of the pentarchy, which was

Copyright © 2000 Daniel F. Melia 11 GLOBAL POSITIONING IN MEDIEVAL IRELAND more than 200 years before Conn Cétcathach’s putative lifetime. Thus, the LU version seems to be older and may reflect a tradition prior to the intrusive doctrine equating the Ulaid with the Dal nAraide. The core of actions in the story (the oral core if you will) is identical in both versions: Old Iliach comes to help the Ulstermen (he’s an ally & not affected by the ces noinden he also may be too old); he has old beat-up equipment, has his chariot loaded with rocks & dirt and comes into battle naked; he is ridiculed by all the men of Ireland except Doche [an otherwise unknown brother of the greatest hero of the Connachta, Cét mac Magach]; he fights so well that he kills huge numbers of the enemy; he makes a marrow-mash of them; his head is cut off by Doche, who takes Iliach’s sword to Lóegaire. It may be a conscious or unconscious coding on the part of either scribe or their sources, but this full set of actions is fully coded for in both versions and carries whatever conscious or unconscious messages it can bear for the intended audience. On the other hand, we have evidence that those immediately responsible for each of our surviving versions had a different estimation of what it was about at at least one interpretive level. The word mell is ambiguous: it seems to be a pair of homonyms, one, heavily attested seen, among other things, in the placename Magh Mell, {9}the “pleasant plain”, “Elysian fields”, with a semantic range of “pleasant, amusing, smooth, etc.” and probably cognate with Latin mollis [and perhaps with the Gaulish tribe, the Meldi -> Meaux] {10}; and the other with the semantic range “ball, clod, boss, bump etc.” also well-attested in Irish and, according to Vendreyes, possibly cognate with Albanian mal’ < mal-no, “mountain”. The R I redactor takes it as the first, “amusing” while the R II redactor attributes the rubric to the dirt-balls that Iliach apparently fought with.

Both versions, however, make the same important point about the marrow-mash, since, like most other episodes in the TBC, part of the purpose of each incident is onomastic. The placename Smirromar is explained by the marrow-mash in both versions here, though R. I has the lectio facilior smirc[h]omair, “marrow-tub. The entire text of the TBC, in

Copyright © 2000 Daniel F. Melia 12 GLOBAL POSITIONING IN MEDIEVAL IRELAND fact, presumes an obsessive interest in placename origins on the part of the intended audience. All of which brings us to two more kinds of traditional database: onomastics and genealogy. We remember things [and, more tellingly, formally arrange to remember things] in order to control and navigate our mental space and to place that mental space in respect to other (including previous) spaces. Names (and the story of how they became the names they are) are a central means by which this controlling memory is established. Names (and their narratives: onomastic stories, senchus, praise poems, elegies) constitute the outward signs of an inward control of present-day space and of the stream of previous time which gives that space its present “shape” in our mental landscape. Genealogies and the names of places exist both synchronically and diachronically (natch), but they are four dimensional systems too. Lineages come to take up space (on a mental map or a page) which is meant to illustrate the history of present political and social reality [Kelleher: genealogies are the constitutions of Irish tribal life]. Onomastic tales (see particularly Tripartite Life of Patrick) anchor the physical landscape to the genealogical landscape by making it possible to connect placenames to genealogy at some crucial time in the past. Interestingly, the treatment of names and lists in medieval Irish manuscripts often reflects visually this contrast between “vertical” paradigmatic information and “horizontal” syntagmatic narrative. {11} Evidence: Use of names in Sts. Lives (and Cain Adamnain. e.g.) as evidence for political claims in “present”. Narrativity of elegy and praise poetry. Explains the apparently parallel status of genealogy, onomastics [dindshenchus, banshenchus] praise poetry, pseudo-prophecy and “straight” narrative (which is itself largely composed of the previous elements.) Why was narrative needed in a world of lists: genealogies, routes, triads, even annals? Ni hansa narrative isa particular kind of mnemonic. Both genealogy and geography, in an age without physical, birds-eye- view maps can be seen as “vertical” kinds of information. Geographical info, when given in its “raw” state is provided by lists (see track of Táin {11}) and genealogy is unambiguously linear as well. But geographical

Copyright © 2000 Daniel F. Melia 13 GLOBAL POSITIONING IN MEDIEVAL IRELAND info has an interesting property: a place cannot be recorded until it has a name, and the history of that naming constitutes a potential narrative. The place on which the contest to provide unique signifiers SSNs or URLs of history takes place is on the map provided by narrative. In the world of oral historiography, narrative played an indispensable role. It was the memorial map the mental surface—upon which the data regarding ancestry and the naming of places was recorded. Who was where when? Only consecutive narrative can fix these relations simultaneously and unambiguously, or, better, provide an argument about who should have been where when. We see such an argument, and one with interestingly low stakes, being played out in Mellgleo Iliach. But such arguments are unnecessary in the world of literal fixity of information provided by the true acceptance of written records as the guarantors of historical (and thus political) records. One can then put the written documents side by side and align their information physically with respect to a page not to a mental space/time. The conjunction of Christian/Roman/Biblical history and the assumptions introduced by official writing practice shows itself in the practice of Irish vernacular scribes attempting to mesh their own multiform, always-present oral history with the all-encompassing world history of the empire of writing which can be engaged, but never truly erased or elided. The tension is seen in the reproduction in writing of variants (which are then available for resurrection or revenance). We see just such a process of remapping in the Lebor Gabala project, the Nennius texts, and in the efforts of chroniclers to fix the literal age of Cúchulainn. But the logic of an oral aesthetic determines the narrative structure of the mapping. I often ask my students to try to work out the internal logic of the passage of time in the TBC, of course, an impossible task. And it is impossible for exactly the same reason that Homer allows some Argive heroes to die twice in the Iliad and RI includes the “long warning of Sualdaim” twice. The tradition of such oral narrative is indifferent to such internal nit-picking. Its consistency is that of structure, not of literal verisimilitude. It is only on the page that such “homeric nods” become obtrusive.

To return again to our illustrative text, [“Remember the Ring?”], the R II version expects less, in a sense, of its audience. More detail is provided about everything and a more complete explanation is offered of each action. This is of a piece with this entire version of the TBC and indicates, taken as a whole, that the redactor expected an audience far less informed about the material than the redactor of R I. In the most glaring instance, the LL version begins with a quarrel between Ailill and Medb about who had brought the most wealth and honor to the marriage (the so-called “Pillow Talk”). Medb discovers that she is one bull short of matching her husband’s wealth and this sets off her quest for the Donn Cuailnge. But such an explanation is not needed in the tradition as a whole. The LU version begins (in good I-E epic fashion) in medias res with the mustering of the men of Ireland, and the explanation for the causes of the war is contained in several of the remscela. The Pillow Talk is thus unnecessary to anyone who knows the tradition, but necessary for those who do not. The wider significance of these practical and aesthetic facts about certain medieval Irish scribes is that for them the TBC was not, apparently, a fixed text, but a fluid and multiform one. The manuscript record indicates that the TBC is behaving in the written tradition more like Cinderella than like the Psalms. It indicates a different attitude toward these vernacular texts than these same scribes seem to have had toward narratives in Latin. While saints’ lives, for instance, often contain common incidents, medieval Irish scribes do not treat them as if they are merely realizations of some underlying outline. In an oral environment the concept of the definitive performance is a purely theoretical one. Even a performance which becomes stable and is recognized as superior or epochal in the culture is likely to have its influence in indirect ways through its effect on future performances and in the formation of the notions of tradition subsequently developed in individual performers. Cf. performance traditions in music and acting in which there is an interplay of fixed text and obvious “readings”. NB that in passing along a purely written text, the “readings” must be displayed by 1)choice of what to pass on, 2) embedded or marginal commentary, 3) explicit statements of interpretation attached to the text.

Written official culture always raises the specter of the impossibility of forgetting certain things only [see Dallan Forgall and Phaedrus] via external storage with the concomitant loss of the possibility of one totalizing official narrative, constantly updated, but always fluid and multiform. We have only one the “latest”—version of the Homeric epics, while we have several TBCs, references to more, and an infinity of Cinderellas.{all of which are the latest version.} The shaping function of narrative the horizontal organizer of vertical data sets—is no longer transparent (or invisible) but is actualized in written variants and in our scribes’ conjectures. In our lack of the lost-but-referred-to versions of TBC, we see the shadow of the multiform tradition falling on the page of the scribe who tries to encompass the whole history in written form.

Daniel F. Melia University of California, Berkely University of California Celtic Conference 16 March 2000