Tales of the Elders of Ireland: A New Translation of ‘Acallam na Senórach’ by Ann Dooley, Harry Roe (review)

HUMANITIES 195 particularly to change the usual division for geography and chorography into world and regional geography. Their mathematical explanations are exemplary. This is a volume that can be used with confidence. As well, the twenty maps and plates are well reproduced or newly drawn and add greatly to an understanding of Ptolemy=s enterprise. As well as providing an excellent English text, Berggren and Jones advance several important arguments concerning Ptolemy and the Geography. First, they >have argued that, taken as a whole, the Geography is an unified composition that may be ascribed with confidence to its traditional author, Ptolemy.= Second, they posit that Ptolemy probably did not include maps with his original work, a question that has concerned scholars for hundreds of years. Berggren and Jones have produced a fine volume and an excellent piece of scholarship. It provides the reader with everything she or he will need to understand Ptolemy=s work. What is absent is a historical or social context. This is not a book that explains Ptolemy=s role in Alexandrine society, or how that society helped him produce the astronomical and geographical books he wrote. Nor does it speak to the impact these works had, on those interested either in natural philosophical or mathematical topics, or in political and mercantile affairs. On the other hand, this was not the function of the book. The attention to internal, intellectual detail will allow this book to be used by historians of many different methodological and philosophical persuasions, and as such, it will remain a necessary component of the libraries of many historians and classicists for years to come. (LESLEY B. CORMACK) Ann Dooley and Harry Roe, translators. Tales of the Elders of Ireland: A New Translation of >Acallam na Senórach= Oxford University Press 1999. xliv, 246. US $12.95 In the twelfth- or thirteenth-century Irish text known as the Acallam na Senórach (>Dialogue of the Elders,= not >Tales of the Elders of Ireland=), when St Patrick (a historical character from the fifth century AD) hears from the hero Caílte (a fictional character from the so-called Fenian cycle of tales) a particularly convoluted story of romance among the supernatural beings who were considered gods by the pre-Christian Irish, he exclaims, as translated by Ann Dooley and Harry Roe, >This is an intricate tale.= (The word rendered >intricate= could also mean >having ramifications= or >ambiguous .=) Patrick, whom Irish tradition credits with the introduction of Christianity to Ireland, could have said the same of the Acallam itself. This is a rich and multifarious composition, even though the acephalic condition of its surviving recensions (the Acallam probably never having been finished), 196 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 the casual pace of the tale it tells (a frame tale, really, containing scores of stories, innumerable bits of lore, and plenty of poems of various kinds), and the seeming aimlessness of the itineraries of Patrick (listening to Caílte and Oisín, his Fenian colleague, as they share all that they know about the past) and Caílte (alternately regaling Patrick and other listeners with his storytelling , and wandering off to engage in new adventures) all may give the impression of a potpourri with little in the way of authorial agenda or subtext apart from trying to cram as much information as possible into the text. Careful readers of the Acallam, however, know better than to underestimate this text=s nature and aims. As Dooley and Roe point out, the Acallam anachronistically makes extensive and subtle reference to the political scene of the era in which it was composed. Moreover, the very premise of the text B an unlikely encounter between pagan heroes, emerging out of the past like Rip Van Winkle and eager to embrace the new religion once they meet its most famous advocate in Ireland, and St Patrick, the personification of the Christian impact on Irish culture, who with divine sanction commissions the recording of all that these >elders= remember about their heroic world (a process that supposedly resulted in this text) B constitutes a bold defence of the Irish literary establishment, under attack from church reformers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as...