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24. The Theme of ainmne in Scéla Cano meic Gartnáin
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24 The Theme of ainmne in Scéla Cano meic Gartnáin ( 1 9 8 3 ) Scéla Cano meic Gartnáin is a brief (and highly selective) biography of one Cano son of Gartnán, to whom it assigns a reign of twenty-four years as king of Scotland: the text runs to 512 lines in D.A. Binchy’s edition,1 and this includes 180 lines of verse. It is the story of a man who is destined to be king and, like many another king-tale, it falls into the pattern of Exileand -Return. The tale opens with an account of the events which gave rise to Cano’s exile (lines 1–37); he went to Ireland in order to evade the murderous attentions of Áedán mac Gabráin, who had defeated Cano’s father Gartnán in a struggle for the kingship of Scotland and gone on to massacre Gartnán and all the inhabitants of the island on which Gartnán lived. Being in fosterage away from the island, Cano had escaped the massacre. Scéla 342 Cano reaches its climax with the return of its hero to Scotland, to which he has been summoned to assume the kingship (lines 367–76). The main part of the narrative is devoted to the events of Cano’s exile in Ireland where he stayed, first with the joint kings of Tara, Diarmait and Bláthmac; then with Gúaire, king of Connacht; and finally with Illand, king of the Corcu Loígde. The first of these sojourns seems to have been brief, the second lasted for three months (line 220), and Cano spent three years with Illand (line 356). Two of the themes which occur in the account of Cano’s exile are his love for Créd, daughter of Gúaire (lines 172ff., 299ff.), and his fast friendship with Illand (lines 356ff.), and it is these two themes which are taken up again after Cano’s return to Scotland. First we are told of Illand’s death at the hands of his own people, and how Cano keens and then avenges him (lines 377–447). There follows a long poem on the “ales of sovereignty,”2 and the tale ends with an account of how Cano tried to keep an annual assignation with Créd, and of how the last of these led to both their deaths (lines 488–512). The main lines of Scéla Cano are clear enough, and yet it is one of the most tantalizing of the early Irish narrative texts. It has been described by James Carney as “primarily a saga of love, secondarily a saga of friendship ,”3 and, as such, we might expect it to be of timeless appeal. But its appeal and even its accessibility are greatly diminished by the condition of the extant text of the tale, for it does not readily yield up its secrets. It is true that Scéla Cano is a comparatively short tale, and that, since it has survived in one manuscript only, the reader may approach it directly without having to work his way through a thicket of versions and recensions. Furthermore , the text as we have it is unencumbered with the obscure rhetoric of roscada, the narrative is liberally leavened with passages of dialogue, and the prose is interspersed with verse. Indeed, Eleanor Knott pronounced it “the most poetic of our early tales that have survived.”4 On the other hand, the text“abounds,”as Binchy put it,“in difficulties and ambiguities.”5 Many of these are doubtless to be put down to scribal corruption, and not a few have been plausibly eliminated by the scholars who have worked on the tale, notably Thurneysen, O’Brien, and Binchy.6 A number of residual “difficulties and ambiguities” have resisted the best efforts of the scholars and remain to plague us, but it is fair to claim that, notwithstanding the imperfect transmission, we now have a reasonably adequate working text to get on with. 24. The Theme of ainmne in Scéla Cano meic Gartnáin 343 [52.55.214.236] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:25 GMT) 344 THE CYCLES OF THE KINGS If it can still be said that Scéla Cano “is a ‘text’ to be studied and elucidated by scholars and cannot be read with the same ease and pleasure as some of the other sagas,”7 some of the fault doubtless lies...