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25. The Rhetoric of Scéla Cano meic Gartnáin
- University of Notre Dame Press
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25 The Rhetoric of Scéla Cano meic Gartnáin ( 1 9 8 9 ) Scéla Cano meic Gartnáin (“The Story of Cano son of Gartnán”)1 is a brief biography, in a mixture of prose and verse, of a Scottish prince whose life was endangered from his birth, and who fled to Ireland in order to escape the murderous attentions of his uncle, Áedán mac Gabráin, who was king of Scotland.While in Ireland, Cano stayed successively with the joint kings of Tara, Diarmait and Blathmac; with Gúaire, king of Connacht; and with the king of Corcu Loígde, Illand mac Scanláin. He secretly became betrothed to Gúaire’s daughter, Créd, who was already married to Marcán, king of Uí Maine, and who was also the unwilling object of the amorous designs of Marcán’s son, Colgu. Cano developed a fast friendship with Illand mac Scanláin, who was the most generous of his hosts, and it was with great sorrow that Cano parted from Illand when he was eventually 352 called home to assume the kingship of Scotland. A year later, Illand was slain, and Cano returned to Ireland to avenge his death. Once every year, he came to Ireland to try to keep a tryst with Créd, but his rival, Colgu, was always present on these occasions with a hundred warriors, and finally intervened in a way which was to lead to the death of Créd and of Cano. Scéla Cano survives only in the somewhat imperfect text of the Yellow Book of Lecan, and this presents several problems of interpretation at the level of the “plain sense” of the tale. Problems have been identified at other levels as well. It does not as yet seem possible, for one thing, to retrace the genesis of the tale with any degree of assurance. Its language shows a mixture of Old-Irish and Middle-Irish features, and stands in need of thorough analysis; it would seem unwise, on present knowledge, to assign a date of composition to it. What has come down to us is, in some measure, the outcome of a process of composition and transmission of the kind which I have characterized elsewhere as “comprising the expansion and contraction , reshaping and redaction of matter, much of which must have been received into the literature from indigenous oral tradition, but some of which is of learned ecclesiastical provenance.”2 The question of authorship is thus a complex one, since Scéla Cano is the work of more than one hand. We know that the last of them was the scribe of the Yellow Book of Lecan text (though we cannot estimate the extent of his contribution), but we do not know who the others were, or what was their number. None of this, it must be said, prevents us from studying the tale as a self-sufficient entity, and that is what I propose to do in this essay. The rhetorical and thematic features of the text which will be explored here might seem to point to the conclusion that Scéla Cano is essentially the work of a single author. What will not remain in question, in any case, is the integrity of Scéla Cano as a work of imaginative literature. If we are still in the dark about the author, or authors, of Scéla Cano, we can at least be quite certain that it was composed in the kind of literate Christian milieu which James Carney wrote about in his Studies in Early Irish Literature and History.3 If, as seems likely, some of the material in Scéla Cano derives from oral tradition, then that material was taken and used in the creation of a written work of fiction in an early Irish ecclesiastical community . The consideration of the oral antecedents of early Irish narrative has so far generated more heat than light,4 but the matter arises here, not least because Gerard Murphy used Scéla Cano to exemplify the relationship , as he saw it, between “the tales as really told to assembled kings and 25. The Rhetoric of Scéla Cano meic Gartnáin 353 [18.209.209.246] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:47 GMT) 354 THE CYCLES OF THE KINGS noblemen at an ancient óenach” and “the poorly narrated manuscript versions .”5 Murphy’s observations on the matter have serious implications for the study...