Coire Sois, The Cauldron of Knowledge: A Companion to Early Irish Saga

Preface

Preface Matthieu Boyd For over thirty years, Tomás Ó Cathasaigh has been one of the foremost interpreters of early Irish narrative literature qua literature. His method combines a rare philological acuity with painstaking literary analysis. Ó Cathasaigh broke new ground with his insistence that the extraordinarily rich and varied corpus of early Irish literature“cannot be properly understood except as literature, with due allowance being made for its historical dimension.” In “Pagan Survivals: The Evidence of Early Irish Narrative ” (1984), the item in this volume that gives the fullest attention to scholarly trends, he remarked: “the tendency has been to conduct the discussion of Irish texts principally in terms either of the artists who have produced them or of the universe which is reflected in them, so that there is a pressing need to analyze the extant texts as literary works in their own right.” Later, in his study of “The Rhetoric of Fingal Rónáin,” he added frankly that“Irish studies has not had enough of the cultivation of literary scholarship as an intellectual discipline.” If he was correct in this,the phenomenon can partly be explained by the initial difficulty posed by the language of the texts and by the time and effort needed to develop the linguistic tools that literary critics would require. The Royal IrishAcademy Dictionary of the Irish Language,begun in 1913,was only completed in 1976, and the Lexique étymologique de l’irlandais ancien, begun in 1959,remains unfinished.Even now,despite considerable progress xv in the last three decades, the field continues to feel the lack of modern editions and translations of important works. However, there was also a question of attitudes. Previously, the literary texts had been treated as repositories of linguistic forms, historical data, and mythological debris to be exploited by philologists, historians, and mythologists, often for predetermined purposes. They were invariably seen as the products of mere scribes or redactors rather than self-conscious literary artists. Some scholars, like T.F. O’Rahilly, went so far as to consider the texts to be in error vis-à-vis their theories. Ó Cathasaigh’s point was that, regardless of the origins of a particular text, it could be profitably studied in the form in which it has come down to us, with respect to the rhetorical strategies employed, or the sustained development of key themes either within a single text (as in “The Theme of lommrad in Cath Maige Mucrama” [1980–81]), or in a number of texts (as in “The Semantics of síd”[1977–79]). His studies revealed a hitherto unsuspected degree of narratorial art and thematic consistency within and among the sagas to which he gave his attention. He sometimes achieved this through the judicious application of theoretical frameworks such as Dumézil’s trifunctional approach to Indo-European myth, which he was among the first to bring to bear. He was not shackled to literary criticism, however, and was also able to produce outstanding historical research (e.g., in “The Déisi and Dyfed” [1984]) and technical studies of manuscript redactions and early Irish grammar. After nearly two decades of such work, it was natural that Ó Cathasaigh should have been asked to survey “Early Irish Narrative Literature” in the volume on Progress in Medieval Irish Studies edited by Kim McCone and Katharine Simms (see Ó Cathasaigh 1996b, a valuable snapshot of the field); but with characteristic modesty he said hardly anything there about his own contributions. Patrick Sims-Williams, in his 2009 John V. Kelleher Lecture at Harvard University,“How Our Understanding of Early Irish Literature Has Progressed,” was not so reticent. He identified two major advances of the past few decades: (1) the realization that early Irish literary texts are attuned to the political conditions in which they were redacted, and can be analyzed as propaganda; and (2) the realization that early Irish literary texts can be analyzed as works of literature, on their own terms. The first approach is exemplified by the work of Donnchadh Ó Corráin and Máire Herbert; the second by that of Ó Cathasaigh. xvi Preface It is no longer necessary to justify a literary-critical approach to early Irish texts. Ó Cathasaigh was swiftly joined in this by Kim McCone, Joseph Nagy, Philip O’Leary, Joan Radner,William Sayers, and others. They in turn have been followed by a new generation of scholars. One thing that consistently distinguishes Ó Cathasaigh’s work...