Dark Speech: The Performance of Law in Early Ireland (review)

The study of early Irish law, one of the most demanding and also one of the most fruitful areas in contemporary Celtic studies, has always been a largely textual undertaking. This is not simply because the sources are, inevitably, texts. They are also notably difficult texts: many of them fragmentary and corrupt, all of them bristling with a technical terminology which may be supplemented by wilful obscurantism, several of them among the earliest surviving vernacular documents. It is not surprising, then, that their interpretation has often been seen primarily as a linguistic problem, the decipherment of what D. A. Binchy once described as “a sacrosanct and unchanging canon.”

Robin Chapman Stacey is well aware of the philological challenges posed by the material, which she makes no attempt to minimize. But her interest is here directed toward other questions. How was early Irish law actually implemented? What actions and what words, under what circumstances, were legally effective? What place did they occupy in the lives of the community? Such questions have in recent years been posed, across a broad interdisciplinary spectrum, by the proponents of performance theory, and it is this approach which provides the basis for Stacey’s own inquiry. The result is a book that carries us into a contentious, dramatic, and often paradoxical world.

The first chapter looks at legal usages from which a verbal dimension was virtually absent: symbolic actions such as the taking possession of land by driving horses onto it, or the seizure of cattle in order to articulate a claim against their owner. Stacey interprets such practices as rule-governed transmutations of transgressive activities like trespass and theft, gestures which “embodied and objectified social conflict in a way that displayed the tensions that lay behind the event, but resolved them in what participants were likely to understand as a straightforward performance of communal values and beliefs” (p. 51).

In the second chapter, “Jurists on Stage,” Stacey considers the legal specialist as verbal performer, deploying his artistry to provide what “appeared as irrefutable proof of the divinatory and historical veracity of what had been decided” (p. 93). Unfortunately, the sources provide us with no actual descriptions of performances of this kind. Many legal tracts contain judgments composed in the obscure rhythmical style known as rosc or roscad (often attributed to legendary figures of the pre-Christian past or the conversion period), and such judgments are placed in the mouths of such figures in some tales as well; but this does not amount to evidence that extempore composition of rosc was really a part of legal performance in the seventh and eighth centuries. A passage from the treatise Bretha Nemed Toísech, cited later in the book as evidence that jurists were expected to be able to compose in this way (p. 210), seems rather to be an acknowledgment of the limitations inherent in rosc as a preexisting corpus of memorized lore.

Similar concerns inform the third chapter (“The Power of the Word”), but here it is the form of the utterance itself which is the focus of discussion. Stacey has more to say here about rosc, which she contrasts interestingly with fásaige or “maxims.” That different types of speech could have legal efficacy is a valuable perception, even if I cannot agree with all of the distinctions invoked in its support: thus Stacey’s contention that individual maxims are by their nature anonymous (p. 101) is contradicted by the attribution of such a maxim to Crimthann Nia Náir in the saga Scéla Muicce Maic Dathó. Language’s relationship with power extends of course well beyond the law, and this chapter also looks at such matters as the social roles of praise and satire.

In the fourth chapter, “Voicing Over,” Stacey surveys the loci of legal authority. Besides the brithemain or “jurists,” legal functions were exercised by kings, by poets, and by clerics: sometimes these figures acted in conjunction...