Law, Literature and Society: CSANA Yearbook 7 (review)

This, the seventh Yearbook of the Celtic Studies Association of North America, contains a stimulating mix of papers on Irish, Welsh, and Continental Celtic matters, from ancient times to the Late Middle Ages, with many of the papers involving an intersection between literature and law.

The first and most substantial paper in the volume is Paul Russell’s “Poets, Power and Possessions in Medieval Ireland: Some Stories from Sanas Cormaic” (pp. 9–45). This looks at a group of short but complete narratives which are incorporated into the Old Irish glossary known as Sanas Cormaic. His ingenious analysis does not just elucidate the individual narratives but also shows that they have much in common, which in turn allows him to explain a stage in the growth of the Glossary. Noting that the entries in Sanas Cormaic are organized in blocks by first letter only (and not as in modern dictionaries), he makes the important point that the narratives are all located toward the end of individual letter-blocks and, since nearly all entries seem to have remained where they were first put, there is strong reason to believe that they were incorporated into the glossary at the same time. He goes on to reveal that the narratives share significant themes and formal features. Many of them concern poets, the training of poets, and their divinatory and satirico-legal functions. The action often takes in both sides of the Irish sea, and coastal and other liminal locations feature prominently. Merchants and the trade of valuables are also important. High sensitivity to different kinds of language is in evidence in many of them. Latin is often used for narratorial comment, or to highten ambiguity. The turning point of individual narratives is often expressed in complex and obscure language, in verse or alliterative prose, and the inability of poets, whether master or trainee, to interpret utterances is pivotal in many cases. One also finds a correlation between speech and power, and between silence and subordination. A translation of one version of each of the narratives in question is usefully provided in an Appendix (pp. 33–43).

In “The Assassination of Diarmait mac Cerbaill” (pp. 46–57), Michael Meckler discusses the historicity of the various sources concerning the death in AD 565 of this outstanding Uí Néill king of Tara. These include the obituary notices in the annals (with the earliest underlying compilation deriving from the “Iona annals” which are generally dated to ca. 680–ca. 740), Adomnán’s Vita Columbae which was compiled ca. 700, and Diarmait’s legendary Aided, or “Death-tale,” whose composition has been dated to ca. 1022. Versions of the Aided are also found in the lives of Saints Ruadán of Lorrha and Brendan of Clonfert.

Diarmait’s killer is named in almost every source, annalistic and narrative: he was Áed Dub, king of Mag Line in northeastern Ulster. As for the place in which Diarmait was assassinated, it is not identified in the Vita Columbae, nor in the Annals of Ulster, but all the other major annals name it as Ráith Becc, a site in Mag Line. But for Meckler, the absence of this detail from the Annals of Ulster and the Vita Columbae undermines its credibility in the sources that do contain it. He goes on to reject Thomas Charles-Edwards’s suggestion (in his Early Christian Ireland [2000], pp. 295, 527) that Diarmait’s death at the hands of Áed Dub may have occurred while the Uí Néill king was Áed Dub’s guest, enjoying the hospitality he might expect as overlord of a client-king since one outcome of the battle of Móin Dairi Lothair a few years previously had been the significant extension of Uí Néill territorial authority in northeastern Ulaid. (On p. 53 Meckler says: “Thomas Charles-Edwards claimed that Columba’s hostility towards Áed Dub stemmed from Áed’s killing of Diarmait while the Ulsterman was...