5 - The medieval Irish Wandering of Ulysses between literacy and orality

Summary

Merugud Uilixis meic Leirtis, ‘The Wandering of Ulysses son of Laertes’, is a short prose saga composed in late Middle Irish around the year 1200. The text survives in three late-medieval manuscripts, the earliest and best-known of which is the late fourteenth-century Book of Ballymote. Merugud Uilixis purports to tell the adventures of Ulysses son of Laertes, Uilixes mac Leirtis, on his voyage home from Troy and his eventual homecoming.

Merugud Uilixis has attracted a fair amount of critical notice for being the first vernacular retelling of the Odyssey in the medieval West. The composition of a vernacular Irish saga devoted to the adventures of Ulysses, at a time before any twelfth-century renaissance can plausibly be claimed to have permeated Irish monastic institutions, is noteworthy and the text sheds new light on the reception of Homer, specifically Homer’s Odyssey, in medieval Ireland.

Kuno Meyer, who published the text and translation in 1886, already concluded that the text represented an original composition rather than a translation of a Classical source-text. William Stanford called the saga ‘a lively and sophisticated fusion of classical and Irish elements’. Stanford’s description of Merugud Uilixis as ‘not entirely unhomeric’ aptly expresses the problem the saga has posed for its critics: the saga appears to capture the spirit of the Odyssey, while deviating dramatically from the Homeric plotline. The Irish author appears to have a grasp of the overall story arc and its Iliadic context, and he presents us with a vivid and plausible portrayal of its central characters. A significant number of the story’s motifs are ultimately derived from Homer’s Odyssey, but in each case they appear transformed and bear little detailed resemblance to the text of the Odyssey. Furthermore, a significant portion of the saga is devoted to adventures that cannot be traced back to Homer but are inspired by a popular oral folktale; the author, as we shall see, has successfully grafted the folktale’s plot onto the Homeric plotline.

Critical readings of Merugud Uilixis have tended to approach the Irish text by matching elements in the saga to episodes in the Odyssey, and to judge the saga by the extent to which it adheres to Homer.