7 - Reconstructing the medieval Irish bookshelf: a case study of Fingal Rónáin and the horse-eared kings

Summary

When the medieval scholar-authors constructed a narrative literature about the pre-Christian past of Ireland, its discourse was shaped by engagement with Graeco-Roman antiquity as well as with pre-existing lore originating in the Irish language. This claim is no longer controversial, but we are only beginning to engage with the challenges that it presents. We need to develop a new understanding of how Latin texts were read and appropriated – in effect, a new ‘archaeology of reading’. A key issue here is the relationship between text, commentary and world-knowledge. In this period, the canonical Latin texts were transmitted and assimilated in conjunction with a vast and ever-growing body of gloss commentary, in exactly the same way as the Bible itself. As a result, many texts that today would be classed as imaginative and artistic literature may have been valued at least as highly for the accumulated knowledge about language, ideas, history and myth that mediated and even fused with the words of the original author. This is most clearly documented for Virgil, Boethius and Martianus Capella, the authors who gathered the strongest commentary traditions; but it applies in principle to any ancient author read by medieval Irish scholars.

This challenges our sense of genre categories. For example, if we are to explore the reception in the Táin of material from Virgil’s Aeneid, we need to begin by reconfiguring our sense of the Latin work’s cultural status. In our period it was not only a poetic artefact but also the carrier of a vast body of Servian commentary, and thus served as a repository of detailed concrete knowledge about the worlds of the ancient Mediterranean. The vernacular narratives created in the shadow of those canonical works may be much closer to historiography (or pseudo-historiography) than modern literary classifications like epic or heroic saga might suggest. The same perspective may help to contextualize the countless cross-echoes between Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle-Raid of Cooley) and Togail Troí (The Destruction of Troy).