9 - Was Classical imitation necessary for the writing of large-scale Irish sagas? Reflections on Táin Bó Cúailnge and the ‘watchman device’

Summary

In his 1955 monograph, Studies in Irish Literature and History, James Carney pitted himself against what he saw as a ‘nativist’ orthodoxy which held to a national-Romantic view of the best-known Irish sagas as relics of native myths and legends, isolated from (or only superficially linked with) the wider world of European Latin learning. Against this orthodoxy, Carney asserted that Irish sagas achieved literary greatness and ‘epic’ status only when their authors embraced and imitated the Latin epic tradition. His statement about Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle-Raid of Cooley), which in practice (and problematically) he took as representative of the whole corpus, forms my starting-point: ‘Those features which are part of the epic scale of presentation must be due to imitation of the classics or of Christian developments of them.’

Carney’s views have been influential among those who analyse the sagas primarily as products of their time of writing rather than in terms of their presumed oral antecedents. The importance of Carney’s insights cannot be denied: if he sometimes argued them in a breezy or unsystematic manner, this lack has been remedied by his followers, especially since the 1970s when the concerted application of literary-critical techniques began to make real inroads into the study of medieval Irish texts. Yet the search for Latin models, no less than the search for mythological or oral-traditional models, becomes one-sided when pursued as if Latin texts and translations – hagiography, biblical texts, Patristic writings, Classical learning – constituted the only meaningful part of the saga-authors’ literary and narrative environment. Texts are necessarily our starting-point, but that does not mean Irish authors had access only to texts, or that their use of other media (such as conversation) is not worth considering, as philological and source-critical orthodoxy sometimes seems to assume.

My own approach to the sagas is oriented almost exclusively around the literate and learned contexts of their time of writing, toeing the philological line; but in this chapter I will caution against an ‘either-or’ view of the sagas’ origins and procedures. Rather than offering a specific case-study, I will examine recent attempts to argue that Classical models were necessary for the writing of the longer native Irish sagas, revisiting some of the evidence cited and drawing on previous work on the Classical affinities of the Middle Irish saga Togail Bruidne Da Derga (The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel).