by Tom Birkett
neglected, poems – religious, historical and didactic – which hint at wider opportu-
nities for creative and poetic engagement with more challenging verse forms. At the
end of an essay on linguistics and poetry, the Irish poet Micheal O’Siadhail wrote:
‘I want to hold up the wonder of words and say: How about this?’1 My aim here is
comparable: I want to hold up some of the lesser-known wonders of medieval Irish
poetry and say: How about this? Or this? Or this?
Anthologising Medieval Irish Poetry
When modern poets look to medieval Irish poetry for inspiration, they understand-
ably turn to anthologies of translated medieval verse: Gerard Murphy’s Early Irish Lyrics, original y published in 1956,2 was the first anthology to provide the original texts of a selection of medieval Irish poems, accompanied by facing page translations.
It was a landmark publication and, along with two other significant collections,3 it
has determined the way that medieval Irish poetry has been presented to the Anglo-
phone reading public and to modern poets for the last half-century. The academic
1 Micheal O’Siadhail, Say But the Word: Poetry as Vision and Voice, ed. David F. Ford and Margie M. Tolstoy (Dublin, 2015), p. 32.
2 Gerard Murphy, ed. and trans., Early Irish Lyrics: Eighth to Twelfth Century (Oxford, 1956; repr. Dublin, 1998).
3 David Greene and Frank O’Connor, ed. and trans., A Golden Treasury of Irish Poetry, A.D. 600 – 1200 (London, 1967); James Carney, ed. and trans., Medieval Irish Lyrics (Dublin, 1967). Another influential anthology has been Kenneth H. Jackson, ed. and trans., A Celtic Miscel any: Translations from the Celtic Literatures (London, 1951), which was initial y published by Routledge and has appeared in many subsequent reprints by Penguin, and
Medieval Irish Poetry
93
study of medieval Irish poetry has advanced hugely in the decades since then: large
numbers of previously unedited and untranslated poems have been made available,
although perhaps not sufficiently available since they can general y only be found in
specialist scholarly journals, such as Celtica, Éigse and Ériu. There is no collection aimed at the non-specialist reader which contains these newly-presented riches.
And, more frustratingly, in contrast to the corpus of Old English poetry, there
are countless medieval Irish poems – beautiful, complex microcosms of medieval
thought – which remain unedited and untranslated and thus entirely unavailable to
the non-academic reader.
The poems which have previously been selected for inclusion in anthologies have
been those which most closely conform to modern expectations of poetry, that is,
lyric poetry, narrative verse, occasional verse and nature poetry. In a 1996 essay
on medieval Irish poets and poetry, Liam Breatnach made the following pertinent
observations:
Doubtless the choice of texts in these anthologies was influenced by the fact that they were intended for a wider readership than the student of Old and Middle Irish, and an
important desideratum remains the compilation of an anthology specifical y designed
for students which would cover a much wider range of material in verse, both as
regards subject matter and metre.4
As Breatnach’s remarks suggest, twentieth- and twenty-first-century expectations of
what constitutes poetry have shaped the selection of texts for inclusion in antholo-
gies. When it comes to trying to draw a representative picture of the range and func-
tions of medieval Irish poetry, existing anthologies have an ultimately misleading
emphasis on lyric and nature verse. Two exemplary cases will suffice. The poem
which Murphy entitles ‘Blackbird by Belfast Lough’5 appeared in Thomas Kinsel a’s
New Oxford Book of Irish Verse in Kinsel a’s own translation:
The little bird
let out a whistle
from his beak tip
bright yellow.
He sends the note
across Loch Laíg
– a blackbird, a branch,
a mass of yellow.6
This poem exemplifies one common misconception regarding medieval Irish poetry,
namely, that it exhibits a particular love for nature which was uncommon elsewhere
in early medieval Europe. The same poem was translated by Seamus Heaney, who
which, in addition to specimens of poetry, contains short prose narratives and extracts from longer prose and prosimetric sagas. Jackson’s collection includes not only Irish literature but also examples from the literatures of other Celtic-speaking regions.
4 Liam Breatnach, ‘Poets and Poetry’, in Progress in Medieval Irish Studies, ed. Kim McCone and Katharine Simms (Maynooth, 1996), pp. 65–77, at p. 66.
5 Murphy, ed. and trans., Early Irish Lyrics, pp. 6–7.
6 Thomas Kinsel a, ed., The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse (Oxford, 1986), p. 30.
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Elizabeth Boyle
gave it the title ‘The Blackbird of Belfast Lough’. Heaney’s translation is included in Patrick Crotty’s The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry:
The small bird
chirp-chirruped;
yellow neb,
a
note-spurt.
Blackbird over
Lagan water.
Clumps of yellow
whin-burst!7
This type of marginal verse8 accorded well with Heaney’s close observation of the
local and the natural, and is representative of the verse which appears in all anthologies of Irish poetry and is most frequently adapted by modern poets. Similarly, the
small corpus of confessional lyric verse from early medieval Ireland has resonated
with modern poets. The tenth-century poem which Murphy entitled ‘On the Flight-
iness of Thought’9 was translated again by Kinsel a with the opening-line title ‘I’m
Ashamed of my Thoughts’:
I’m ashamed of my thoughts
and how they escape me.
I fear dreadful danger
on Doom’s endless day.
They stray, in the Psalms,
down paths not proper,
run riot, make mischief,
in God’s great eyes,
through bustling throngs,
and flocks of wild women,
through forests and towns,
more swift than the wind.10
The poem, which continues for another nine stanzas, encapsulates the struggle of an
ecclesiastical scholar to keep his mind away from worldly temptation and focused
on his edifying studies. It was translated into rhyming verse by Crotty in his Penguin Book of Irish Poetry and there given the title ‘Straying Thoughts’:
Shame on these thoughts of mine
that dart every way
7 Patrick Crotty, ed., The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry (London, 2010), p. 40.
8 By which I mean not only physical y marginal, in that such verses are sometimes found in the margins of manuscript pages rather than being the central or primary text on the page, but also marginal in the sense that they do not represent the concerns or subject matter of the bulk of the poetic corpus from early medieval Ireland.
9 Murphy, ed. and trans., Early Irish Lyrics, pp. 38–43.
10 Kinsel a, ed., The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, pp. 50–1.
Medieval Irish Poetry
95
they are piling up trouble
for Judgement Day.
At Psalms they dander
down unapproved roads
run riot in the face
of all-seeing God.
Through bustling crowds
through gaggles of girls
throug
h woods through cities
they swagger and swirl.11
The same poem was reimagined by Christopher Reid and given the title ‘Unruly
Thoughts’. This version is included in Maurice Riordan’s recent anthology The Finest Music:
Shame on my thoughts,
constantly at play!
I dread what their wild sports
will bring me on Judgement Day.
During psalms, they stravage
down every wrong road;
they roister, they rampage
in full sight of God.
At assemblies, at parties
of frivolous women,
through woodlands, through cities,
they go storming.12
Two broad observations can thus be made: that the same few poems appear again
and again in anthologies, and that they are translated and adapted with a certain
uniformity of tone, which is shaped by modern expectations of nature and lyric
poetry. These two (occasional y overlapping) types of verse have been understand-
ably attractive to modern poets and readers, not least because, of all surviving
medieval Irish poetry, nature and lyric verse most conform to what has been
the dominant aesthetic mode in western poetry since the Romantic period. The
appeal of such poetry is obvious. However, as I have already suggested, poems of
this type represent only a tiny fraction of the surviving corpus of medieval Irish
poetry, and even the idea that this tiny fraction constitutes a coherent genre has
been called into question.13 In a seminal article published in 1989, Donnchadh Ó
Corráin deconstructed the modern scholarship which identified among the ‘Celts’
11 Crotty, ed., The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry, pp. 14–16.
12 Maurice Riordan, ed., The Finest Music: An Anthology of Early Irish Lyrics (London, 2014), pp. 27–8.
13 See, for example, B. K. Martin, ‘Medieval Irish Nature Poetry’, Parergon 21 (1978), 19–32.
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an instinctive racial characteristic (in the discourse of the nineteenth century) or
ethnic sensibility (in the discourse of the twentieth) which pre-disposed them to
writing nature and lyric verse. As Ó Corráin showed, over time an image had arisen
(from the scholarship of Douglas Hyde, Robin Flower, Kenneth Jackson, Kathleen
Hughes and others) of isolated hermits expressing a peculiar form of ‘Celtic’ Chris-
tianity (which often appears as a barely-veiled paganism) through the composition
of nature poetry, and hence the identification of some early Irish nature and lyric
verse as ‘hermit poetry’.14 This image of the isolated hermit communing with, and
celebrating, nature has undoubtedly influenced modern translators and adaptors of
medieval Irish verse. Ó Corráin, however, dismissed as ‘naive’ the idea of early Irish
‘hermit poetry’. Indeed, he doubted ‘whether much of this is personal poetry’ and
argued rather for it being public, communal and/or educational (for example, verses
composed as teachers’ examples to il ustrate points about metrics or semantics),
rather than private, personal and confessional.15
Ó Corráin’s study was followed in 1996 by an essay by Patrick Sims-Williams
on the categorisation of early Irish and Welsh ‘nature poetry’ from an implicitly
post-colonial perspective,16 but aside from these taxonomic and historiographical
issues of so-called ‘nature’ and/or ‘hermit’ poetry, there has been little engagement
on a conceptual level with the categorisation and criticism of the various forms and
genres of early medieval Irish poetry. It remains the case that the range of poetry
that tends to be studied, translated, adapted, read and analysed is very narrow. One
serious consequence of the exclusion of other (more common) forms of Irish poetry
– poetry which is didactic, pedagogic, genealogical, cosmological, political or histo-
riographical, to give just a few examples – is that it contributes to a romanticised,
and sentimental view of medieval Irish poets as nature-loving, conservative and – in
many cases – only superficial y Christian. Maurice Riordan’s introduction to his
recent collection of translations of medieval Irish poetry is representative of this
view:
The lyrical spirit of the monastic poetry continues in typical y vivid observation of
nature, expressions of religious feeling, as well as recollections of pagan lore.17
Riordan perpetuates Murphy’s distinction – long since shown to be false – between
‘secular’ and ‘monastic’ poetry.18 Riordan accepts the model of medieval Irish
education which was dominant in the 1950s and 60s. This model set up a binary
opposition between ‘native’ and ‘ecclesiastical’ (the latter, by implication, ‘non-
native’) poetic traditions, which is unsupported by the evidence.
14 Donnchadh Ó Corráin, ‘Early Irish Hermit Poetry?’, in Saints, Sages and Storytel ers.
Celtic Studies in Honour of James Carney, ed. Donnchadh Ó Corráin, Liam Breatnach and Kim McCone (Maynooth, 1989), pp. 251–67. Ó Corráin cites at length il ustrative examples from the scholarship of Hyde, Flower et al.
15 Ó Corráin, ‘Early Irish Hermit Poetry?’, p. 264.
16 Patrick Sims-Williams, ‘The Invention of Celtic Nature Poetry’, in Celticism, ed.
Terence Brown (Amsterdam, 1996), pp. 97–124.
17 Riordan, ed., The Finest Music.
18 Murphy’s Early Irish Lyrics was divided into two halves, entitled ‘Monastic Poems’ and
‘Secular Poems’.
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97
More recent scholarly discourse on the most popular medieval Irish poems
has revealed a theological complexity to compositions which have hitherto been
regarded as playful examples of a peculiarly Celtic ‘delight in nature’. Perhaps the
best-known example is the poem beginning Messe ocus Pangur Bán, often known
as ‘The Scholar and his Cat’.19 This poem draws out the analogy between the work
of the scholar (hunting for meaning) and that of the cat (hunting for mice), but,
as Greg Toner has shown, the poem serves a serious theological purpose, namely
‘to demonstrate the very essence of Creation itself and the place of man and beast
within it’.20
There are further complexities to the presentation of examples of medieval Irish
poetry, in relation to their contextual setting. As is the case with Old Norse litera-
ture, much of medieval Irish narrative literature is prosimetric, that is, a combina-
tion of prose and poetry. Another common feature of anthologies of early medieval
Irish poetry has been to isolate poetic sections of narrative texts from their prose
contexts. Again, this has tended to be done with sections of lyric verse and/or poetry concerned with nature.21 However, as Geraldine Parsons has stated, a ‘general
principle that should be adopted in reading prosimetric texts’ is that the prose and
poetry ‘are intended to be read as a single unit’.22 Extracting the verse and reading
it as poetry isolated from its context again misleads the general reader, and is a
further example of modern sensibilities and stylistic expectations being imposed on
medieval literature.
The identification of some lyric verse is also made problematic by the fact that
much of the early medieval Irish ‘personal’ poetry is actual y a construct; that
is,
written in the voice of a poetic persona. For example, there is a large corpus of Middle Irish (i.e. composed between c. 900 and c. 1200) poetry written in the voice of St Columba (d. 597), which demonstrates the way that the use of poetic ‘masks’
was a common device in early medieval Irish poetry.23 A much-anthologised
example would be the eleventh-century poem written in the voice of Eve, which
19 For an incisive summary of previous scholarly comment on the poem, and a new
analysis drawing on patristic theology, see Gregory Toner, ‘“Messe ocus Pangur Bán”:
Structure and Cosmology’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 57 (2009), 1–22. Translated by Murphy as ‘The Scholar and his Cat’ ( Early Irish Lyrics, pp. 2–3); by Kinsel a as ‘Pangur Bán’
( New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, p. 31); by Paul Muldoon as ‘Myself and Pangur’ ( Penguin Book of Irish Poetry, ed. Crotty, pp. 16–17; The Finest Music, ed. Riordan, pp. 5–6).
20 Toner, ‘“Messe ocus Pangur Bán”’, p. 22.
21 Thus, for example, Murphy, Kinsel a, Crotty and Riordan all present numerous items of verse as stand-alone poems, when in fact they have been extracted from prosimetric
narrative texts.
22 Geraldine Parsons, ‘ Acal am na Senórach as Prosimetrum’, in Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Col oquium XXIV (2004) and XXV (2005), ed. Christina Chance et al. (Cambridge, MA, 2009), pp. 86–100, at p. 87.
23 Máire Herbert, ‘Becoming an Exile: Colum Cille in Middle-Irish Poetry’, in Heroic Poets and Poetic Heroes in Celtic Tradition: A Festschrift for Patrick K. Ford, ed. Joseph Falaky Nagy and Leslie Ellen Jones, CSANA Yearbook 3–4 (Dublin, 2005), pp. 131–40. For a broader discussion of the use of poetic ‘masks’ see Maria Tymoczko, ‘A Poetry of Masks: The Poet’s Persona in Early Celtic Poetry’, in A Celtic Florilegium: Studies in Memory of Brendan O Hehir, ed. Kathryn A. Klar et al. (Lawrence, MA, 1996), pp. 187–209.
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takes responsibility for the Fall of Man.24 Such is the prevalence of this device that one would certainly hesitate before suggesting that the author of ‘I am Eve’ was
even female. Indeed, it has been suggested that it is unlikely that the author of ‘The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare’ was a woman, and that the confessional nature
of that poem is a fictional construct, although this is ultimately unprovable.25
Thus we can see numerous complexities regarding the forms and functions of
medieval Irish poetry: the critical emphasis on lyric and nature verse; the tendency
