This volume, comprises a collection of Middle Irish texts and translations into English culled primarily from manuscripts of the tenth through twelfth centuries, those considered by the editors to be most illustrative of the distant Atlantic island’s response to Greco-Roman antecedents whether in direct translation, adaptation or inspiration. The anthology quotes from passages of a sufficient length to illustrate in their structure, style or themes a deep engagement with antique exemplars, as well as their quality as vernacular works of substantial literary art or transmission of knowledge in their own right. The earliest piece included is the Old Irish Auraicept na nÉces ‘The Scholars’ Primer’, composed as early as the eighth or ninth century; the latest text comes from the Stair Ercuil ocus a Bás ‘The Life and Death of Hercules’, which was probably translated from a fifteenth-century printed book in English.
In the first episode of Sir Kenneth Clark’s famous BBC series Civilisation, “By the Skin of our Teeth” (1969), the art historian remarks archly: “People sometimes tell me they prefer barbarism to civilisation. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial,” before going on to celebrate, somewhat paradoxically, the early Christian monasteries of pre-urban Ireland and the “Celtic West” as the crucial conservators of classical culture in northwestern Europe after the fall of Rome. Brent Miles, one of the contributors to this new anthology, has already explored in his Heroic Saga and Classical Epic in Medieval Ireland (2011) the surprising Latinity of these Christian communities of the insular North Atlantic, even in their never-Romanized world “back of beyond,” not only in the preservation of the Latin Bible, homilies and theological tracts, but in their sustained interest in Greco-Roman secular literature as well. Miles studies Irish prose vernacular narratives, most of which were probably not committed to writing until after the year 1000 and copied into manuscripts that survive from a century or two later. He uses these Middle Irish texts to assess the depth and continuity of Latin learning in the island, finding a steady commitment to study of the Latin classics from late antiquity when they were first introduced during Ireland’s conversion to Christianity in the fifth century. Even after raids and occupations by Scandinavian Vikings during the ninth and tenth centuries, there was little need to import new books in Latin from abroad—the libraries that survived were still well-stocked—so that writers in the vernacular could turn again to a study of the ancients during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, finding fresh interest in their native traditions as well. Miles proposes that bilingual Irish authors drew for their written retellings of traditional tales upon their experience of school exercises in Latin grammar and composition, noting that the text of the Hiberno-Latin Hisperica Famina ‘Westerly Orations’ (mid-seventh century) already reveals formal imitations of Virgilian epic similes and martial type-scenes. More distinctively, Christian Irish authors, unlike some of their British and continental counterparts, resisted a tendency to “redeem” ancient myth and legend, native or Greco-Roman, by allegorizing it, as in the Ovide moralisé of fourteenth-century France. Instead, Irish vernacular writers take the Roman poets—Virgil, Statius, Lucan, and their redactors—very much on their own terms, that is, as secular authorities who offer edifying examples of political leadership, military valor and moral challenge. The first recension of the Togail Troí ‘Fall of Troy’, for instance, is a fairly close vernacular rendering of its source, in this case, De Excidio Troiae Historia ‘History of the Ruin of Troy’ attributed to Dares Phrygius (fifth century CE). Irish authors found in this text themes they took to represent perennial conflicts of human will and heroic choice, which they could then adapt to re-imagine the lives and deaths of their own native heroes like Cú Chulainn and Fergus mac Róich, Queen Medb of Connacht and Conchobor of Ulster. Miles thus argues for a kind of precocious proto-humanism in the study of Latin literature in medieval Ireland, concluding that the monasteries of the island cultivated a consistently respectful attitude toward the multiple resources of their intellectual heritage: their Christian faith, of course, but also Latin secular learning which led them to a further interest in the many competing strands of their own archaic Celtic tradition as well. Latin poems supplied the literary forms and conceptual models that enabled the creative preservation of the teeming indigenous genres of narrative and discourse, as well as a more general cultural re-packaging and systematization of traditional lore cultivated among various regional chiefdoms by different classes of fili ‘seer, poet’, satirist and prose storyteller. There never was a revival of interest in the Greco-Roman classics in medieval Ireland, since these had never been lost and, in fact, showed Irish writers how to compose new classics about their own people in their own tongue.
Miles has contributed further thoughts to the current volume with chapters on later recensions of the Togail Troí. Indeed, he shows how this text, in particular, was progressively “Hibernized,” in that it remained faithful to its laconic Latin original while elaborating on that primary source in response to the conventions of traditional oral narrative:
The first iteration of Togail Troí was probably a fairly literal translation into Middle Irish from this simple Latin text … Against this model, a reviser of the original Togail Troí has constructed a greatly elaborated picture of Troilus’s martial feats. The Irish description includes no new details of the battle itself, but the intensity of the fighting is conveyed through a number of rhetorical techniques [including] features that may reflect actual Irish battle terminology … Praise for Troilus is expressed in the most flamboyant terms, for example the contention that, had he lived to the age of thirty, he would have ruled an empire that would span the known world, a claim that has no counterpart in Dares. (99)
These embellishments naturalize the text in native Irish tradition, distinctive for its “Celtic hyperbole,” as also seen in the tragic tale of Cú Chulainn’s slaying of his own son Connla who, had he lived, would have led the men of Ulster to “the gates of Rome and beyond.”
The Togail’s figure of Troilus shares other features with traditional Irish storytelling, especially his aristeia which is offered in terms comparable to the ríastrad ‘warp-spasm’ of Cú Chulainn in the Táin Bó Cúailnge ‘Cattle-Raid of Cooley’. A lón láich ‘hero’s light’ is seen to glow from Troilus’ head in the midst of his battle-frenzy, corresponding to the lúan láich shining from Cú Chulainn’s forehead during his bodily distortion and devastating “Six-Fold Slaughter” of the men of Ireland:
Now when Troilus beheld the great fury and the vehemence and the rage that the Myrmidons displayed, and when they cast their spears at him, fury and anger filled him, and the lón láich [hero’s light] arose out of his forehead until it was as long as his nose, and his two eyes came out from his head until they were as long as the measure of a fist around his head. His hair was like the branches of a thorn bush. He attacked the hosts in that form, like a vigorous lion full of lacerating ferocity that races to visit doom on a herd of boars. He slew one hundred and fifty warriors of the Greeks and Myrmidons at the first soldier’s onrush which he brought against them … [W]hat Troilus slew of the Greeks on that day alone constitutes one of the ‘unreckonable things of the Siege [of Troy]’. And it is hard to say whether anyone from the whole host escaped from him that was not lame or blind or deaf or maimed, after being cut and hacked by the thrust of his spear, by the bite of his sword, by the edge of his shield, by the tip of his fist, by the crook of his elbow, by the thick of his knee; (so that) he plied them together with the fragments of the stones, the frames of the chariots, the yokes of the oxen, the beams of the ploughs (?). Then he took the shields and the swords and the clubs and the spears, so that only their remnants lay in his hand after they had been broken in the smiting of his foes. So great was the number that fled that scarcely did Ajax son of Telamon stand his ground in their wake.
Yet despite this acculturation to native epic forms of narrative, subsequent redactors of the Togail also loved to regale readers with their own knowledge of the backstory of the Trojan War gained from reading Virgil’s Aeneid and his medieval commentators, further slipping in a list of the labors of Hercules and story of Jason and the Argonauts.
Nonetheless, these learned Irish authors had a complex attitude to the texts in the two languages they knew, their own and Latin. The competing colophons at the end of the Táin in the Book of Leinster (twelfth century) read: (1) In Irish: “A blessing on every one who will study/learn the Táin faithfully in this way and who will not add any other form to it,” an insistence upon strict adherence to textual authority that may itself have been learned from Roman masters; and (2) in Latin: “But I who wrote this historia, or rather fabula, do not give credence to certain things in this historia or fabula. For certain things in it are the deceptions of demons; certain things, however, are figmenta poetica; certain things resemble the truth, certain things do not, certain things are for the delectation of fools” (translated by Miles in Heroic Saga [2011] 1). This comment has sometimes been deplored by modern scholars for its bigotry, but actually reveals the kind of healthy critical distance that comes from long exposure to competing traditions of the past. And of course, the complaint about the “deceptions of demons” presumably refers to interventions by old Irish divinities in the action of the Táin, parallel to those of the Greco-Roman deities in classical epics. These are beings whom the scribe had been taught by St. Augustine to regard as devils in disguise. Yet, he considers other parts of the story to be perfectly plausible, even useful to contemplate, perhaps even historically true.
The editors remind us, therefore, that the “medieval Irish scribe is seldom a mere copyist; more often he regards himself as a fer léiginn ‘man of learning’,” a kind of independent and critical authority in his own right, so that his work often represents “creative scholarship rather than passive transmission” (xxiii). Irish scholars embraced Latin learning with such confidence and alacrity, they felt authorized to use it as a template from which order their own busy native traditions in a neat, comprehensible and universal scheme. The Chronicle of Eusebius-Jerome, for instance, which had coordinated the ancient history of the Assyrians, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans and other peoples in parallel columns from the time of Abraham, were joined in the eleventh century by a similar list of ancient Irish figures and events in a new column.
The anthology offers several such excerpts of chronology and correlation of traditions, as well as other popular narratives from classical antiquity, those preceding the Trojan War or describing its aftermath. These include versions of the kin-slaying of the family of Tantalus, the Cretan Minotaur, the labors of Hercules, the wanderings of Ulysses and Aeneas, the conquests of Alexander, “The Civil War” of Lucan, as well as retold tales of Hebrew myth and legend, like Samson’s slaughter of the Philistines. A final set of texts and translations includes contributions to world knowledge from Irish tradition on the model of classical or biblical precedents, like royal genealogies or schematized ages of history. The collection concludes with a table of its principal manuscript sources, a full bibliography and helpful index—a remarkable and convenient resource for both Celticists and classicists, as well as a long overdue demonstration of Sir Kenneth Clark’s piquing point long ago.