Flower The Irish Tradition

1. Auflage 1993
ISBN: 978-1-84351-306-3
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

First published in 1947, these celebrated lectures and introductions to the medieval and modern Gaelic-speaking culture, which was drawing to a close when Flower first came to Ireland in 1910, form a primary source for generations of scholars and readers, Celticists and medievalists. This edition is accompanied by Professor Delargy's In Memoriam and an updated bibliography of Flower's works.

ROBIN FLOWER was Deputy-Keeper of Manuscripts in the British Museum from 1929 to 1944 and a lifelong visitor to the Blasket Islands in Kerry. His books include the Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the British Museum (Vol.II, 1926), The Western Island (1944), and a translation of The Islandman (1934) by Tomáis O Criomhthain.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Flower, Robin

Leseproben

II

EXILES AND HERMITS

IT was in the ninth century that some wandering scholar from Leinster kept a commonplace book upon the shores of Lake Constance. He must have written down whatever in his day’s reading took his fancy—notes from a commentary on the Aeneid, excerpts from the fathers, some church hymns, a brief glossary of Greek words, some Greek declensions (not very accurate), and some very peculiar natural history.1 Amid a huddle of other sayings he has written down, too, that proverb of exile—‘caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt’—which the young Milton was afterwards to adapt to the album of a Neapolitan refugee at Geneva. Milton added a verse of his own stern poetry:

If virtue feeble were

Heaven itself would stoop to her.

And so our Irish wanderer remembered the poetry of his native land, perhaps his own poetry, and set down casually beside his Latin commonplaces and Greek declensions those verses which were to make him immortal. It is the first example we have in manuscript of the personal poetry of the Irish, and it is very characteristic that the verses should be concerned with the antics of a scholar’s cat. One is reminded of the quaint cat that twists its elongated form round the litany on the first page of the contemporary Irish Stowe Missal. This is the poem in which the student tells us of this companion.2

I and Pangur Bán my cat,

’Tis a like task we are at:

Hunting mice is his delight,

Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men

’Tis to sit with book and pen;

Pangur bears me no ill will,

He too plies his simple skill.

’Tis a merry thing to see

At our tasks how glad are we,

When at home we sit and find

Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray

In the hero Pangur’s way;

Oftentimes my keen thought set

Takes a meaning in its net.

’Gainst the wall he sets his eye

Full and fierce and sharp and sly;

’Gainst the wall of knowledge I

All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den

O how glad is Pangur then!

O what gladness do I prove

When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our tasks we ply,

Pangur Bán, my cat, and I;

In our arts we find our bliss,

1 have mine and he has his.

Practice every day has made

Pangur perfect in his trade;

I get wisdom day and night

Turning darkness into light.

It is to be hoped that white Pangur remained faithful to his master and did not yield to that peregrinatory passion (consuetudo peregrinandi) which we know to be characteristic of cats, and which Walafrid Strabo notes as a chief mark of the Irish of the ninth century. A later poet tells us that Irish cats were not free of this defect. Above the complaint ‘The white cat has gone straying from me’ he sets this cynical comment on feline and human nature:1

The kitling cat

Whose nurturing thou labourest at,

When he is come to cat’s estate

Goes wild and flees thee soon or late.

’Tis so with evil natures still

For, give them, as they grow, their will,

And, when to man’s estate they’re come,

They’ll fly their father and their home.

I cannot resist the temptation to add here a little tale of a cat’s pilgrimage from the Book of Leinster.2

Three students there were of the men of Ireland that went on pilgrimage. With zeal and heart’s love they went that journey. Three loaves was all the provender they took to sea. ‘I’ll take the kitling with me,’ said one of them. When they were come to the shoulder of the sea, ‘In Christ’s name,’ said they, ‘let us cast our oars into the sea and give ourselves into God’s hands.’ And so they did. It was not long till with Christ’s help they came to an island. ‘It is a lovely isle,’ said they, ‘with water and a plenty of firewood in it. So let us make a church upon the island.’ And so they did. Their cat goes and drags to them goodly salmon, as much as three salmons every day. ‘This pilgrimage of ours is no pilgrimage at all now,’ said they, ‘for we have brought our provisions with us, that is, our cat to be our provider. We will eat no more of the cat’s food.’ So they abode six days without food till there came a provision from Christ upon the altar, half a wheaten loaf and a piece of fish for each one of them.

The sequel of the tale in the Book of Leinster tells us how the human pilgrims died one after the other until only one grey old man was left to carry the burden of prayer and praise originally borne by the three. The poor cat had a gloomier fate. For, living on the salmon which its masters rejected, it swelled to the proportions of a monster and was destroyed by St. Brendan when, on his voyagings, he came to bring release of death to the last survivor of that pious company.

But it is time to return from the cat to his master, the wandering Leinsterman in Europe. The character of the poetry which he has interspersed amid the evidences of his variegated learning indicates clearly enough the district of his origin. First there is a bardic poem in eulogy of a chief of north Leinster, Aed son of Diarmait son of Muiredach. This is among our earliest examples of the panegyrical poetry so inordinately developed by the later bards. And as I do not propose to exemplify further this part of Irish poetry, a translation may be attempted.1

Kindler of glory’s embers,

Aed, goodly hand of giving;

Comeliest that song remembers

By pastoral Roeriu living.

A mighty shaft and loyal

Whom glory overarches;

Of all men else most royal

In grassy Maistiu’s marches.

My love—if such his pleasure—

To Dermot’s son I bring it;

My song—more worth than treasure—

To his high praise I sing it.

Dear name! renowned in story,

Aed! no man may decry him;

Where Liffey flows in glory

Fame’s voice shall ne’er bely him.

Grandchild of that fierce fighter

Muireach, a cliff of splendours,

Honour—no fame is brighter—

To his race Cualu renders.

A stately tree, a glowing

Jewel whom strife embolden;

A silver sapling growing

From soil of princes olden.

Songs at the alefeast ringing,

Scales climbed of comely measures,

Bards with their heady singing

Acclaim Aed and his pleasures.

In this poem—perhaps of the eighth century—the Irish panegyric style which was to rule for near ten centuries is already formed. We have materials for tracing its evolution from the sixth century onwards,1 and its characteristics are at all periods substantially the same. The style is always strict and concise; using metaphor in preference to simile; indulging in asyntactical constructions for which the exclamatory character of Irish sentence structure gives ample excuse; bold and barbaric in its terms and figures; and tending always to treat the chieftain eulogized as an abstract compendium of princely qualities rather than as a being subject to the ebb and flow of the more ordinary impulses.

The earliest examples of this poetry that we have are eulogies of the Milesian dynasties of Leinster and Munster. The placenames in the poem from the St. Paul manuscript point to north Leinster as the district of its composition. And much of the material that we have for the early non-official poetry points to this same Leinster-Munster district as the most productive region in the time of the saints. Poetry, indeed, was only one growth in a field of intense intellectual and religious activity. Most of the Latin manuscripts that have come down to us from the old Irish Church were written within the limits of the district. The chief theological literature, Latin or Irish, arose in the country lying south of a line drawn from Clonmacnoise through Clonard to Tallaght near Dublin. The main centres outside of this region, Bangor in the Ards of Ulster, and Iona off the Scottish coast, were in close and constant communion with the South. Comgall, the founder of Bangor, is said to have studied under Fintan of Clonenagh in Leix; whether this is true in fact or not is of little importance to the argument, for in any case it denotes that there was a close connexion between Bangor and Clonenagh. Columcille’s relations with Bangor and the South are very marked, and there was a regular intercommunication between Iona and these districts. In fact, if we study the lives of the saints of the sixth and seventh centuries we find that Columcille is to these writers the typical Irish saint far more than Patrick, who in these records is a somewhat intermittent and shadowy figure. The early disciplinary and canonical literature which one would have expected to find issuing from the metropolitan centre is to a considerable extent of southern origin. The writers of penitentials were Finnian of Clonard and Cuimíne Fota, a markedly Munster writer. There is some reason for believing that the collection of Irish canons...