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This article suggests that an iconographic design found on early instances of a series of Iron Age British coins may foreshadow medieval Celtic myths about fantastic boar. Parallels are drawn with traditions about Balar’s boar, Cú Chulainn and Formáel’s boar, and with the Welsh episode of Menw and Twrch Trwyth.
This article examines the patterns of history-writing in Geoffrey Keating’s retellings of the tales from the Ulster cycle in Foras Feasa ar Éirinn. The study illustrates how Keating’s familiarity with Irish medieval sources, his clerical education, which placed considerable emphasis on rhetoric, and his awareness of the English and continental traditions of history-writing, influenced the composition of the fragment of Foras Feasa ar Éirinn dedicated to the tales from the Ulster cycle. The author shows that in this fragment Keating tended to apply native narrative strategies more. As regards authorial intentions, Keating used the selected tales from the Ulster cycle as exempla of sin and its drastic consequences, which may explain his particular interest in the death tales.
This article presents an edition and translation of a short memorandum found in RIA MS 23 N 29 (Cat. 467). The text records the assassination of Mág Raghnaill, chief of Muintear Eólais, by rival members of his family on Easter Sunday 1502, and describes the assassins’ journey from Lough Ree to Lough Key with the slain chief’s ship.
In Cath Catharda, the adaption of Lucan’s verse epic Bellum Civile, is a hitherto little explored example of a medieval Irish translation of a classical text. This paper explores some aspects of its structure and its employment of sources, in particular its bipartite narrative architecture and its teleology, its use of medieval explicative scholia on Lucan’s text, and the format and the sources of its historiographical introduction. It is suggested that this introduction’s section on Roman history and political organisation derives from a source that is also reflected in a similar passage in the Old Icelandic Rómverja saga.
No single individual did more to ‘make Irish respectable’ in the decades before and after 1900 than the great German scholar Kuno Meyer. But while Meyer’s tireless activities as an editor and translator of Irish texts and as a populariser of ancient Irish literature has long been documented, less is known about his activities ‘behind the scenes’. A newly discovered cache of letters and postcards that Meyer sent to Douglas Hyde during the years 1898–1919 now reveals the full extent of that background activity and the extraordinary level of encouragement and support that he gave to the movement to establish a ‘native school’ of Irish scholars, culminating in the establishment (in 1903) of the School of Irish Learning in Dublin.
This article seeks to show that aspects of the late-attested myth of the origin of Cú Chulainn’s gae bolga ‘spear of the bulge’ illuminate medieval descriptions of another remarkable spear, an extraordinary horse that acts like a spear, and a divinatory rod wielded by a spearman: respectively, the lúin of Celtchar mac Uthechair, the Derg Drúchtach of Conall Cernach, and the flesc of a poet called Lugaid. This finding helps to demonstrate the essential integrity of what might otherwise seem arbitrarily fanciful passages in Mesca Ulad ‘The intoxication of the Ulstermen’, Brislech mór Maige Muirthemni ‘The great rout of Murthemne’ and Sanas Cormaic ‘Cormac’s glossary’. Also included in a footnote is a suggested solution to a crux in Lebor gabála Érenn ‘The book of invasions of Ireland’ concerning Lug’s gae Assail ‘spear of Assal’.
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