Medieval Invasions in Modern Irish Literature

J. Ulin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137297495
• eBook ISBN: 9781137297501
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Medieval Invasions in Modern Irish Literature offers the first book-length treatment of the literary return to and reinterpretation of Giraldus Cambrensis's twelfth century The History of the Conquest of Ireland. Writers studied include W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, James Joyce, Sean O'Faoláin, Micheál Mac Liammóir, Brendan Behan and Jamie O'Neill.

1

Modern Disruptions

In the sixth chapter of his twelfth century Topography of Ireland, Giraldus Cambrensis offers the following description of an island off the west coast of Ireland:

There is an island called Aren, situated in the western part of Connaught, and consecrated, as it is said, to St. Brendan, where human corpses are neither buried nor decay, but, deposited in the open air, remain uncorrupted. Here men can behold, and recognise with wonder, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, and great-great-grandfathers, and the long series of their ancestors to a remote period of past time. (Cambrensis 64)

It is a richly evocative description and one which might well serve as a microcosm of the landscape of Irish literature, in which historical ancestry and the past resist the processes of concealed decay within graveclothes or beneath the soil. Instead, the bodies on this island remain exposed and available to the present gaze. A contemporary spectator may recognize not only the past’s imperviousness to death but his own relationship to an eternally available history. The sense of wonder emerges from recognition of the past, its eternal presentness, and the spectator’s position within a “long series” that begins but is not contained within the “remote period of past time.” That the island is consecrated by St. Brendan the Navigator is all the more fitting; the present is mapped onto a past which provides generational and historical navigation. Sacrificed in this moment of recognition is the belief in the past as “remote.” The spectator’s recognition of the relationship between the past and the present requires that he learns to read the “human corpses” not as the anonymous dead but as his inherited ancestry.

In the footnotes for his 1905 edition of Cambrensis’s The Topography of Ireland and The History of the Conquest of Ireland, Thomas Wright amends the location of this island from Aran to Inisgluair in Co. Mayo. This correction of Cambrensis’s twelfth century narrative not only creates a textual space in which medieval and modern text contest one another, but reflects the competing narratives characteristic of nineteenth century publications of medieval texts and later compilations, annals and histories. While Cambrensis’s account of the island promises the ability to read backward through a long series coherently, Wright’s emendations suggest instead that the process of looking backwards is complicated by conflicting accounts, misreading, and dislocations. In the mid to late nineteenth century, the publication of Irish manuscript sources that “corrected” Cambrensis’s version of 1152–1172 fractured the causal narrative of Ireland’s colonial origin story in ways that allow later writers to challenge that history and alter its legacy.

In 1831, George Petrie acquired a holograph copy of Annals of the Four Masters, initiating a period of active acquisition by the Royal Irish Academy of manuscripts from private collections for the purposes of making them publicly accessible through translations and printings.¹ Nearly a century later, in their A Short History of the Irish People (1927), Mary Hayden and George A. Moonan would look back upon this mid to late nineteenth century period from the other side of the Irish Literary Revival, acknowledging the crucial impact of “the publication of a number of works which had lain in manuscript for many centuries” on shaping the understanding of Irish history and fostering its international study (Hayden and Moonan 575). Likewise, W. B. Yeats would refer to this period as “the forming period of Irish nationality” (Pearce 76).

In a series of lectures delivered in 1855 and 1856 on manuscript sources for Irish history, Eugene O’Curry repeatedly uses burial references to emphasize the Irish past recorded in unpublished and untranslated manuscripts. O’Curry discredits earlier historians because of their failure to consult the store of Irish language historical manuscripts: “All were ignorant, almost totally ignorant, of the greater part of the records and remains of which I have here, for the first time, endeavoured to present a comprehensive and in some sort a connected account” (O’Curry ix). Any attempt to write an Irish history, he argues, will require first an unlearning: “they must first cast behind them almost all that has yet been printed on the subject ... for the history of ancient Erinn is as yet entirely unwritten, and her antiquities all but unexplored” (437). For O’Curry, this means not only that the past is not understood, but that the past’s relationship to the present is as yet unacknowledged. Encouraged by the “increasing interest” in the manuscript materials, O’Curry argues for the central position that should be occupied by “that which still lies buried in our Irish MS. Libraries” and mourns that “still the great sources of genuine historical and antiquarian knowledge lay buried in those vast but yet almost entirely unexplored compilations, which to my predecessors were inaccessibly sealed up in the keeping of the ancient Gaedhelic, the venerable language of our country” (emphasis mine, 436, ix, vi). In a lecture dated July 22, 1856, O’Curry questioned how a history of Ireland could be written when these sepulchral manuscript sources “have not really been examined by any other eye than my own in our generation” (436). O’Curry alone bears witness “to the vast extent of these, I may say, yet unopened materials,—the long-neglected, long-decaying wealth of national records” (436). In his call to others to begin to look upon these texts and recognize their significance, O’Curry makes clear that the gaze will not reveal only the past, but will, as on the island Cambrensis identifies, reveal the past’s relationship to the present: “History is really valuable when it revives and strengthens the bond which connects us with our forefathers,—the bond of sympathy, of respect towards themselves,—of pride and emulation of their brave deeds and their love of country” (455).

Six months after this lecture, on January 26, 1857, the Master of the Rolls submitted a plan to Her Majesty’s Treasury for the publication of ancient chronicles. The project was deemed an “important national object” and the plan was adopted (Todd 4).² The result was a proliferation of historical texts edited and translated from manuscripts and available for purchase at four key booksellers, one of which was located in Dublin. By 1891, ninety-seven volumes had been published, ranging from “the earliest time of British history” through the end of the reign of Henry VII. This publication initiative represented a movement generated not only by official English bodies but also by Irish societies such as the Gaelic Society, Iberno-Celtic Society, Irish Archeological Society, Irish Texts Society, Royal Irish Academy, Celtic Society, Gaelic League and the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language (Hayden and Moonan 576–77).

With the translation and publication of Irish language manuscript sources, new versions of the twelfth century events circulated that challenged Cambrensis’s account of the twenty year period preceding the arrival of King Henry II. These newly available editions of historical source texts disrupt the causal narrative structure which identifies the abduction of Dervorgilla as the inciting event for the Norman invasion of Ireland. Nineteenth century editions of these sources featured calls from historians in notes and prefaces to cease to privilege the abduction in narratives of the conquest and to relinquish romance in favor of history. Yet in spite of such calls, the twenty year period from 1152 to 1172 lingered in the realm of romance and poetry, and the survival of the romantic causal narrative structure that elevated Dervorgilla to the status of Helen of Troy in the face of a “terribly accurate and painfully verifying” age showed the imperviousness of Cambrensis’s version to challenges (Balfour 18). Indeed, while historians repeatedly rebuked the status granted to Dervorgilla in Cambrensis’s narrative and in a number of subsequent histories, their more “accurate” versions were no match for Ireland’s own Homeric epic, featuring the abduction of a beautiful woman with catastrophic consequences.

Giraldus Cambrensis’s The History of the Conquest of Ireland opens with the description of Dervorgilla’s abduction, cementing a causal structure that will be followed by later writers identifying it as inciting the invasion.³ Cambrensis’s account of the period between the abduction of Dervorgilla and Diarmuid Mac Murrough’s request to King Henry II to aid Diarmuid in the repossession of his kingdom offers little indication of the fourteen year gap between the 1152 abduction and Diarmuid’s banishment and subsequent request to Henry II for aid in 1166:

Dermitius, the son of Murchard, and prince of Leinster, who ruled over that fifth part of Ireland, possessed in our times the maritime districts in the east of the island, separated only from Great Britain by the sea which flowed between. His youth and inexperience in government led him to become the oppressor of the nobility, and to impose a cruel and intolerable tyranny on the chiefs of the land. This brought him into trouble, and it was not the only one; for O’Roric, prince of Meath, having gone on an expedition into a distant quarter, left his wife, the daughter of Omachlacherlin, in a certain island of Meath during his absence; and she, who had long entertained a passion for Dermitius, took advantage of the absence of her husband, and allowed herself to be ravished, not against her will. As the nature of women is fickle and given to change, she thus became the prey of the spoiler by her own contrivance. For as Mark Anthony and Troy are witnesses, almost all the greatest evils in the world have arisen from women. King O’Roric being moved by this to great wrath, but more for the shame than the loss he suffered, was fully bent on revenge, and forthwith gathered the whole force of his own people and the neighbouring tribes, calling besides to his aid Roderic, prince of Connaught, then monarch of all Ireland. The people of Leinster, considering in what a strait their prince was, and seeing him beset on every side by bands of enemies, began to call to mind their own long-smothered grievances, and their chiefs leagued themselves with the foes of Mac Murchard, and deserted him in his desperate fortunes. Dermitius, seeing himself thus forsaken and left destitute, fortune frowning upon him, and his affairs being now desperate, after many fierce conflicts with the enemy, in which he was always worsted, at length resolved, as his last refuge, to take ship and flee beyond sea ... . Mac Murchard, submitting to his change of fortune, and confidently hoping for some favourable turn, crossed the sea with a favourable wind, and came to Henry II, king of England, for the purpose of earnestly imploring his succour. (Cambrensis 184–85)

While the above excerpt suggests that some time has elapsed between Diarmuid’s abduction of Dervorgilla and his appeal to Henry II (the people of Leinster have “long-smothered grievances,” Diarmuid suffers “many fierce conflicts” which cause him to seek aid “at length ... as his last refuge”), these hints do little to counteract the power of the causal narrative structure that Cambrensis imposes in aligning Dervorgilla with Helen of Troy and Cleopatra. The narrative thread connecting her to the arrival of Henry II in Ireland depends upon concealing a fourteen year interval between her abduction and Diarmuid’s banishment. Thus Cambrensis’s twelfth century historical narrative contains an inherent anachronism; the most influential record of that history unites disparate time periods and eclipses periods deemed “uneventful” in order to construct and impose a particular causal narrative. In Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations (1744), Giambattista Vico defines four varieties of anachronism:

1) To portray a period full of events as void of them

2) To portray a period void of events as full of them

3) To unite times that should be divided

4) To divide times that should be united. (Vico 251)

Cambrensis’s account of the twenty year period between 1152 and 1172 participates in anachronism as Vico defines it, principally types 1 and 3 above; the years between Dervorgilla’s abduction and Diarmuid’s banishment from Ireland are portrayed as void of events and all but eliminated by him. Cambrensis unites this twenty year period in a few sentences, and in doing so creates an anachronistic causal narrative structure that only begins to be complicated by the translation, editing, printing and circulation of Irish historical sources in the nineteenth century.

In the mid to late nineteenth century, the translation and publication of a number of Irish histories began to offer new contexts for the events of 1152–1172 and to challenge Cambrensis’s construction of the causal relationship between the abduction of Dervorgilla and the conquest. While The Annals of Clonmacnoise, for example, confirms the centrality of the abduction of Dervorgilla in Diarmuid’s banishment and decision to seek aid from Henry II, other accounts resist this narrative by including history prior to Dervorgilla’s abduction and by emphasizing the time lapse between her abduction and Diarmuid’s invitation to Henry II as well as the conflicts among regional rulers in Ireland. These texts offer multiple reasons both for Diarmuid’s banishment and for his return to seek revenge, and shed new light on the historical Diarmuid Mac Murrough, Tiernan O’Rourke and Dervorgilla. Most importantly for the purposes of this book, the multiple contexts and narratives available in these new publications offered a chance for nineteenth and twentieth century writers to begin to challenge the supremacy of Cambrensis’s narrative construction of twelfth century Irish history.

Compiled in the 1630s and published in seven volumes which appeared from 1848 to 1851, Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland by the Four Masters from the Earliest Period to the Year 1616 represented a foundation upon which O’Curry argued “the only valuable, the only complete and rich history, then, the only worthy, the only truly intelligible history of ancient Erinn” must be based (O’Curry 443).⁴ The account of Dervorgilla’s abduction in Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland reads as follows: “On this occasion Dearbhforgaill, daughter of Murchadh Ua Maeleachlainn, and wife of Tighearnan Ua Ruairc, was brought away by the King of Leinster, i.e. Diarmuid, with her cattle and furniture; and he took with her according to the advice of her brother” (O’Donovan 1103). Editor John O’Donovan, however, does not allow the account to stand alone but instead supplements it with the far more damning and evocative account from The Annals of Clonmacnoise. The Annals of Clonmacnoise, though translated into English in 1627, was not printed for the first time until 1896. It closely corresponds to Cambrensis’s version in directly linking the abduction of Dervorgilla to Diarmuid’s banishment from Ireland. The account of the abduction itself, which O’Donovan appends to the rather bland account contained in Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland, offers a much more negative portrait of Diarmuid while offering some justification for Dervorgilla’s participation in her abduction:

Dermott McMurrogh king of Leinster tooke the lady Dervorgill, daughter of the said Morrogh O’Melaghlin, and wife of Tyernan O’Royrck, with her cattle with him, and kept her for a long space to satisfie his insatiable, carnall and adulterous lust, she was procured and enduced thereunto by her unadvised brother Melaghlin for some abuses of her husband Tyernan O’Royrck don before. (Murphy 199–200)

In supplementing the account in Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland with the account in The Annals of Clonmacnoise, O’Donovan provides two competing accounts of the abduction. While in the primary account, Dervorgilla is “brought away” by Diarmuid at the advice of her own brother, the footnoted account from The Annals of Clonmacnoise foregrounds the crime committed by Diarmuid. Here he “tooke the Lady” and her cattle and “kept her for a long space to satisfie his insatiable, carnall and adulterous lust.” This far more menacing account adds the additional information that her brother’s advice comes because of “some abuse” she had suffered at the hands of her husband O’Rourke, an allegation upon which Dervorgilla’s later defenders will seize.

O’Donovan’s edition of Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Medieval Causes
• 1 Modern Disruptions
• 2 Medieval Cycles
• 3 Modern Escapes
• Conclusion: Medieval Genealogies and a Modern Medieval Obituary
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index