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language: Middle Gaelic (tr. Ann Dooley and Harry Roe)
country: Ireland-Scotland
year: medieval
form: saga(?)
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 30.8.25-15.9.25
Ann Dooley and Harry Roe’s translation of Acallam na Senórach, published as Tales of the Elders of Ireland, does, I think, a great job of conveying both the appeal and the frustrations of the text.
I should start by saying that it is, in some ways, a frustrating text. a lot of this is simply unavoidable: while an enormous and to a great extent still unreckoned-with body of medieval Gaelic literature has survived into the present, an even more enormous body of medieval Gaelic literature has not. this makes the structure of the Acallam a bit difficult: it follows — mostly — Caílte, one of the last surviving heroes of the Fían (band of wandering warriors) led by the hero Finn mac Cumaill, who early in the text encounters Saint Patrick, who is in the process of establishing and consolidating a Christian community in Ireland. Caílte — occasionally joined by Finn’s son Oisín — is asked to tell stories about the adventures of the Fían, both by Patrick and by the various kings, queens, warriors, and Otherworldly persons they encounter during Patrick’s travels and during Caílte’s final few adventures. these stories, written down for posterity, are presumably the stories that comprise the Acallam itself — a performance of its own textuality that I do very much love.
the main difficulty here is that many of the stories are brief — snippets or anecdotes that assume some prior familiarity with the characters (so many of them) and context. presumably the scholarly community that produced the text was familiar with at least some of these stories and characters at greater length — this is part of how Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams read the enigmatic medieval Welsh poem “Preiddeu Annwfn”, for example, as reflecting a body of traditional knowledge to which we do not have access. unlike “Preiddeu Annwfn”, the Acallam is not — or does not to me appear to be — an attempt to set traditional knowledge above ecclesiastical learning (if anything it is very consciously an attempt to harmonize the two, a classic medieval Gaelic move), but it still is very clearly a rhetorical performance of traditional knowledge. Caílte as storyteller embodies the old, welcomed by Patrick into the new in exchange for sharing his enormous store of knowledge. he’s even got a de facto heir, the musician Cas Corach, son of Caincinde, welcomed into the faith by Patrick (who eventually sets him up with a wife) and instructed in “lore” by Caílte.
a secondary difficulty is simply the volume of material. there are so many stories, so many characters, and it at times is difficult to track them all, or to do more than let them wash over you. most of the stories are place-lore: Caílte and whoever he’s traveling with come to a new place, and someone asks the reason for the place’s name. conveniently, not only does Caílte always know the reason, but also he was usually personally present for whatever battle or tragedy or whatever else the name commemorates.
this is also, though, part of what’s good about the text. first there is the humorous angle: the text becomes a lot funnier if we approach it with some skepticism about Caílte’s depth of knowledge — how convenient that you just happened to be there! oh, and also there. and over here, too? wow! thank you for sharing your knowledge with us, o great warrior. this approach feels particularly relevant when names start recurring (in different places as far as I can tell) with different stories.
but also I’m just…compelled by place-lore — the way the composers of the Acallam understood history to be inscribed on the land, and even to be inscribed two or three levels deep. many places are identified both by a current name and by one or more older names — and each name points to a story. some of the names survive into the present; some of them do not. either way, they are a powerful testament to the depth of Gaelic history in Ireland, against centuries of colonialism and an —at best — indifferent postcolonial state, even as it is concealed under sometimes opaque anglicizations.
there’s a lot of other interesting stuff going on here, as well — not systematically, but scattered tantalizingly throughout. the Túatha Dé Danann as political actors, embedded in material, political-economic conditions — not fading into the Otherworld (or not exactly) but being subsumed into the Milesian population. conversely, an imagined past where all of Ireland seems to be at peace, or rather where the kings of the five provinces are not at war and do not seem to be politically at odds. a tension between a piously Christian disapproval of polygamy and an unwillingness to criticize it among the Fían — some wild gender politics here in general, and I think it could be interesting and productive to interrogate the Acallam’s relationship to surviving medieval law-texts on marriage, sex, and divorce. an abiding sense of grief, that despite Caílte passing on his store of knowledge — and a great deal of wealth — to Patrick and Cas Corach, something is being, perhaps irrevocably, lost.
much to consider. really glad I finally read it.
moods: adventurous, informative, wacky