O’Sullivan, C. M. Hospitality in Medieval Ireland, 900–1500.
Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004.
Sexton, R. “Porridges, Gruels and Breads: The Cereal Food-
stuffs of Early Medieval Ireland.” In Early Medieval Mun-
ster: Archaeology, History and Society,edited by M. A.
Monk and J. Sheehan, 76–86. Cork: Cork University Press,
1998.
Sexton, R. A Little History of Irish Food. Dublin: Gill and
McMillan, 2001.
See alsoAgriculture; Crannóga; Famine and
Hunger; Fishing; Manorialism; Mills and Milling;
Trade
DINNSHENCHAS
The term dinnshenchas(lore of prominent or famous
places) denotes a popular genre of early Irish literature
that purported to explain the origin of well-known
Irish placenames. Material coming under this general
heading pervades almost all aspects of that literature;
it forms a significant part of such great literary works
asTáin Bó Cúalngeand, even more notably, Acallam
na Senórach, as well as cropping up in hagiographical
texts. In such works, some well-known place name is
mentioned and a question posed as to how it got that
name. There may also be reference to another name
(usually quite fanciful) by which the place was reput-
edly known prior to the incident said to have given
rise to the present toponym. The explanation is usually
given in terms of pseudoetymology, or the invention
of a suitable eponym. It may take the form of what
has been termed an “elaborate legendary anecdote”
relating to a fictitious, and often mythological, indi-
vidual and some imaginative incident in which he or
she was reputedly involved (e.g., a river or lake named
from a legendary princess said to have drowned there).
While such purported “explanations” may be enjoyed
as entertaining stories, they rarely if ever shed any
worthwhile light on the true origins or meaning of the
names, and therefore have little in common with the
results of modern scholarly study of placenames.
The collection specifically known as Dinnshen-
chas Érenn(thedinnshenchasof Ireland) is a large
body of toponymic lore put together in the eleventh
and twelfth centuries. It occurs as both poetry and
prose in a number of late medieval Irish manuscripts,
beginning with the twelfth-century Book of Leinster.
The relationship between the various recensions is quite
complex and has led to a marked diversity of views
among leading scholars. The following account is par-
ticularly indebted to the work of Tomás Ó Concheanainn,
who follows Rudolf Thurneysen in recognizing three
recensions.
Recension A, the metrical version, consists of a
series of 107 poems. In most cases, a single place is
the subject of a single poem, but some places (e.g.,
Benn Étair, Druim Fíngin, and Mag Femin) may be
treated of in more than one poem. This recension
occurs uniquely—albeit broken into four sections—in
theBook of Leinster; between the sections other material
is interposed, including elements of Recension B. (The
provincial division of the poems is as follows: 40 relat-
ing to Leinster, 26 to Connacht, 16 to Munster, 10 each
to Meath and Ulster, and 5 uncertain or involving more
than one province.)
Recension B, the prose version, comprises about
one hundred separate items and survives—albeit
incomplete— in three manuscripts: the Book of Leinster
and two from the sixteenth century—Rawlinson B 506,
in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and Gaelic MS XVI
in the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. (The
latter two can be designated, respectively, Bd and Ed.)
Recension C combines both prose and verse, 176
items in all, with the legend relating to a particular place
name given first in prose and then as a poem. The
recension occurs in several manuscripts from the four-
teenth to the sixteenth centuries, most notably in the
books of Ballymote, Lecan, and Uí Mhaine (all of which
were either complete or being compiled by the closing
years of the fourteenth century), and also in a manu-
script preserved in the municipal library in Rennes,
Brittany. The prose material from the Rennes manuscript
was edited by Whitley Stokes. (The recension occurs in
as many as nine other manuscripts, some of them from
as late as the eighteenth century, while scattered extracts
are found in several additional manuscripts.)
Edward Gwynn—to whom we are indebted for his
five-volume edition of the Metrical Dinnshenchas—
thought in terms of just two recensions, A and B
together and C, constituting his “First” and “Second”
Recensions, respectively. The traditional scholarly under-
standing was that the prose and metrical versions were
essentially separate, and Gwynn’s view was that the
prose had been “put together largely by making
abstracts of the corresponding poems... the prose
[being] usually no more than a brief extract from the
poem.” According to the same scholar, Recension C
(his “Second Recension”) was the result of a late
twelfth-century “Reviser” joining the poems of A to
the prose of B, and supplying further prose and verse
equivalents as necessary. Tomás Ó Concheanainn,
however, takes an entirely different view, seeing
Recension C as the earliest one, with B as “an abridged
recension made from the prose of C,” and A as “an
anthology... extracted from an early text of C.” He also
suggests the date 1079 as a superior limit to be assigned
to the formation of the extant versions of C, and he
identifies the anonymous twelfth-century man of learn-
ing whom Gwynn dubbed the “Reviser” as “in fact, the
original redactor of Dinnshenchas Érenn, though by no
means the author of all its components.”DIET AND FOOD