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ROMANCE
The study of romance in medieval Ireland has been
hindered by doubts about its literary merits, a certain
prejudice against its foreign origins, and by the sheer
number of such works and the lack of printed editions.
Thus, it is not yet possible to offer a full assessment
of the influences that shaped Irish romance or of its
place in Irish literary history. The period of written
romance in medieval Ireland broadly coincides with
Early Modern Irish (1200−1600).
The earliest evidence for romance occurs in an Irish
manuscript of the late twelfth century that contains a
catalog of traditional tales, among them one called
Aigidecht Artúir(The entertaining of Arthur). Several
trends were converging about this time to make Ireland
more receptive to Continental literature. Ecclesiastical
reforms brought Continental religious orders and a
realignment of the Irish learned classes. The new
learned class, the bardic families, concentrated on
eulogistic poetry designed to flatter the numerous petty
kings that emerged after the Anglo-Norman invasion.
One casualty was the traditional repertoire of Irish
prose tales, which lost much of their raison d’êtrein
the changed literary and political order. Moreover, the
new Anglo-Norman ruling class favored French liter-
ature, especially romance.
The influence of foreign romance at first mani-
fested itself indirectly. The traditional Irish tales
continued to circulate, but they were now altered in
quantity and quality under the influence of foreign
romance. Thus, the number of tales that enjoyed cur-
rency became much smaller. A principal casualty was
the cycle of Historical Tales (or King Tales). Even the
other two major groups of tales from Old-Irish liter-
ature, the Mythological Cycle and the Ulster Cycle,
underwent a process of severe selection. Most of the
newly selected tales dealt with love or the marvelous
or lent themselves to ready expansion with numerous
incidents of the marvelous—all characteristic features
of romance. Moreover, the tone was transformed. It is
telling to compare the ninth-century tale Longes Mac n-
Uislennwith its fourteenth-century revised counterpart,
Oidheadh Chloinne hUisneach. The former is marked
by a heroic ethos, austere style, and tight narrative in
contrast with the romantic ethos, verbose style, and
loose structure of the latter. A fourth group of traditional
tales, the Fenian Cycle, which related the deeds of Finn
Mac Cumaill and his fiana(band of warriors), had the
advantage over the older cycles of being still in forma-
tion after the Anglo-Norman invasion. Thus, it could
accommodate itself more easily to contemporary lit-
erary tastes. It also had a wealth of romantic matter:
elements of the marvelous (from folk tradition),
heroes, and the ill-starred lovers Diarmait and Gráinne
(compare Tristan and Iseult). The trend of tailoring
native tales to romantic tastes continued as late as the
fifteenth century.
By the fifteenth century the influence of foreign
romance became overt. The Norman-English settlers
had become so wedded to Gaelic society that they
were in a position to influence it directly, a process
helped by the fact that the English administration was
preoccupied with the political turmoil in England that
culminated in the Wars of the Roses. Romantic tales
of English and French origin, a central part of the
Anglo-Norman literary heritage, were now translated
into Irish. Representative works of the well-known
cycles of romance appear in translation: from “The
Matter of Britain,” “The Quest of the Holy Grail,”
from “The Matter of France” tales from the Charle-
magne Cycle; from “the Matter of Greece and Rome,”
Stair Ercuil(based on Caxton’s English translation of
the French); and from Middle English (fourteenth cen-
tury) such romances as William of Palerne,Guy of
Warwick, and Bevis of Hampton. In addition, transla-
tions were made of certain works that, although not
romance, contained elements of the marvelous; nota-
bly, The Travels of Marco Polo,The Travels of Sir John
Mandeville, the Letter of Prester John, and the Book
of Alexander.
Such were the foreign influences at work in the
shaping of the Irish Romantic Cycle (Ir. rómán-
saíocht). Its individual tales (in prose) are very diffi-
cult to date since most of them are anonymous and
written in a standardized literary language. Although
appearing mostly in manuscripts of the seventeenth
and eighteenth century, they were composed well
before that time as suggested by the presence of a few
of them in fifteenth-century manuscripts. Their
authors were professional men of letters, knowledge-
able not only in the native repertoire of stories and folk
motifs but also in foreign romances. In origin literary
(rather than oral) productions, they were intended for
oral delivery to an aristocratic audience.
For the most part their subject matter is drawn
from the exploits (real or imagined) of characters
from Ireland’s literary history: the court of Conchobar
of Ulster and his opponents, as portrayed in the Ulster
Cycle; Finn Mac Cumaill and his fiana as found in the