- Chapter Thirty-Six -
Hadrian.^126 At Aldhelm's level issues of scholarly and national prestige came
together. The competition in the Hisperic Colloquy is on a humbler, more local
scale. The principal weapon used by the contestants is just what we should expect
from reading Columbanus: rare and exotic vocabulary. Such a competition explains
the purpose of the Hisperica Famina, indeed the function of Hisperic Latin
itself. The scholar of high status does not merely speak Latin, he faminates Ausonica
dictamina.^127 For someone approaching this linguistic phenomenon from outside,
the result seems ludicrous self-advertisement. It is only within a society divided
into numerous ranks and within an aes dana governed by competition that such
linguistic behaviour makes sense.
A similar phenomenon appears in Old Irish. In the laws, and occasionally in
prose tales, we meet text marked by unusual vocabulary, allusive turns of phrase,
including kennings, and some syntactical peculiarities.^128 Several devices, therefore,
distance such text from normal prose whether it is exposition of the law or narrative.
U sing a term which has been employed for some examples of consciously elevated
and rarefied text, I shall call this form of the language 'rhetorical Old lrish'.129 In the
Hisperic Colloquy, as we have seen, the social situation which called for exotic Latin
was uncertainty in the relative status of two or more persons. This characteristically
arose from the arrival of a stranger whose learning might pose a threat to the native.
In Tochmarc Emire, the Wooing of Emer (by Cll Chulainn), there are passages of
rhetorical Old Irish, including kennings and riddles, at the point at which Cll
Chulainn first approaches Emer.13o Within these passages there are clear echoes of
Latin, but, curiously, not so much of Hisperic Latin as of the style of elementary
grammars.l3l In this instance, display of Latin learning, however rudimentary,
marked Irish as rhetorical. This is not true for didactic Old Irish (law, exegesis,
grammar) in which elementary Latin style appears in equally elementary contexts. In
Tochmarc Emire, it should be noted, rhetorical language marks the opening of
Cll Chulainn's courtship of Emer, not its success. When the relationship between
them is most uncertain -when it most urgently calls for clarification -the language
126 Aldhelm, Letter 5, ed. R. Ehwald, Aldhelmi Opera Omnia, MGH, AA xv (Berlin, 1919),
no. 5 (pp. 486-94); trans!' in M. Lapidge and M. Herren, Aldhelm: the prose works
(Ipswich, 1979), 163.
127 The Hisperiea Famina: I. the A-text, ed. M. Herren (Toronto, 1975), lines 37-41.
128 D. Greene, 'Archaic Old Irish' in Indogermaniseh und Keltiseh, ed. K.H. Schmidt
(Wiesbaden, 1977), II-33; L. Breatnach, 'Canon law and secular law in early Ireland: the
significance of Bretha Nemed', Peritia 3 (19 8 4): 439-59, esp. 452-9.
129 P. Mac Cana, 'On the use of the term retoirie', Celtiea 7 (1966): 65-90, argues that the orig-
inal use of the marginal abbreviation .r. was not for retoirie but for rose or roscad; for
another suggestion, see D. Melia, 'Further speculation on marginal .r.', Celtic a 21 (1990):
362-7. I am not trying to revive a discredited interpretation but only to characterize a type
of Old Irish which had affinities with a type of Latin. It is the third type of text marked
by .r. distinguished by Mac Cana, p. 89.
130 Toehmarc Emire, §§ 17-27, ed. A.G. Van Hamel, Compert Con Culainn and Other Stories
(Dublin, 1933), 26-32.
IJI Ceist, § 26, and ni hansae, §§ 20, 22. On these see T.M. Charles-Edwards, 'Review article:
the Corpus Iuris Hibernici', Studia Hibernica 20 (1980): 147-50.