- Language and Society among the Insular Celts AD 400-1000 -
is most rhetorical. In T din B6 Cuailnge the situation which gives rise to rhetorical
language is different but even more ambiguous.132 Ailill and Medb have gone on an
expedition to seize the Bull of Cuailnge. They have been accompanied by Fergus, an
exile from Ulster, indeed former king of Ulster, whose heroism as a warrior was as
exceptional as his virility as a lover. Medb and Fergus make a secret assignation but
fail to escape the notice of Ailill who sends his charioteer to spy on them. The
charioteer removes Fergus's sword from its scabbard while the couple are making
love. Fergus is compelled to make a wooden sword which he puts in his scabbard in
place of the sword which has been removed. When the couple reappear and meet
Ailill, the latter laughs at Fergus and reproaches Medb and they defend themselves,
all in highly obscure rhetorical dialogue. The substitution of the wooden sword in
the sheath provides an opportunity for embarrassing riddling, but riddles are only
one element in a general heightening of the language.
Rhetorical Old Irish is not, however, the only form of the language which needs to
be set in its social context. One way to elevate the language is to use archaism. This is
more important in Old Irish than in Latin because the latter has a wider variety of
ways in which to render prose exotic: poetic vocabulary, Greek loans and even the
odd Hebrew item. In general, Irish had to make do with its own resources and
archaism was therefore a most useful device. This had probably long been the case. A
fair proportion of the ogam inscriptions date from a time when the form of the
language they use - called Primitive Irish by modern scholars - was no longer spoken.
Just as the Latin of post-Roman Britain stretched all the way from the grammatically
correct and highly wrought prose of Gildas to phrases betraying a radical ignorance
of the elements of Latin grammar, so too some ogam inscriptions are consistent in
language while others combine features from different periods. The latter appear to be
not only artificial in language but also incompetent in their archaism; the former may
sometimes be just as artificial but at least they were inscribed in accord with the rules
of a form of Irish which sometimes already lay in the past.^133 Archaisms in rhetorical
Old Irish may be just as artificial and just as genuine as Primitive Irish in an ogam
inscription: the tradition of using ancient language to elevate the style of a text has
been an enduring feature of Irish from the ogam period to modern times.
Even ordinary, non-rhetorical Old Irish is unlikely to represent the normal
spoken language of the people.134 It is notoriously free of dialect. How odd this is
can be seen from a comparison with Welsh, Old English and Old High German.
Modern Welsh dialect differences sometimes go back to the OW period:135 English
IF Tdin Bo Cuailnge, Recension I, ed. e. O'Rahilly, lines 1030-1146.
133 D. McManus, A Guide to Ogam, §§ 5.6, 5.7 (pp. 80-2).
134 On the learned character of Old Irish see K. McCone, 'Zur Frage der Register im friihen
Irischen', in S.N. Tranter and H.L.e. Tristram (eds) Early Irish Literature -media and
Communication/ Mundlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit in der fruhen irischen Literatur
(Tiibingen, 1989),84-7.
135 Old Welsh ceintiru (plural), in the Oxoniensis Prior glosses on Ovid's Ars Amatoria, St
Dunstan's Classbook, ed. R.W. Hunt (Amsterdam, 1961), fo. 38r, line 4, is South Welsh as
against cefndyrw: d. T.M. Charles-Edwards, 'Some Celtic kinship terms', Bulletin of the
Board of Celtic Studies 24 (1970-2): 107-8.