- Chapter Thirty-Eight -
institutions of an earlier time when Ireland was still innocent of Christianity and of
writing?
Written Irish - if we discount the ogam alphabet, which was not suited to the
recording of extended discourse - dates from the sixth century. It originated in a
monastic milieu and to all intents and purposes it remained a monastic monopoly for
the next six hundred years. In its early stages it seems to have been confined mainly
to historical and panegyric verse and to short formulistic legal texts. One group of
poems, commonly referred to as the 'Leinster poems' because of their concern
with Leinster history, is considered particularly significant for the evolution of the
orthodox presentation of native history and genealogy during the first couple of
centuries of Christianity. In particular it exemplifies the great monastic design
of grafting native historical and genealogical tradition on to Christian world history,
so that the ancestor of the Leinstermen, Labraid Loingsech, is himself made the
descendant of Noah and Adam; the enterprise in learned ecumenism first glimpsed
in these poems was subsequently extended and elaborated by generations of scholars
until its final culmination in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in the great synthetic
history of Leabhar Gabhdla, literally 'The Book of the Taking'. The conscious
and sustained shaping of this amalgam of ecclesiastical learning and native tradition
throughout the period of Old and Middle Irish is in itself the clearest caution against
assuming any consistent correspondence between the extant corpus of text and the
oral learning and literature of the pre-literate era. The same monastic milieux and
in large measure the same literati who from the seventh century on produced a
substantial learned and ecclesiastical literature also generated a rich manuscript
corpus of heroic and mythico-historicalliterature conforming broadly to traditional
genres and categories. That the individual texts which make up this literature
were shaped in varying degrees by the intellectual ambience in which they were
composed and by the exotic learning of their monastic authors is beyond dispute;
there is clear enough evidence of it in their vocabulary and content. Where agreement
falters is with regard to the extent of this monastic innovation and the degree of con-
tinuity, or discontinuity, between the new written literature and the oral literature
which preceeded it and later coexisted with it.
James Carney (1914-89), a scholar of great literary and philological insight,
reacted to what he perceived as an exaggerated regard for the role of tradition on
the part of some of his older colleagues whom he dubbed 'nativists' by seeking
to demonstrate that the written literature of Old Irish was largely a new creation
deriving much of its motivation and substance from the Latin learning of the monas-
teries.^3 Whether the academic divisions of opinion were anything like as constant and
clear-cut as he implies is open to question - from a different vantage-point, that of
the anthropologist-mythologist observing the ingrained preconceptions of the
philologist, Alwyn D. Rees remarks of Celtic scholars in general, including at least
some of those whom Carney takes to task, that 'they seem to have a predisposition
to minimize the continuity of the native tradition ... into historical times.'4 Yet
undoubtedly Carney's critical revisionism provided a healthy deterrent and counter-
balance to uncritical acceptance of the traditional character of the new literature, even
if his vivid advocacy of his views has had the effect of polarizing the terms in which
the argument continues to be prosecuted, thereby imbuing it with a polemical