- Chapter Thirty-Eight -
Donegal, one can hardly dismiss it as an unsympathetic fiction, considering how
vividly it recalls the great inauguration rite of the horse-sacrifice, the asvadmedha,
in ancient India.ls If indeed they are analogous, then where must one seek the source
of Giraldus's report? That the rite was then obsolete in his time is indicated by other
accounts of roughly contemporary inauguration, and one can only conclude that it
reached Giraldus as an item of seanchas, or oral tradition, which remains wholly
unattested elsewhere.
NOTES
I Histoire de la Gaule II (Paris, 1908), 13 n. 5.
2 'Ces documents de langue britannique [sic], cycle mythologique irlandais, etc., sont en
grande partie des ceuvres artificielles, dues a I'imagination ou a I'erudition de conteurs
ou de demi-savants, et sont loin de donner l'echo fideIe de l'Irlande elle-meme, de
refleter ses croyances ou de conserver ses traditions. Trop de fantaisies individuelles ont
pu s'y glisser, trop de remaniements s'y sont produits.' Here and elsewhere Jullian uses
the term britannique as if it included the Irish language.
3 Cf. especially his Studies in Irish Literature and History (Dublin, 1955> repro with index
1979)·
4 'Modern evaluations of Celtic narrative tradition', Proceedings of the Second International
Congress of Celtic Studies', Cardiff, 1963 (Cardiff, 1966) 31-61 at 39.
'The dating of archaic Irish verse', in Stephen N. Tranter and Hildegard L.c. Tristram
(eds) Early Irish Literature -Media and Communication: Mundlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit
in der fruhen irischen Literatur (Tubingen, 1989) 39-55 at 41.
6 d. Carney, Studies .1.78; P. Mac Cana, 'On the word Liech "warrior"', Celtica I I (1976):
12 5- 6.
7 Mac Can a, Eriu 23 (1972): 102-42 at 107-17.
8 Edward Gwynn, The Metrical Dindshenchas I (Dublin, 1903, repro 1941, 1991),70-4.
9 On the 'watchman device' see Gerard Murphy, Eigse 8 (1955-7): 157 n. 3; Jan de Vries,
Heroic Song and Heroic Legend (London, 1963), 75-7; Patrick Sims-Williams, Studia
Celtica 12-13 (1977-8): 84-5.
10 Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature (Maynooth, 1990), 17.
I I Studies, 298, 319. Referring to variants of the 'watchman device' in the written literature
he comments that they indicate 'that we are dealing with a technique which is developing
rapidly from generation to generation within the literary period rather than with one that
was inherited in a stereotyped form from an oral tradition immemorially old'. In fact a
wider comparison of relevant material elsewhere shows that the supposed progressive
development of the topic in Irish is at best doubtful (d. P. Sims-Williams, Studia Celtica
12-^1 3: 84 n. 5).
12 Pagan Past, passim.
13 Mac Cana, Eriu 23 (1972): 102-42 at 107-14.
14 Carney, Studies, 296-7.
15 Topographia Hibernica III, 25; Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed. James F. Dimock, v
(London, 1967), 169; The First Version of the Topography of Ireland by Giraldus
Cambrensis, trans!' John J. O'Meara (Dundalk, 195 I) 93-4.