- Mythology and the Oral Tradition: Ireland -
element which sometimes has the effect of distorting rather than clarifying the
questions at issue. One of Carney's major contributions to Irish studies was his series
of valuable commentaries on the style, motivation and structure of early Irish verse,
and here again he was often concerned to stress the importance of its contemporary
and sometimes personal motivation. By contrast, however, when dealing with some
of the 'Leinster poems' already referred to he tended increasingly to ascribe them
to dates rather earlier than had been customary, and in a couple of instances even to
within the pre-Christian period: this kind of verse, he suggested, constituted 'the oral
archives of the kingship of Tara'.s
Prose, on the other hand, was a more fluid medium and its literal continuation
from oral to written correspondingly less likely, which, given that Irish (and
Welsh) narrative is characteristically in the form of prose, is a matter of considerable
importance in assessing the relative roles of the traditional and the exotic in its
composition. It is in its externals that early written narrative betrays most clearly
its literate origins. When Carney refers to its use of words borrowed from Latin, he is
pushing an open door; after all, the commonest of its terms for 'hero', laech, derives
from Latin laicus, and, it would indeed be surprising if the working vocabulary of the
monastic literati did not affect the texts they composed.^6 Even its characteristically
terse diction is a typically written style, though one that has almost certainly been
evolved from the less constrained medium of oral story telling.^7 It is when one
turns from the externals to considerations of theme and content that one finds sharp
differences of interpretation and presentation, not surprisingly perhaps. On the one
hand the use of Latin borrowings and the development of a distinctive written style
do not in themselves imply that the matter of the narrative is not, as it purports to
be, largely or essentially traditional. On the other, the considerable interaction and
collaboration evidenced from the sixth century onwards between vernacular and
monastic learning and between filidh and literati must inevitable have left its mark on
the matter as well as the form of written secular narrative. Authors and redactors
trained in biblical precedent would have been quick to see its analogies with native
tradition, as - to take only one example from many - when they compared Cormac
mac Airt with Solomon and, if we accept Gwynn's plausible suggestion, perceived the
analogy between the great hall of Tara and Solomon's House and Temple.^8
While some of Carney's assertions of borrowing from Latin/classical and ecclesi-
astical sources are at the very least evidentially improbable - for example that the
(seating) arrangement at formal gatherings in texts like Tain Bo Cuailnge derive from
the seating arrangement in heaven as presented in the vernacular religious text Pis
Adomnan 'Adomnan's Vision', that the Otherworld tree is taken from the Tree of Life
in Genesis, and that the familiar 'watchman device' is borrowed from Homer
(Iliad III.r6df.) 'through whatever intermediaries'9 (my italics) - the fact remains that
Irish thought and learning from the sixth century on was an interweave of native and
exotic, monastic constituents. One need only instance - apart from the Bible itself
- the remarkable impact of Isidore's Etymologiae on Irish learning, or the close blend
of native and 'external' concepts of the nature of art and poetic inspiration in
Old Irish didactic texts such as Immacallam in da Thuarad, 'The Converse of the Two
Sages'. As I have observed on other occasions, this confluence was probably
inevitable given the convergence and considerable overlapping of the professional