- Chapter Thirty-Eight -
interests of traditional poet-scholars and monastic literati and given the fact that both
groups would have issued largely from the same social class and even from the same
families. In this context one can readily endorse and even enhance Kim McCone's
observation that 'Continuity with the pre-Christian past by no means precludes
significant changes on the way'.JO The problem is, of course, that the literary results
of this amalgam are now accessible to us only to the extent that they have survived in
texts written and transmitted in monastic schools and by monastic scholars. Of the
learned oral tradition which preceded the written and which continued alongside it,
obviously we know nothing except by written reference or by extrapolation from
the written texts. One may easily be inclined therefore, while not denying it, largely
to discount it, on the grounds that in Old Irish we have a homogeneous corpus of
learning and literature created solely in terms of the written text, a tendency this that
is all the stronger when accompanied by certain preconceptions about oral tradition.
James Carney speaks of 'primitive oral tradition' (my italics) and gratuitously
assumes a contrast between a dynamic written text and a 'stereotyped' oral text. I I In
the sense in which he uses them these terms are of doubtful relevance - for one thing,
the evidence of comparable situations elsewhere in the world is that oral 'histories'
have their own dynamic and are adapted to the requirements of contemporary or
local taste and circumstance just as often and as freely as written ones - but their
effect as used by Carney is to exaggerate the actual discontinuity, or mutation,
occasioned by the transition from the oral to the written phase. The nature of this
discontinuity is perhaps most easily summarized by indicating briefly what early
Irish literature as we know it is. Excluding its specifically ecclesiastical component
it is a corpus of texts in prose and verse comprising a wide range of matter and genre
- historical and genealogical, mythico-heroic, lyrical, dramatic, and so on - all of it
drawing upon secular tradition and all of it composed and written by monastic
scholars and inevitably influenced by the broad sweep of their ecclesiastical experi-
ence and learning. The creative dynamic of this combination is attested in the sheer
volume and variety of the literature it generated, in the rich diversity of metre it
produced, in the stylistic experimentation that produced written Old Irish narrative
prose, in the infusion of Christian and personal values and perspectives into tradi-
tional themes, in the aesthetic and philosophical preoccupation of certain monastic
litterateurs with the relativities of time and space in traditional tales of the
Otherworld, and so on. One cannot gratuitously assume that a corresponding oral
tale lies behind each written one, and one can think of other texts analogous to the
Old Irish store of Deirdre, Longas mac nUislenn, which is so finely crafted within
its compact frame that one feels it was probably first composed as a written tale.
Paradoxically, it is precisely these tales that seem most subtly and cunningly to
exploit the resources of traditional literature to invest their laconic prose with its
peculiar sense of complex allusion and resonance. But it is also true that the whole
corpus of Old Irish secular narrative supposes such a diversified oral tradition. On
this there is a broad measure of agreement: even a work such as Kim McCone's
Pagan Past, which is a thoroughgoing, articulate essay in maximizing the Latin
and biblical element in the literature, does in one way or another acknowledge the
substantial continuity from pre-literate and pre-Christian traditionP How this con-
tinuity is realized in writing will vary from one text to another: the early recension