10 - ‘Wrenching the club from the hand of Hercules’: Classical models for medieval Irish compilatio

Summary

This short chapter will present an attempt to respond to two metaphorical statements that have played a part in the delineation of responses to the role of Classical literary models in the inspiration and interpretation of medieval Irish narrative material. One of these statements is old, one more contemporary. The newer one is the widespread critical assumption that Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle-Raid of Cooley) represents an Irish equivalent to Virgil’s Aeneid, the older is a lateantique and medieval commonplace examining Virgil’s relationship to his Homeric sources, and assessing his work in the creation of the Aeneid as that of compilator, or compiler, as much as auctor, or author.

A developing scholarly awareness of the significance of medieval ideas of compilatio has enhanced our appreciation of compilation as an aspect of Irish literary practice, and a consideration of medieval views of compilation invites us to look at the medieval treatment of authors understood as compilers in this light. Alongside the fine-grained studies of lexical and thematic borrowing and modelling represented in other chapters in this volume, it seems appropriate to explore the understanding of Classical compilatory practice available to the producers of medieval Irish narrative, and to examine the relationship between the Virgilian inheritance and the production of vernacular Irish narrative within the broad interpretative and theoretical framework that compilatio provides. It is hoped that an examination of these aspects of Irish engagement with Virgil may offer some new perspectives on the connections between the medieval Irish experiences of reading Latin texts and writing vernacular ones.

Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century responses to Táin Bó Cúailnge are readily contextualized in Revivalist attempts to gather status for a redefined and independent national identity, as well as in a contemporary assumption that the content of the text represented survivals from an earlier mythological stratum. They drew on a critical classification of the text as an Irish formulation of ‘epic’ to invoke comparisons and analogies with Classical epic narratives. As recent commentators have pointed out, the early commentators on this issue looked to the Homeric corpus as the first point of comparison. Analogies were drawn at a number of levels, ranging from the form and scope of the tale to direct comparisons between individual characters and episodes.