DeDanaan

Filed by Aine MacDermot

One obvious area where we have come along in leaps and bounds has been in the field of women’s studies. Yet for all the studies made on the history of women in Ireland, I have seen no author who has mentioned nor come to grips with the Ban-shenchus - the History of Women. The Ban-shenchus is a record of the lives of hundreds of Irish women who lived prior to the 12th Century.

We have seven surviving copies of this book. One ends with mention of Gormflaith, who died in 1030. She was a Leinster princess who became the wife of Brían Bóroimhe, also mother of Sitric, King of Dublin. Another version ends with the story of the famous Der bhForgaill who died in 1193, the wife of Tighernán O Ruairc, King of Breifne, who eloped with Diarmuid Mac Murrough, King of Leinster, and after a life which would have been a godsend to most Hollywood scriptwriters, ended her days in holy orders at Clonmacnoise.

Just how much do we know about Irish myths and legends? Ah well, you might say, that is a field that has been exhaustively ploughed. But how much of these are actually studies of manuscript remains or merely reworkings of previously published secondary sources?

Back in 1900, Professor Kuno Meyer, in his introduction to a translation and study on one of the Irish stories, listed 400 sagas and tales surviving in manuscript form. he added that since he had compiled the list a further 100 tales had been identified but not catalogued, while a further 150 tales he believed could still lie undiscovered in libraries throughout Europe. Our knowledge of Irish myths is based on the translation and annotation of only 150 of 650. Since the modern Irish state has come into being, hardly any further work had been done in editing and translating the remaining 400-500 manuscripts.

How many have read the Caithreim Cheallachain Chaisil (The Battle-Career of Ceallachain of Cashel)?

This lengthy manuscript is the story of Cellachain, King of Munster, who died in AD 954, who, 60 years before Brían Bóroimhe at Clontarf, broke the Danish domination within his own Kingdom. Cellachain was one of the most interesting of Munster kings. In fact, Cormac III, King of Munster, commissioned the book sometime between 1127 and 1138. It was written in Cashel and the earliest surviving copy is in the Royal Irish Academy.

There it lay. And I only stumbled across it because in 1905 Professor Alexander Bugge, at the University of Christiana, in Denmark, went to the trouble of translating the entire saga, not into his native Danish, but into English.

Now here is a work that is not merely a saga of deeds of derring do, breaking from prose into poetry, but a work which is a view of history written less than two centuries after the events recorded. Why has no Irish scholar ever bothered with it? Why has no storyteller come to grips with the saga in which we find murder plots as well as battles and intriguing characters, such as the Lady Mór who is in love with Ceallachain but captured by the Danes.

While this might be a field that a Danish plough has touched, it still lies pretty fallow.

Another field that is untouched is the extensive collection of Irish medical manuscripts. Before the turn of the 19th Century, the Irish language contained the world’s most extensive collection of medical literature in any one language. Just think about that fact. The great medieval Irish medical books are scattered in many repositories. These books survive from the 13th and 16th Centuries.

One would have thought that within the modern vogue for alternative medicine, these books would be examined by scholars and students producing their countless works on the ancient medicines of the world and medical histories. They are not.

There are many Irish medical works that are not even catalogued. From the time of Charlemagne, Irish medical men have spread through Europe. Niall O Clacán (c. 1501-1655) trained in medicine in the old Gaelic tradition and became not only physician to Louis XIII of France but Professor of Medicine at Toulouse and Bologna, writing some of the leading medical works of his day, such as Cursus Medicus. The University of Bologna, where he taught, holds several Irish manuscripts and even printed books from his personal library.

I have, over the years, become horrified at the overwhelming number of uncatalogued Old and Middle Irish manuscripts contained in repositories throughout Europe. The great finds of Irish works have been made possible by only one thing - luck. An entire book written in Irish on cosmology, in 1694, by a Jesuit priest, Father Magnus O’Domhnaill of Donegal, studying at the Irish College of the University of Salamanca was discovered last century. Professor Heinrich Zimmer, a German Celtic scholar, suggested at that time that some method was needed to research and identify such Irish works. Nothing was done.

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