Life
1688-1760 [Mícheál Coimín]; b. Kilcorcoran, nr. Milltown
Malbay, Co. Clare; of family who suffered by Cromwellian confiscations,
but were reinstated on a large farm at the Restoration; raised a Protestant;
involved in scandalous abduction of Harriet Stackpoole, commemorated in
his own poems; wrote on the Oisín-Niamh theme in “Laoi Oisín
ar Thír na nÓg”, a source for Yeats’s Wanderings
of Usheen [Oisín]; also “Eachtra Thoirdhealbhaigh Mhic
Stairn”, in prose, narrating the love-quest of a Viking which leads
him to Tara; Comyn’s manuscript relics were destroyed at his death
by his son Edward.
Works
David Comyn, ed., Laoidh Oisín air Thír na nÓg
(1880); and Eoghan Ó Neachtain, ed., Eachtra Thoirdhealbhaigh
Mhic Stairn (1992).
Notes
Russell Alspach, Irish Poetry from the English Invasion to 1798
(Phil: Pennsylvania UP 1959), in which an account is given of Theophilus
O’Flanagan’s paper to the RIA including remarks on a translation
of Keating’s Foras Feasa ar Eirinn by Michael Comyn, who was
‘celebrated for his knowledge of Irish antiquities. He made a translation
of Keating which he intended to publish, but death prevented the execution
of his design, and the manuscript was fatally lost’ (‘An Account
of an antient Inscription in Ogham Character on the Sepulchral Monument
of an Irish Chief’, Transactions of the RIA, I, 1787, Sec. Antiquities,
p.7; Alspach, p.82-83.)
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