Life
Scholar and critic; ‘Nationality and kingship in pre-Norman Ireland’,
in T. W. moody, ed., ‘National and the pursuit of national independence’, Historical Studies 11 (Belfast 1978), pp.1-35.
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Quotations
‘Early Ireland: Directions
and Re-directions’, in Bullán, 1, 2 (Autumn 1994),
pp.1-15: challenges the emphasis on oral origins of Irish
legal manuscripts and the culture on which they are founded, a conventional
interpretation which was much bolstered by O. Bergin and D. A. Binchy, and summarised
by Gerard Murphy in this form: ‘Medieval Irish manuscripts would
seem indeed to be related to living storytelling much as the museum today
[is] related to living material culture. When, therefore, we form a picture
of the orally narrated Irish tale as something immeasurably superior to
the suggestions of it a monastic scribe has recorded, we are not creating
a figment of the imagination, we are merely restoring to the corpse buried
in a manuscript the soul that once animated it.’ (Saga and Myth
in Ireland, 1961.) Ó Corráin sees Binchy as ‘the
principal shaper of opinion’ in this matter, basing his view on the
philological fact that the canonical texts show older features which ‘doubtless
go back to the oral teaching the pre-Christian law schools’; Binchy
further holds that the fénechas [earliest law texts] are ‘the
first precipitation in writing of the oral tradition of the schools, most
of it in a primitive form of verse or in rhythmical alliterative poetry
like the “rhetorics” preserved in some of the sagas.’ (‘Linguistic
and historical value of the law tracts’, Proc. RIA, 1943;
Ó Corráin, p.2.) Binchy is seen as perpetuating a jeu
d’ésprit of Bergin’s in which the relation between Irish
literary and oriental forms of culture such as the rabbinical and the
‘irrelevent Indian legal commentators’ (p.3), before outlining
an intensely literary tradition in support of the assertion that: ‘The
heroic atmosphere, the Otherworld folk, the world of druidry and taboo
of pagan prophecy and portent, are the work of creative artistry, not
the self-conscious oral transmissions of a traditional pagan past.’
(p.10.) Of the legal tractsÓ Corráin writes: ‘These
texts are not the unaltered records of a pagan past, the oral teaching
of pagan lawyers, and thus an artefact of Celtic culture, if not of remote
Indo-European antiquity. In fact, the laws are the product of the self-confident
and vigorous clerical culture of early Ireland that consciously created
a Christian law for a Christian people.’ (p.5.) He instances James Carney’s
reservations about the predominance of orality, and the tardy reaction
of modern Irish scholarship to his views exemplified by Prionsias Mac
Cana and others regarding the oral foundations of Irish literature, and
the associated hypothesis of ‘concurrent oral tradition that fed
the manuscript record.’ (p.4.)
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