PhD ABSTRACT This dissertation is the first sustained analysis of the literary qualities of Acallam na Senórach (AS), a fíanaigecht text which presents an imaginative reflection on many aspects of the dual inherited cultures of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Ireland, namely the Christian and the pre-Christian. Part I, comprising three chapters, examines the composition and transmission of the work as a preliminary to a systematic close reading of the text. Showing that the modern edition misrepresents the transmitted text as incoherent and that its language is largely homogenous, I argue that this is a unified work. AS’s form is scrutinized in the third chapter, wherein I conclude that the text’s integrated prose and poetry testify to a clearly-conceived and skilfully-realized artistic whole. Three major groups of sources drawn on by the author, namely fíanaigecht material, dinnshenchas and texts connected with St Patrick, are assessed in turn in the three chapters that form Part II. Since we see the author to have drawn on pre-existing sources in a variety of creative ways, the work is revealed as an imaginative and multivalent response to its own literary heritage. The text possesses a complicated structure, which assessed in Part III. Its frame-tale structure gives rise to a layered narrative which frequently moves between an imagined past (or pasts) and present in a non-chronological order. I argue that the frame, which constitutes that part of the text’s action set in the Patrician Ireland, must be to the fore of any interpretation of the author’s intended reading of the text. Furthermore, a detailed close reading of one of the text’s multiple narrative strands reveals the symbiotic relationship of structure and theme. The author is shown to have been a formidable creative talent, a conclusion which is in keeping with a growing trend to recognize the artistic capabilities of the medieval Irish author, whose role has been understood all too frequently in the past to be that of an almost unthinking conduit of tradition. |
