Trí bior-ghaoithe an bháis

lines 5356-5367

Bíodh a fhiadhnaise sin ar mhórán d’uaislibh an oiléin se na hÉireann agá ndeachaidh báthadh ar mhórán dá dtighthibh onóracha ionnus nach fuil acht ainbhfine agá n-áitiughadh don chur so 7 iad féin an mhéid maireas dá n-iarmhar i moghsaine 7 i mbochtacht ag íoc uabhair 7 aindlighidh drúise 7 droichbheart fill 7 fionghaile a sean 7 a sinnsear. Gonadh uime sin do-rinne Maolmhuire Ó hUiginn aird-easpog Thuama an rann so:

Fuilngidh Dia dúthaigh a sean

tré anuabhar Mhac Míleadh

críoch ainglidhe fá n-iadh tonn

fá riar ainbhfine eachtronn.

lines 5486-5501

Is eadh tarla don dara fear .i. Rodericus do dhéanamh, dúil do chur i mnaoi iarla onóraigh don Spáinn, 7 an t-iarla do chor ar eachtra don Aiffric. Agus ar mbeith don iarla san eachtra soin tarla don rígh míghníomh do dhéanamh ré mnaoi an iarla. Agus ar bhfilleadh óna thurus don iarla, fuair sgéala an mhíghníomha soin, 7 do-ní gearán 7 éagnach ar an rígh ré huaislibh na Spáinne fán míghníomh sin, 7 do-rinne féin 7 iad féin ceangal ré chéile, 7 do chogradar Múraigh do thabhairt isteach ar an Spáinn. Agus iar gcinneadh ar an gcomhairle sin dóibh, téid an t-iarla tar a ais don Aiffric, 7 tug sluagh líonmhar Múrach leis don Spáinn dá gabháil, 7 tug féin 7 na Múraigh gona ranntaibh cath don rígh Rodericus, gur marbhadh Rodericus 7 urmhór a shluagh san chath, gur ghabhadar na Múraigh orlamhas na Spáinne tuairim chúig céad bliadhain do dhruim an mhíghníomha soin. Agus ní tháinig lorg ná sliocht ar Rodericus san Spáinn ó shoin.

Narrative

Geoffrey Keating or Séathrún Céitinn, historian, priest and theologian, was born around 1580 in the southern part of county Tipperary. The son of a large landowner of Old English lineage, Keating was educated initially at a school run by the local learned Gaelic family of Mac Craith. His early education at this bardic school provided Keating with an informed knowledge of elite Gaelic scholarship, lore and poetry. Certainly, Keating’s early formation within a bardic milieu enabled him to compose poetry of some distinction in Irish. Indeed, Keating’s poetry reflects his promotion of a Gaelic cultural inheritance and an Irish Catholic identity common to both the Gaelic Irish and Old English communities. Subsequent to his education within a Gaelic paradigm, Keating travelled to continental Europe to undertake studies for the priesthood. He pursued an extended course of study which culminated with the award of a doctorate of divinity to him possibly at the university of Rheims. Keating was associated with the Irish College at Bordeaux from its foundation in 1603 probably as a teacher. He had returned to Ireland by 1613 at the latest where he served as a priest in the Roman Catholic diocese of Lismore and Waterford. It seems that Keating was noted for the high quality of his preaching across east Munster.

Keating is remembered today as a writer of exceptional significance in early modern classical Irish. Completed around 1634, Keating’s monumental history entitled Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (‘A foundation of knowledge of Ireland’) which recounts the story of Ireland from the creation down to the late twelfth century is recognised as an influential master work of early modern Irish literature. Its ideological significance in the context of the seventeenth century derived from Keating’s assertive and elegant defence of the integrity of Gaelic Irish culture and his adumbration of a common Irish identity which unified the island’s Gaelic and Old English communities. Crucially, Keating’s history has been recognised as having made available ‘a national narrative in a modern idiom’ [Breandán Ó Buachalla, The crown of Ireland (Galway, 2006), 15]. Although not published in print in the seventeenth century, it circulated widely in manuscript and very quickly in an English translation in scribal format. A printed translation in English was first published in London in 1723. However, it was not until the early twentieth century that a complete printed text in Irish appeared under the auspices of the Irish Texts Society between 1902 and 1914.

If Keating was intellectually formed in the first instance within a Gaelic milieu, his continental theological education imbued him with the dynamic of the Counter-Reformation. Keating’s second major work of prose was his 1631 devotional tract entitled Trí Bior-ghaoithe an Bháis (‘Three shafts of death’) which was essentially a treatise on sin, repentance and death. Heavily influenced by the rhetorical tropes of contemporary preaching, it is quite likely that the text gives some indication of the thematic material and preaching style deployed by Keating himself. The text consists of three books: the first deals with the concept of three types of death; the second book deals with the question of original sin while the third book is concerned with purgatory. The extract analysed in his instance derives from the seventh section of the third book which deals with the reasons why God chose to grant longevity to some and an early death to others. These lines reflect a deep sense of Irish Catholic grievance in the wake of the consolidation of the crown’s authority in Ireland in the early decades of the seventeenth century and a perception of material disposession and misfortune commonly attributed to providential punishment of previous Irish wrong-doing and vice. Characteristically, Keating invokes the sanction of bardic tradition when he quotes a quatrain attributed to the late sixteenth-century praise poet and cleric Maolmhuire Ó hUiginn in support of his narrative of the exaction of providential retribution.

Ironically, given the importance of his contribution to Gaelic literature and tradition, little is known of the detail of Keating’s life. A Latin inscription on a stone tablet placed over the doorway to the chapel of St. Ciarán at Tubbrid in county Tipperary in 1644 asks for prayers for the repose of Keating’s soul. Appropriately, given his acute awareness of the transience of life and earthly glory, the only record of Keating’s death circa 1644 is to be seen amid the abandoned ruins of an early modern mortuary chapel in rural Tipperary.

lines 5356-5367

Fuilngidh Dia dúthaigh a sean

tré anuabhar Mhac Míleadh

críoch ainglidhe fá n-iadh tonn

fá riar ainbhfine eachtronn.

lines 5486-5501

Translation

Let the evidence of that be the many nobles of this island of Ireland who endured destruction of many of their honorable houses so that there are only foreigners residing in them for the present and they themselves – the number of their remnant who are living – in servitude and poverty paying for the pride and lawlessness, lust and evil deeds, treachery and fratricide of their antecedents and ancestors. As a result of that Maolmhuire Ó hUiginn, Archbishop of Tuam, composed this quatrain:

God suffers the land of their ancestors,

an angelic territory around which a wave closes

under the hegemony of a foreign cohort

because of the overweening pride of the Sons of Míl

What happened to the second man, that is Rodericus, [was] to desire the wife of an honorable earl of Spain, and to send the earl on an expedition to Africa. And after the earl had been on that expedition it happened that the king committed an evil deed against the wife of the earl. And on the earl’s returning from that expedition, he received news of that evil deed, and he made complaint and lament about the king to the nobles of Spain regarding that evil deed, and he and they made a treaty together, and they plotted to bring in [the] Moors to Spain. And after they had decided on that council the earl went back to Africa and brought a plentiful host of the Moors with him to Spain to conquer it, and he and the Moors with their bands brought battle to king Rodericusso that Rodericus and the majority of his army were killed in the battle, so that the Moors took possession of Spain for roughly 500 years as a result of that evil deed. And neither trace nor issue came of Rodericus in Spain since then.

lines 5356-5367

Fuilngidh Dia dúthaigh a sean

tré anuabhar Mhac Míleadh

críoch ainglidhe fá n-iadh tonn

fá riar ainbhfine eachtronn.

lines 5486-5501

Translation

This selection is a relatively accessible example of Early Modern Irish prose composed by a master of the medium. Nevertheless, it does exhibit some peculiarities that may not seem obvious and, as we would expect with prose, which deviate from the rules governing Classical Modern Irish verse. Moreover, Keating was a great stylist and revealed here are some excellent examples of both his personal predilections and phrasings connected to the text’s purpose as a basis for sermons. Below are tips to assist in translating and understanding some of the trickier bits of grammar and syntax, both of Keating’s prose and Ó hUiginn’s poetry:

Bíodh a fhiadhnaise sin: Here we get a sense of the exhortatory style of the prose, which may be connected to the fact that this material was intended to serve as the basis for sermons delivered orally before a congregation. Rhetorical flourish that would engage listeners was, we can imagine, a crucial concern in the work’s composition.

agá ndeacaigh vs. agá n-áitiughadh: Here we encounter words that look the same but are different in constitution and function. The first instance of agá represents the combination of preposition + relative particle. The eclipsis of the following word, then, is a feature of the indirect relative construction. The second instance of agá is built from a preposition + personal pronoun. The eclipsing of the following word in this instance comes on account of the personal pronoun being in the 3^rdperson plural.

i moghsaine 7 i mbochtacht, etc.: The use of alliterative pairs is a common rhetorical device in Early Modern Irish prose, and a particularly strong feature of Trí bior-ghaoithe an bháis. Keating’s heavy use of the technique may have something to do with the material’s eventual purpose of oral delivery. Whatever the reason behind the stylistic choice, the text’s modern editor Osborn Bergin was not impressed, writing that ‘his lavish display of alliterative groups of rare words, chosen more for the sound than for the sense, appears to the modern reader to transgress the bounds of good taste’. See p. xiv.

trí anuabhar Mhac Míleadh: Frequently it is the case that when translating quatrains of Early Modern Irish poetry one should not proceed in linear fashion or sequentially. Rather, one must be attentive to semantic and grammatical units and how they interact with others in the quatrain. For instance, we have placed the second line of Ó hUiginn’s original as the concluding line in the English translation. The contrast between the syntactical structure of Ó hUiginn’s quatrain and Keating’s prose lines offers a nice, illustrative reminder of the different translation strategies required for verse and prose.

anuabhar Mhac Míleadh: Here we encounter a sequence of linked nouns, the second and third of which are in the genitive serving to qualify the word immediately preceding them. In such a situation (noun + noun in the genitive + noun in the genitive), one may encounter lenition of the second word in the sequence where none is expected, or non-lenition where it would be expected. This is known by the bardic grammarians as sléagar, and the particular example here is Mhac, which need not be lenited. For more on this phenomenon, see Eoin Mac Cárthaigh, ‘Sléagar agus “genitives lenited in special circumstances” i bhFilíocht na Scol’ in C. Breatnach and M. Ní Úrdail (eds), Aon don éigse (Dublin, 2014), 239-46.

Is eadh tarla…dúil do chur: In Modern Irish or English we would expect a conjunction or linking verb in such a construction – say, ná in Irish or was in English – the absence of which might introduce some confusion when translating.

an t-iarla do chor: here we simply note an example of the orthographical flexibility in Early Modern Irish which contrasts with the more rigid rules of Modern Irish: early in this sentence we encountered the same word in the same case represented as chur, but here as chor. Note, also, that the Glossary headword – cor/car– reveals further acceptable variation.

Agus ar bhfilleadh óna thurus don iarla: the construction preposition iar + verbal noun + preposition do + noun (agent) is a common one in Early Modern Irish prose. Do be aware, of course, that iar often appears as ar (e.g. ar mbeith don iarla, above). Keating, however, makes use of both forms: note the occurrence of iar gcinneadh ar an gcomhairle sin dóibh later in this passage. It might be helpful in understanding this phrasing to think of tar éis dom (duit, etc.) + verbal noun in Modern Irish as analogy.

tar a ais: this common construction sometimes includes the possessive pronoun, as here, and other at times appears simply as tar ais

7 do-rinne féin 7 iad féin: unlike Modern Irish, Classical/Early Modern Irish requires number agreement of verb and subject noun. Nevertheless, the use of compound subjects with a singular verb as seen here is allowed and will be encountered in period texts. A further example can be seen a few lines below: 7 tug féin 7 na Múraigh.

7 tug féin 7 na Múraigh: the use of the historical present is frequent in this text, a choice perhaps connected with the desire to create a sense of urgency and immediacy with a congregation.

Chunk Title Goes Here, the Original Text

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