This chapter considers the evidence of medieval Irish vocal music which can be found in surviving Old and Middle Irish texts. The texts contain many references to public singing in secular contexts and indicate that the normal practice was for songs to be sung by a single man or woman or by groups of either men or women. A prestigious type of chant or song called aidbsiu ‘poetic recitation’ is distinguished from a martial singing mode described as dord (or andord), the basic meaning of which is ‘humming, buzzing’ and which has the capacity to mesmerize those who hear it. In the Fenian tales, the phrase dord fiansa ‘the hum of the war-band’ is used of a type of singing practised by young warriors, accompanied by the rhythmic banging of the shafts of their spears. Extempore group-singing by women is described as cepóc; another category of singing is coíniud ‘keening of the dead’, which regularly incurred the disapproval of the Church, but continued to be practised into modern times.
The paper focuses on a historical episode occurring in a few Middle Irish Annals: the death of the Munster king Fedemid mac Crimthann: 844 (846?): “Saint Ciaran (dead in 549 - T.M.) gave him a thrust of his crozier, and he (Fedelmid) received an internal wound, so that he was not well until his death”. The compiler presumed his future addressees could understand this deed as a act of vengeance: king Fedelmid Feidlimid, king of Caisel, as Annals say, “put to death members of the community of Cluain Moccu Nóis and burned their church-lands to the very door of their church”. The paper aims at showing that the king was killed by a real person. The narrative structure follows the traditional folk one: S - V - O. The Subject and the Object may be replaced by supernatural beings. So, in our case the Subject (a real person) has been replaced by Saint Ciaran.
A new method of “dating” language changes was proposed in the 1950s by Morris Swadesh (1952, 1955), who examined changes in the basic vocabulary of a language and postulated that the 1000-year retention rate represents 86% of the vocabulary; in other words, 14 words from a 100-word list must be replaced. An attempt to calculate the split between Goidelic and Brittonic based on this approach was made in Greene (1964) and later in a fundamental study by Elsie (1979) containing, unfortunately, some inaccuracies. In Blažek and Novotná (2006) this split between Goidelic and Brittonic is dated to ca. 1200 BC. The authors used a new calibration, with a change in the constant of disintegration λ from 0.14 to 0.05 per millennium, the elimination of borrowings and the inclusion of synonyms in the wordlist. The use of synonyms compromises the original Swadesh idea of the basic vocabulary of a language, and automatically leads to its artificial archaisation. This article tries to demonstrate the possibility of an analysis of semantic changes in basic Irish vocabulary using the non-modified version of the Swadesh method and to define a possible date for the growth of the Middle Irish language stratum.
The article deals with the influence of archaic mythological motifs on the historiography, using the existence of different plots in the old Russian and the Middle Irish sources. The chronicle tradition of ‘calling the Vikings’ is usually considered as an element of pseudo-historic narratives of migratory tale, as are the motifs of ‘three brothers’ and ‘marriage with a daughter of the local ruler’. An analysis of Giraldus Cambrensis’ historical tracts shows that the development of these motifs is partly based on Irish historical records and finds support in the Irish Chronicles.
Abstract
This paper intends to study the history of the Old Irish word aue ‘descendant, grandchild’ in both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The former approach tries to demonstrate what forms this word evolved into from the early Old Irish period up to the end of the Middle Irish period, and to establish the phonological changes it underwent in accordance with our present understanding of the history of the Irish language. The latter approach is based on a linguistically annotated corpus of the Annals of Ulster, and shows the distribution of variant forms of aue in relation to the period they are attested in. The discrepancy between the two observations is discussed and various hypotheses are raised to explain it.
The Position of Middle Irish: Historical Linguistics and Glottochronology