Analecta Hiberniae, Fasciculus III

The present writer presents the third fragment from the Codex Hibernicus Bodleianus Primus. The subject is Brigid, whose dual role as goddess and saint has received extensive treatment – Professor Stokes's work on the Brigidine material remains the standard reference, though the present writer would note one or two reservations regarding the treatment of her forge function – and who here appears in her capacity as maker, a role shared in this tradition with Goibniu and the other craftsmen of the Tuatha Dé Danann but treated in this fragment with an unusual degree of attention to process rather than outcome. The present writer has not encountered elsewhere a description of Brigid constructing what appears to be a stringed instrument of some kind, though the association between the goddess-saint and music is well attested in later hagiographic material; one may note the parallel with Hephaestus, that divine artificer whose forging scenes in the Iliad anticipate in certain respects what the present fragment appears to describe, though Brigid's procedure here is considerably more solitary and, the present writer is compelled to say, rather more tender in register than the Homeric parallel will quite accommodate. What is curious – and the present writer uses the word advisedly – is the ending: the instrument is completed and placed in the doorway of the forge, where it is left. There is no dedicatory gesture, no invocation, no explicit recipient. The present writer interprets this as a ritual deposit of the threshold-offering type discussed at some length in Professor Meyer's comparative study, the doorway serving as a recognised liminal space for objects intended for otherworldly or divine receipt. The piece affects the present writer with an unusual quality of stillness not entirely characteristic of the mythological sources; he attributes this to the deliberately narrow focus of the narrative. The annotating hand is the same as that observed throughout the collection.

From the supplementary leaves of the Codex Hibernicus Bodleianus Primus. One leaf of fine vellum in good condition. The writing stops two-thirds down the verso, followed by a brief marginal note in the second hand, after which the remainder of the leaf is blank. The primary hand is the same as the preceding fragments.

The forge had been cold for seven days. She came to it at night with what she carried and set it down on the floor and looked at it for a time before she touched it.

What she had carried was three things: a piece of oak cracked along its length but not all the way through, a length of sinew, and the remnant of a bronze pin so old it had no owner. She had not gone out to find these things. They had been in the world and she had been in the world and eventually their paths were the same.

She worked through three nights without sleeping. For the first two nights there was no fire. On the third night she lit the forge and worked in the heat of it until the thing was what it would be. She did not burn the oak. She bent it. The crack ran the length of the wood and she opened it a little and pressed the bronze pin along it and the crack held the pin the way a wound holds what has been worked into it. She strung the sinew across the curve of the wood and the wood did not refuse it.

When it was done she played it once. A bird sleeping in the thatch of the roof moved on its perch. The fire shifted. It was very quiet after the sound went.

She set the instrument in the doorway of the forge. Not inside and not outside. In the space that is neither and both.

She went back to the fire.

The forge has been called Ceardlann na Tairsí since that time, which means the smithy of the threshold, and it is said to be a place where things are left for finding.

[ . . . ] Is é in dorus in t-idir. Beirid cách a lámha.

Mane post laudes scripsi haec. Caelum album. Memini: aliquando ex quercu fracta et neruo feci instrumentum. Semel cecini et deposui in cellula. Nunquam quaesiui si quis audiuisset. Hic scribo quia alibi non potui. Domine, ecce.

_{Footnote. The scribe's marginal note is brief and personal. It translates:}

_{In the morning after lauds I wrote this. The sky is white. I remember: once I made an instrument from cracked oak and sinew. I played it once and set it down in my cell. I never asked whether anyone heard it. I write this here because I could not write it elsewhere. Lord, look.}

_{The observation semel cecini et deposui – I played it once and set it down – has an agreeable plainness; the present writer takes it as a devotional parallel of the typological sort, the monk drawing an oblique comparison between his own modest artisanal effort and the mythological act of creation described in the text, a form of typological thinking not uncommon in monastic contexts. That he never sought to know whether anyone heard is, the present writer supposes, a mark of appropriate humility. The final Domine, ecce is addressed to the divine in the familiar mode characteristic of Irish marginal devotion, a usage the present writer has noted elsewhere in the collection; ecce can bear the sense of simple demonstration, the prayer less an appeal than a presentation, here it is, though the two senses are not always separable. The present writer notes in passing that a phrase cognate to quaerere si quis audiat appears in Augustine's Confessions in a rather different context – the soul seeking response in the world's beauty – though the comparison would be imprecise and the present writer does not press it.}

_{The rosc is partly illegible in the exemplar. The first line is unrecoverable. The second, Is é in dorus in t-idir – the door is the between, or perhaps the door is what is between – is a sound construction, the definite article applied to the preposition being a notable if not unparalleled Hiberno-Latin-influenced formation. The third line presents a small difficulty: Beirid cách a lámha has been rendered by the present writer as everyone takes what is theirs, though it might with equal plausibility be read as everyone brings their hands, the verb beirid admitting both a taking sense and a bringing sense as it does elsewhere in the collection.}

_{The forge name Ceardlann na Tairsí has not been located by the present writer in any known geographical record and may be a local designation now lost, or may originate in the source tradition rather than in topography.}