Analecta Hiberniae, Fasciculus IV
On Four Folios Attributed to a Tradition of Amergin Glúingel, of Uncertain Provenance, Being a Complete Transcription with Commentary
The present writer approaches the fourth and final group of the Codex Hibernicus Bodleianus Primus supplementary leaves with a degree of perplexity not habitual to these investigations. The subject is Amergin Glúingel, poet-seer of the Milesian invasion, first speaker of the famous verse of self-identification, and a figure who occupies a position in the Irish mythological record that has no precise classical parallel – closer, perhaps, to Orpheus than to any other, though the analogy is imperfect in several directions. What distinguishes these four folios is not their subject but their structure, their anomalies, and the nature of the scribal annotations appended throughout.
Structurally, the piece distributes its prophetic verse one line per folio across four leaves, a device for which the present writer has found no precedent and which he regards as either an innovation of considerable artistry or an interpolation, in the sense that the four folios may not have been intended to form a single text at all. The joins are too deliberate, however, to be entirely accidental; the present writer suspects design, though he cannot identify the designer with confidence. Indeed, taken as a whole the text bears the marks of a composed rather than transmitted piece – too architectural for accidental recovery – and the possibility of deliberate interpolation within an otherwise authentic collection cannot be dismissed, much as the present writer would prefer to dismiss it.
The marginal annotations across these four folios are in the same hand observed throughout the preceding three texts, and accumulate in length and personal register as the folios proceed, culminating in a note in the fourth folio that is the longest single annotation in the collection. In it, the scribe – who here, for the first time, provides his name – states that he does not know whether the text he has been copying was found in an older exemplar or composed by himself in a state of mind he cannot now account for. The present writer notes this formally as an interpolation in the technical sense: the monk's uncertainty about his own role in the text's existence introduces a layer of provenance difficulty that cannot, with current evidence, be resolved.
A third anomaly: the third line of the distributed verse is damaged beyond recovery, leaving the verse incomplete even when the four folios are read in sequence. Whether this is accidental lacuna, or itself an interpolation of the lacunose form, the present writer cannot say. He records his hesitation as a footnote to his usual confidence. The piece remains, whatever its origins, and must be accounted for.
From the supplementary leaves of the Codex Hibernicus Bodleianus Primus. Four leaves of vellum of unusual weight, possibly from a different scriptorium than the preceding texts. The primary hand is a fine insular minuscule of probable tenth-century date, somewhat archaising in character. The annotating hand is the same as throughout the collection; it appears under some pressure in the first folio, as though written quickly, and grows progressively more deliberate across the four leaves.
The First Folio: On the Sea
The island was on the horizon when he made the song. The shape of it was in him before the words were. He knew the words when they came because they were the right words, and the right words are not always the true ones.
He was in the prow of the leading boat. The storm the Tuatha Dé had raised against them was in the sky ahead. He did not speak yet. He turned the song over, the way a man turns a stone before he uses it, to find the weight of it and whether it will hold.
He had made songs before. This one was different. It had a purpose in it, the way a tool has a purpose that an ornament does not.
He was not the wind on the sea. He would say he was the wind on the sea. He was a man standing in a boat and the boat was in real water and the wind was its own matter and separate from him. The lie was the vehicle. The thing in the vehicle was real.
He did not tell anyone what he was doing. He stood in the prow and the island came closer.
Canaimm brecc ar son fír.
Nescio unde hoc uenit. Exemplar aliud non habui: hoc quasi apparuit. Nox clara. Membrana aliena esse uidetur.
Footnote. The first folio's annotation is notably brief and locates the scribe by weather rather than the liturgical hour, a minor variation on his established practice. The note translates:
I do not know where this came from. I had no other exemplar: this appeared, as it were, of itself. The night is clear. The vellum seems to belong elsewhere.
This anxiety about provenance is a scribal commonplace; monks frequently copied from poor or incomplete exemplars and their working notes reflect this uncertainty routinely.
The rosc first line, Canaimm brecc ar son fír – I sing lie for the sake of truth – is in the present writer's view an interpolation of the standard Amergin tradition, introducing a self-conscious element of poetic dissimulation not present in any received version of the Song of Amergin. The present writer regards this as a later medieval accretion, reflecting a more sophisticated and arguably sceptical understanding of poetic fiction that sits awkwardly within what is otherwise presented as archaic material. Its placement in the opening folio is, at a minimum, curious.
The Second Folio: On the Landing
He sang it when the storm was on them. The words went out over the water and the water received them. This is not metaphor. The water took the words as the earth takes what falls into it. They went down and were not returned.
The storm left the sky. The boats came in on a flat sea to the mouth of the river and the land was there and they came to it.
He did not sing it a second time. One time was what the song required.
The people came off the boats and named what they came to. They named the river and the headland and the strand where they set foot. They did not name the song. Songs are not named. They are carried.
He stood on the strand and watched them naming things and did not speak and the island heard this too.
Éistid in talam.
Post primam scripsi. Interrogo: res scripta fit res uera? An sufficiens tantum? Si scribo Amergin cecinisse, cecinit? Non scio. Sed hoc scio: res legitima est quae mouet animum, quaecumque sit eius origo.
Footnote. The second folio's annotation, written after the morning office of prime, translates:
After prime I wrote this. I ask: does a written thing become a true thing? Or only sufficient? If I write that Amergin sang, did he sing? I do not know. But this I know: a thing is legitimate which moves the soul, whatever its origin.
The scribal philosophical inquiry here expressed is not unusual in the context of monastic copying; medieval scribes frequently reflected on the ontological status of pre-Christian texts they reproduced, particularly when working without a verifiable exemplar.
The second rosc line, Éistid in talam – the land listens – is a commonplace of immrama and invasion literature; the responsiveness of the Irish landscape to significant speech acts is well attested from the earliest sources and requires no particular annotation.
The landing at the mouth of the River Scéne – Inber Scéne, the present Kenmare – is consistent with the received tradition.
The Third Folio: On What Came After
He heard the song in the mouths of others. The time is not given. He was somewhere he had been before and the song came to him from a distance in a voice that was not his.
It was a good rendering. He did not correct it.
The song had a life now that was separate from the making of it. He had known this was what would happen. He had known it on the water. He made it anyway.
He went to the headland at Inber Scéne and stood at the edge of the cliff. Below him the sea went on being the sea.
He had said he was the wind and the wave and the stag upon the mountain and the hawk above the cliff. He was none of these now. He was a man at the edge of a cliff in the wind and the wind was not consulting him.
He was the only one who knew the full shape of the thing, from the making on the water to the sound of it in another's mouth at a place he could not see. The beginning and the end were his and everything between had left him.
He stood there for a time not measured. He went back.
[ . . . ]
Feci et ego. Et ego hic fui.
Footnote. The third folio's annotation is reduced to six words in two clauses:
Feci et ego. Et ego hic fui. – I also made. I too was here.
The brevity is striking after the more elaborate notes of the preceding folios. The first clause the present writer takes as a simple vocational identification with the craftsman described in the text. The second is a stranger addition: hic fui – I was here – is a formula occasionally found in colophons to indicate the physical location of copying, though the present writer has not previously encountered it doubled with et ego in this manner, nor appended to a working note rather than a formal completion statement. The repetition of et ego across both clauses is, at minimum, a grammatical curiosity.
The third rosc line is severely damaged at this point – the vellum appears to have been scraped, whether intentionally or otherwise, the present writer cannot determine – and the verse as distributed across the four folios cannot be completed from this folio. What the missing line concerned, one can only speculate: a verse of this structure might here address the fate of the maker after the made thing departs, a topic not without precedent in the tradition. The present writer resists the temptation to interpolate where the evidence is absent, and notes this resistance as his only contribution at this juncture.
The Fourth Folio: The Last Record
The place at the edge of the headland had no name when he stood there before and it has a name now. The name means the eye of the maker, which is what it was, and nobody gave it that name deliberately. Names of this kind are given or they are not.
He was there at the end of a thing. The song had run its full length. He knew the length because he had set it in motion and the start of a thing determines its length and he had done the starting.
He sat on the stone at the edge of the headland and the water was below him and the sky was above and he was between them in the way that a made thing is always between what made it and what it makes possible.
There was nothing to add. He did not add anything.
He looked at the water for a time not counted. Then he was not there.
They call the place Súil an Déanaí now, which is the eye of the maker, and the stone is still at the edge of the headland, and people stand on it and look at the water and do not think about what they are standing on.
Finnaimm a dheireadh.
Scripsi haec in nocte ante Pascha, candela una. Nescio si inueni hoc in exemplari uetusto aut si ipse scripsi in statu mentis quem non possum nunc reddere. Saepius legi et non possum determinare. Non mouet me haec incertitudo quantum expectaui. Res est quae est, sine respectu eius qui fecit eam. Factor non est mensura. Hoc semper sciui. Hodie intellego. Ego, Cormacus qui et honorata est, hic scripsi.
Footnote. The fourth and final annotation is the longest in the collection and warrants full transcription. The scribe writes, on the night before Easter with one candle, that he does not know whether he found the text in an old exemplar or composed it himself in a state of mind he cannot now account for – and that, having read it many times, he cannot determine which. He concludes:
...a thing is what it is, without regard for who made it. The maker is not the measure. This I have always known. Today I understand it.
He signs for the first time across all four texts. The signature reads: Ego, Cormacus qui et honorata est, hic scripsi – I, Cormac, who is also the honored one, wrote here. The present writer notes first the name itself: Cormacus – Cormac – is an unusual choice in a signing formula of this provenance, and may represent a name taken in religious life rather than the scribe's birth name, or, given the broader uncertainties of authorship that attend the Amergin text, possibly a pseudonym. If the latter, the choice is not without association: the most celebrated bearer of the name in the Irish tradition is Cormac mac Airt, king of Tara, who received from Manannán mac Lir – the subject, the present writer cannot help observing, of the first manuscript in this collection – a cup with the following property: three lies spoken over it broke it into three pieces; three truths spoken over it made it whole. The present writer does not press this coincidence. He notes that three manuscripts precede the appearance of this name, that the collection opens with Manannán, and that the cup, in the standard account, was made whole.
The formula qui et honorata presents a separate difficulty: in the present writer's experience of Hiberno-Latin naming conventions, this phrase appears exclusively as a marginal gloss on personal names that are themselves the diminutive or familiar form of Honora, and its application here to a male scribe in his own self-description is, so far as the present writer can determine, wholly without precedent. Whether this represents a grammatical irregularity of a type not uncommon in this tradition, or something the present writer is not in a position to explain, must remain an open question.
The present writer confesses that this note is not easily dismissed. Factor non est mensura – the maker is not the measure – is either a pious commonplace, a form of the Augustinian resignation before the inevitable gap between the making and the understanding, or something more precisely aimed at the text before the monk and at the position of its reader. The Latin has a quality the present writer has been attempting, across several folios, to characterise as merely technical, and has not succeeded. Cormac's signature, following his silence in the three preceding texts, is either a record of copyist's practice or the most personal thing in the collection, and the present writer cannot, at this time, determine which.
The final rosc line, Finnaimm a dheireadh, may be rendered I witness its ending or I recognise its end, the verbal form admitting both a passive witnessing and an active recognition.
The place name Súil an Déanaí – the eye of the maker – has not been found on any contemporary survey of the Kenmare headlands; it may have been superseded by a later name, or it may never have existed outside this text. The piece remains, whatever its origins, and must be accounted for.