Analecta Hiberniae, Fasciculus V

The present writer received the following leaf after the preceding four transcriptions had been prepared and were in their final form for submission. The leaf was found adhering to the inside of the back binding of the Codex Hibernicus Bodleianus Primus, separated from the main gathering and apparently undiscovered throughout the period of the present writer's earlier work with the collection. It is a single leaf of fine vellum, worn at the corners, the text in the same primary hand as the preceding four fragments. The text is a dinnseanchas — an Irish genre of place-name explanation well represented in the Metrical Dinnseanchas edited by Professor Stokes — and is in itself not remarkable as a specimen of that genre, save for three features the present writer cannot account for. The first is the absence of genealogical identification: dinnseanchas texts invariably name the figure whose action produces the place name, often with patronymic and genealogical context; this text does not. The second is the absence of the accompanying verse: the prophetic rosc form employed throughout the preceding four fragments does not appear here, with no explanation given in the text for its omission. The third is the relationship of this leaf to the preceding collection: the present writer does not know whether it precedes the other four texts and was misbound at the back by error or design, or whether it follows them and was placed there for the same range of reasons. He has heard the argument that it is a beginning. He is not persuaded. He includes it here without further speculation. The ninth and final leaf of the collection. Beyond it: the binding.

Found adhering to the inside of the back binding of the Codex Hibernicus Bodleianus Primus. A single leaf of fine vellum, worn at the corners, the verso blank. The primary hand is the same insular minuscule as the preceding fragments. The single marginal annotation, in the lower left corner, is in the same second-hand, observed throughout the collection.

There is a place outside a door, and the place has a name, and this is why.

A person came through the door. It opened as they came to it, which is the nature of that door, and they came through and stood on the stone outside. They had been brought to the door by others, and now they had come through it, and now they were on the stone.

The road was there. People passed on it as people pass on roads, which is to say, without reference to the one standing on the stone. Someone near them laughed. The laugh was its own matter and not about them, and they understood this.

They stood there longer than a person usually stands outside a door. They were not waiting for someone. They did not yet know where they were going. They looked at the road, and the road was the road it had always been. They looked at their hands. Nothing in the appearance of things had changed.

The people who had brought them to the door did not come back out for them.

Then they went from the stone in one direction and then another, and the door closed behind them, and what was behind the door was behind the door, and the road was still the road.

The stone outside that door is called Leac an Seasaimh, which means the flagstone of the standing. People stand on it now without thinking about what they are doing. This is what the place is called, and this is why.

No verse accompanies the text.

Exiui.

_{Footnote. The dinnseanchas form requires no extensive commentary. The present writer notes three absences. The first is the genealogical identification: as noted in the introduction, the unnamed person is given no name, no parentage, no connection to any known figure or tradition, which is without parallel in the genre as the present writer understands it. Whether this represents a lacuna in the source tradition or a structural intention is not determinable from the text. The second is the prophetic verse: its absence — in a collection whose four preceding fragments all employ the rosc form — is notable, and the present writer has nothing to offer by way of explanation. The third absence is the annotating hand: Cormac the scribe, who accompanied the preceding four texts with personal marginal notes of increasing length and concluded with a signed statement of some apparent significance, here leaves only the single word Exiui in the lower left margin — I departed — which the present writer reads as a routine scribal notation of completion, indicating that work on the exemplar was concluded. The margin is otherwise empty.}

_{The place name Leac an Seasaimh — the flagstone of the standing — has not been located on any survey known to the present writer. The door is not described. The building in which the door is is not named. The people who brought the unnamed person to it are not identified. The direction in which the unnamed person eventually departed is not given.}

_{The present writer has nothing further to add.}