Analecta Hiberniae, Fasciculus XI
On a Fragment Concerning the Well of Nechtan, with Notes on an Unusual Variant of the River-Naming Tradition
The fragment below is preserved in a single later hand's transcript of material that appears to derive from a Meath psalter, now lost, of probable ninth-century provenance. It presents a variant account of the naming of the Bóann — the river known to moderns as the Boyne — that departs in one notable particular from the standard recension preserved in the prose Dindshenchas. Where the standard text concerns itself primarily with the transformation and the river-naming that follows, this variant dwells, in its characteristic compression, on what the present writer will call the interval: Bóann's approach to the well, the observation she made there, and the consequence. The transformation sequence is rendered with an unusual flatness that the present writer initially attributed to lacunae in the exemplar but has come to regard as a deliberate quality of this recension. The account is notable also for what it withholds: neither the contents of the well nor the precise nature of the observation are disclosed. The parallel with the Teiresian tradition — forbidden sight, divine retribution, the seer unmade by what is seen — will be apparent; the Irish material, as always, resists schematic classical analogy, but the substrate is not wholly dissimilar. The monk's appended note is brief and reflects the conventional piety of the Hiberno-Latin hand when treating pre-Christian material.
Transcribed from a copy (s. xi, single hand) of an original text not otherwise attested. The manuscript from which this copy derives was held at some point in the library of the monastery of Clonard, to judge by a partially legible ex libris on the first folio; a second, older marginal hand appears throughout, most extensively on this fragment. The exemplar was evidently in poor condition: several passages in the verse section are damaged beyond recovery, and one gap in the main text was noted by the copyist without supply.
Bóann came to the well before dawn. She had been told the names of those permitted to approach it. Her name was not among them.
Three cup-bearers guarded the well of Nechtan, that is also called Tobar Segais.
They had kept that post since before the count of years. The well held what Nechtan had gathered and what the rivers brought him and what had come to rest there in the darkness beneath the plain. He was the only one who drew from it freely. What came up in his cup he kept.
She walked three times widdershins around it. She looked at what was in the water. She stepped back from the edge. She looked again. She did not look away. The cup-bearers stood at a remove. They had not been told what to do in this circumstance.
[Here approximately twelve lines are missing from the exemplar. The copyist has noted the gap but has not supplied the text.]
The well knew when it was being observed. It rose. She ran west and it took her left hand. She ran north and it took her left eye. She ran east and it took her left leg. Three things it did not take. She ran still. She ran until she reached the sea.
Where she ran the river ran after her. The river had no name until that day. The well had the same name it had before.
Nechtan's cup-bearers returned to their posts.
Con-dairc ocus ní tháinic. B[eirid ... ] co muir [... f]ír [...]. Atá tobar lán.
Scripsi haec post vesperas. Membrana antiqua et tenuis. Exemplar in locis vix legibile. Duodecim lineae in exemplari desunt. Paganum est, et tamen verum, quod gravius est. Nescio quid viderunt oculi eius in aqua. Scio quid facere debui cum vidi quod non licebat videre. Scripsi. Non dixi. Deus miseratur mei.
Footnote: The well is here assigned its alternate designation: Tobar Segais, the well of the Segais hazel, found under the same name in the prose Dindshenchas and in several related texts of the wisdom tradition. The Segais was the sacred hazel that stood above the well, and its nuts, falling into the water, were held to be the origin of all wisdom in the world; the salmon that consumed them carried that wisdom into the rivers of Ireland. The double naming is not unusual in manuscripts of this type and appears to reflect two parallel traditions concerning the same site. Of considerable mythological interest, if somewhat tangential to the principal aetiological concern of this fragment.
The monk's note translates as follows: I wrote these things after vespers. The parchment is old and thin. The exemplar barely legible in places. Twelve lines are missing from the exemplar. It is pagan, and yet true, which is the more troubling. I do not know what her eyes saw in the water. I know what I should have done when I saw what was not permitted to be seen. I wrote it. I did not speak. God have mercy on me.
The personal observation is of the type familiar in manuscripts of this provenance; the closing formula is conventional.
The verse passage presents considerable difficulty. The first line may be rendered: She saw and did not return. The second line is damaged beyond recovery in the central portion; the surviving fragments include the word fír, which carries in legal Old Irish the technical sense of sworn testimony, or in some contexts accusation, in addition to its primary meaning of truth. The present writer reads the line as She carries [something] to the sea, [something] true, though the legal valence is not without interest and has perhaps been noted too hastily by previous editors. Meyer's reading of the principal action as structured around the dawn hour, permitting a solar myth interpretation, seems to the present writer an over-determination of the text; this recension specifies no hour, and the omission appears deliberate. The third line is intact: The well is full.
Stokes, treating the standard Dindshenchas recension, reads the river-naming as the primary aetiological function of the myth; the present writer is inclined to regard this variant's closing sentences as confirmation of that reading. The well's continuation is, in this tradition, the natural terminus.