The source of the Irish Æneid is the Book of Ballymote (pp. 449–485), the property of the Royal Irish Academy, and widely known by means of the facsimile. Prof. Atkinson has, in the Introduction to the fcs., given an account of the contents. Besides that account, and those in the printed catalogues, two others may be mentioned. The first is by O'Curry, in the R.I.A. Catalogue of Irish MSS., First Series, Part iii., 753–875. The second is by O'Donovan, MS. Cat. T.C.D., H. 2. 4. The Book of Ballymote is, so far as is at present known, the only source. Not even a copy of the tale is known to exist; for, in the paper copy of the The Book of Ballymote, deposited in T.C.D., the Story of the Æneid finds no place. The title is entered in the Table of Contents, but has again been cancelled. The scribe never began to write the tale, and its allotted space remains blank. The condition of the proper names shows that it was copied, probably, many times after it left the translator's hands; and other copies may yet be found.
The Irish Æneid has not received much attention at the hands of editors. Dr. Stokes and Prof. Atkinson occasionally refer to it. Prof. Meyer has selected it as one of the sources for his Contributions. Prof. Strachan has examined it closely for his History of Middle-Irish Declension, and for other articles in the Philological Society's Transactions. But the text appears to have been wholly inedited till Prof. T. Hudson Williams published, in the Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie, 1899, his interesting Episode of Dido (BB. 451a 36–459a 30). By that time my first draft of the whole tract was completed. I am
The transcription I first made from the fcs.; and I then collated it with the original ms. This was done with a view to secure accuracy in regard to the marks of aspiration; but I also found that greater accuracy was attained with regard to the marks of contraction, which, in a few cases—e.g. tigi for troigi, 148—were omitted in the fcs. From the appearance of the ms., I concluded that many of the marks of aspiration, and probably some of the letters above (and especially below) the line, were added by a later hand. There is no evidence that the text existed in an older form. The passages quoted from older writings do not fit in well with the context. On the other hand, there are in the text itself many apparently late and even modern forms; and I have preferred to give the text in its late Middle-Irish dress, rather than to run the risk of destroying its character by a too zealous editing. In transcribing the text, I have been guided chiefly by the text itself; and I now set down the following explanations:—
Vowels written above the line represent the syllables ra, re, ri, ro, ru; and the r only is printed in italics.
Similarly, vowels written below the line—chiefly a—are printed in Roman characters.
Consonants written above the line are sometimes noted, especially in the first sheets of the text. The vowel which completes the syllable—chiefly -ud of verbal nouns—is printed in italics.
The contractions for -air, -ar1, though frequent in mss. and in the printed copies of the Bible, are also printed in italics. The extension -ar is not otherwise expressed; and -air,
Y2, vero, occurs at lines 1168, 1751, 1800, 2970, and has been transcribed immorro.
In extending n to nn or nd, the latter has been adopted, as being by far the commoner fully-written form in this ms.
The sign ~ denotes usually m, sometimes um.
The sign - denotes usually n, but is used also for other letters, e.g. Caipes 664, gach 296, and for a considerable variety of syllables.
A hyphen is used to connect emphasizing particles or inseparable pronouns with their respective nouns and verbs; also, for the sake of clearness, it is inserted between the infixed pronoun and the verb; and between transposed consonants (except h) and initial vowels.
A comma above the line is used to indicate the elision of a vowel or consonant.
The article is written as one word except when its final d becomes t, in which case the t is joined to the following noun. It is written along with a preceding preposition as one word.
Prepositions are joined to the relative and possessive pronouns.
The accents I have, with a very few exceptions, omitted from the text. In the ms. they are freely used in a few passages; and, occasionally, they mark a long or accented syllable; but for the most part they merely serve to distinguish the letter i from part of an adjacent letter for which it might have been mistaken.
In the ms. the passive and deponent endings in -er or -ir are rarely written out. The following are the chief examples: rodbaithfider 839, gairmther 947, muirfider 2473, brister 3002, murfaidher 3114; cathaichtir 2517, ni fitir 1796, 2598.
The 3rd sing, of the enclitic perfect co ndechaid is written out in lines 1724, 2151, 3188.
The proper names have fared badly in one respect. Some ignorant scribe, having provided himself with a copy of Vergil's Æneid, wrote them down in the Gaelic text, regardless of
This is, in the main, identical with the Æneid. The material is considerably curtailed. Genealogies and the speeches of the gods, and all matters peculiarly Roman that would fail to move the interest of an Irish audience, are omitted.
The additions, on the other hand, are just such as would rouse that interest. A specimen of the kind will be found on pp. 152, 154, and in many other similar places where it was found possible to give but few references to the text of Vergil. The additions consist sometimes of well-known passages in Irish literature, such as the description of Pallas (1924–1933), cf. O'Curry Lectures 45; Mann. iii. 140, 1; and of his sword ib. ii. 322 (1933, 7); and in a less degree of Æneas (348–351); of Ascanius (2363–9); and of Turnus (1488–1491); and most of all do the additions tell of ‘the battles, sieges, fortunes’ through which Æneas, like Othello, passed. The woes of the vanquished, the sorrows of parting, gold and silver ornaments, the splendour of houses and of arms, and the charm of natural scenery and fine weather, find a place in the tale (1465). This beautiful passage probably does not owe all its inspiration to Vergil or to his translator.
The Tibermouth in Vergil corresponds to the entrance to Purgatory in Dante. The latter sings: So dulcet were the notes that their melody still sounds in mine ears. My master and I, and his companion spirits, seemed wholly contented, as if naught else affected any of their minds’’
(Tozer's Trans., p. 158).
The Irish—in no unusual phrase—re-echoes the same words: ‘It was enough of joy to listen to the many strains which those birds used to sing.’ Further: o li serce (350) may be compared with Tozer's Trans., p. 229, ‘the hue which love approves’; ‘thrice did I essay to put my arms about her neck,’ &c., 648, cp. Tozer, p. 157, ‘Thrice did I clasp my hands behind him, and as oft I brought them back upon my breast’; ‘and now mayst thou conceive the intensity of that love wherewith I burn for thee when I forget our unreality, and would handle a shade as it were a solid body,’ p. 242. Due allowanceThe matter, then, is in the main identical with the Æneid. The translator was a competent scholar, both in Latin and in Gaelic. A few instances of idiomatic phrases, idiomatically rendered, place his scholarship beyond the reach of cavil: velut agmine facto, amal tic slog namad, 220; ar ni fuil dod dichumung, potes nam que omnia, 1256 ; nochor' dichel, non ipse suo premit ore Latinus, 1521; fora belaib, ante gremium suum, 2859; ar ngnim muinterus, fide, 1581; aithescul, oraculum, 1509; and many other examples might be added.
But his main purpose was to produce a scél. Comparetti, in his Vergil in the Middle Ages, Pt. ii., chap, i., gives some account of the rise and spread of the ‘Romance of Troy’, and the ‘Romance of Æneas’. And the translator had, above all things, to produce a work with the leading features of the modern novel. He has the requisite literary talent. A thorough knowledge of his original enables him to begin effectively; to select, curtail, amplify, or transpose his materials in order to meet the taste of his readers. It is unnecessary to expatiate. His progress through the Æneid can be marked, at any point, by a glance at the references to Vergil's Æneid, on the left-hand margin of the text.
I will now remark on some elements in the text which are not Vergilian.
The three sons of Laomedon—Pulus, Foclointis, and Aimpiter (page 2, line 18)—are difficult to identify in Classical Mythology; but v. Roscher's Dictionary, s. Laomedon. TT1 ( = Togail Troi, Stokes's ed., Calcutta 1881) 623 has Pullus, and Vaclontis, and Ampiter; Dares, 3, has Hypsipylus, Volcontis, and Anyritos; and in the Welsh version of Dares, the Red Book of Hergest ii. 4, the names occur in the forms Nophilus, Aclius, and Ampiter.
If the translation which I have ventured to give of line 139 be the correct one, it reflects somewhat adversely on the Irish translator's knowledge of geography.
Trelawney ( Records of Byron, Shelley, and the Author ch. xvii. ad fin.) gives this description of the spot:— ‘In the morning we entered the narrow strait of Messina, passed close by the precipitous promontory of Scylla, and, at the distance
One of the translator's additions to the Vergilian text is the remark:— ‘Some allege that Ætna is one of the doors of hell,’ line 144. There is nothing to show whether he was moved to make this remark by his own theological leanings, or by the opinions current at the time. The idea was, no doubt, a common one. In The Last Days of Pompeii, Bk. ii., ch. viii., the same observation is made of Vesuvius: ‘Difficult was it then and there to guess the causes why the tradition of the place wore so gloomy and stern a hue; why in those smiling plains—to Baiae and Misenum—the poets had imagined the entrance and thresholds of their hell—their Acheron and their fabled Styx.’ And Lavengro, chap, xix., apostrophises ‘Ab Gwilym’ in similar terms:— ‘Thou startest, bendest thy crossbow, intending to hit Reynard with the bolt just above the jaw; but the bow breaks, Reynard barks, and disappears into his cave, which by thine own account reaches hell.’
And in the following passages of the poem Ætna, of the Augustan age, we find (Robinson Ellis's edition, lines 202–205):—
‘Jupiter himself looks wonderingly from afar at those mighty fires, and trembles silently in his secret place that a new race of Giants may rise to wage again the war that was buried in their graves.’
- Ipse procul magnos miratur luppiter ignes,
Neue sepulta noui surgant in bella Gigantes,
Neu Ditem regni pudeat, neu Tartara caelo
Vertat, in occulto tacitus tremit:
And, again, at lines 272–278 (cf. note, pp. 133, 134):—
‘Each of us should do his part to steep himself in crafts that are noble; they are the true grain of the mind, these the highest reward the world can bring us: to know what Nature keeps close within earth's deep heart; never to belie any of her workings, not to gaze in dumb amazement on the divine uproar and furious rages of Ætna's mountain; not to grow pale with affright at its sudden din, not to believe that the wrath of heaven has found a new home underground, or that hell is bursting its confine.’
- Implendus sibi quisque bonis est artibus: illae
Sunt animi fruges, hae rerum maxima merces:
Scire quid occulto terrae Natura coercet,
Nullum fallere opus, non mutos cernere sacros
Aetnaei montis fremitus animosque furentis,
Non subito pallere sono non credere subter
Caelestis migrasse minas aut Tartara rumpi.
Vergil's Sixth Book of the Æneid gave him a tremendous popularity throughout Europe in the middle ages. He figured in the popular imagination less as a cultured genius than the arch astrologer and mathematician, the sorcerer ‘who made witch-rhymes by which he could raise the dead.’ That the Celts came under this influence is proved by the existence of such tales as Fearas Fursa and Fis Adamnáin. But the influence was slighter in proportion as the general state of education was better. And the fact that so careful and good a translation was made into Irish goes to prove that there was a demand for it. The popularity of the proper name Æneas in the Highlands proves that it had no evil associations, just as the prevalence of it points to the probability that the tale, in some form, was at one time widely known.
The first leaf of BB. is missing, but the contents may be supplied from TCD., H. 1. 15; H 2 4, and probably would throw no light upon the Æneid. But the opening page of the existing Book of Ballymote (3b 26) has the passage that gives the genealogy of Latinus corresponding to lines 1478–1480. It runs thus: ‘Oir is iat da mac Ioib meic Satuirnd meic Pallon meic Picc meic Peil meic Treis meic Trois meic Mesraim meic Caim meic Naei.’ The TCD. paper copy has ‘Naoi’. Our text has ix = naoi: cf. O'Donovan's Supplement to O'Reilly's Dictionary. Gr. 432. TT1 opens thus: ‘Rogab rí uasal airegda ordnide rigi in
There seems room for doubt whether Apollo, in Gaelic Apaill or Paill, ever stood in the text.
On the top margin of the opening page (BB. 449), now illegible, but supplied from O'Curry's Catalogue, is the following sentence in an indifferent modern hand:—
‘Imraid ar Æneas da reir an fili Romanach Virgil bo deasda, Tadg Ua Flannagain AT. 1784.’ ‘An account of Æneas, according to the Roman poet, Vergil, follows.’ Such is the meaning of the phrase, bo deasta (= ‘now’): cf. Zimmer, KZ 30, 18 ; O'Donovan's Supplement to O'Reilly's Dictionary Gr. 132, ‘indestar ann so bo deasta’, are narrated henceforward, MR = The banquet of Dun na nGedh, and the Battle of Magh Rath, ed. John O'Donovan, Dublin 1842, 100, 2. But this is apparently the source of O'Reilly's curious blunder in his Dictionary, p. 178b, where he has the entry: ‘Deasda, adj., eldest, Ballim.’
There are three marginal glosses:—
p. 449 ‘guba .i. go n-ead no mead broin’
p. 477 ‘fodhbh .i. gearradh no teasgadh’
p. 479 ‘fuidhbh .i. buain éudibh dhe’
Under the words ‘co ruc urraind triana dhruim siar’ 2549 (BB. 477) is faintly written, ‘bidh Valintín ruadh.’
The scribe, Solomon O'Droma, was, according to Professor Atkinson, a pupil of Mac Egan, first editor of the book, who probably sold it to Mac Donogh of Ballymote. The same authority puts the date of writing at 1400 A.D. Two other pieces are in O'Droma's hand, and end with his flourish, 281 fin., and 333 a17.
Following immediately upon O'Droma's signature is an appreciation in a practised, modern hand: ‘Bennacht for hanmoin a mhic Ui Droma gi gur ecc tu ccc bliadhain ria mesi do ghenedh.’ ‘Blessing on your soul, Mac Ui Droma, though you died three hundred years before I was born.’ This pious postscript, by an unknown admirer, does more than express a wish for the welfare of the scribe's soul. It suggests the identity of his name with the modern Mac Codrum. I, also, will add my tribute of admiration for O'Droma's beautiful penmanship and his general accuracy.