Duanaire Finn – The Book of The Lays of Fionn. Irish Text With Translation. Part II

Description

Gerard Murphy (foilsithe den chéad uair / first published 1933)

xx + 410 pp. ISBN 1 870 16628 0

With the appearance in 1908 of the first volume of Duanaire Finn, edited by Eoin MacNeill, Tadhg O’Donoghue (Torna) wrote: ‘It is books of this kind that show what great work is being done by the Irish Texts Society’. Alas, forty-five years were to pass before the third and final volume, edited by Gerard Murphy, was to be published. This final volume has been described by John Carey, who edited a Subsidiary Series volume of Reassessments of Duanaire Finn in 2003 (No. 13), as ‘a formidable and enduring monument of Irish scholarship’. The Duanaire consists of a collection of poetic texts relating to Fionn mac Cumhaill and the Fianna assembled by Aodh Ó Dochartaigh in Ostend in 1627 for the use of Captain Somhairle Mac Domhnaill of Clann Domhnaill of the Route in county Antrim. As Ruairí Ó hUiginn stated, it was this commission, rather than any of his military exploits, ‘that ensured that Mac Domhnaill’s name and fame would endure’.