ITS-SS13 Duanaire Finn – Reassessments

Cur síos

xi + 123 pp. 2003. ISBN 1 870166 92 2. John Carey.

By way of introduction to his contribution to this volume, Professor Joseph Nagy of the University of California, Los Angeles, paid tribute to the the introductions by Eoin MacNeill and Gerard Murphy to their three-volume edition of Duanaire Finn for the Society (Main Series 7, Main Series 28, Main Series 43), which have remained ‘some of the most valuable and provocative readings of Fenian literature’. He and the other contributors, John Carey, who also edited the volume, Donald E. Meek, the late Máirtín Ó Briain, and Ruairí Ó hUiginn provide an insightful reevaluation of the collection of poems known as Duanaire Finn . Originally brought together by Captain Somhairle MacDomhnaill in Belgium in the early seventeenth century, the poems are reexamined here as to their dating, their Scottish connexions, and their treatment by MacNeill and Murphy. The foreword to the volume, by Pádraig Ó Riain, describes how Duanaire Finn survived and was brought through the press, often against the background of a ‘clash of arms’.