Book cover of “By Poetic Authority”
Coira, M. Pía. (2012) By Poetic Authority: The Rhetoric of Panegyric in Gaelic Poetry of Scotland to c. 1700. Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press. ISBN: 978-1780460031, Hbk 352 pages, £45
Pía Coira’s painstaking and authoritative study of the rhetoric of panegyric in medieval and early modern Gaelic poetry is a significant contribution to the study of Gaelic literature and history in Scotland. Arguing that poetic authority is the principal articulation and justification of Gaelic political leadership and legitimacy (pp. 4-5, 11-12), Coira focuses ‘on the rhetoric of panegyric of Scotland from the earliest extant compositions to the early eighteenth century’ (p. xii). Coira takes the concept of the ‘panegyric code’, which John MacInnes developed in the context of the vernacular aristocratic poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and applies it more widely, especially to dán díreach, the so-called ‘classical’ verse of the filidh (singular file), the trained professional poets of Ireland and Scotland, whose craft reached its highest degree of regulation in the period after 1200. MacInnes characterised the panegyric code as ‘a densely woven texture of imagery in which every phrase, indeed almost every word, is significant’, ‘a coherent system of rhetoric of great resonance and evocative power’ (MacInnes 2006, p. 275).
Coira defines the terms ‘Scottish poetry’ and ‘poetry of Scotland’ expansively, ‘as the extant corpus of poems which in one way or another are of interest to Scotland’, including both poems addressed to Scottish patrons by Irish authors as well as works composed by Scottish poets (p. 31). The study begins with the arrival of the Gaels in Scotland c. AD 500 but Coira makes clear that there is very little surviving poetic material until about 1200 (p. 7) and indeed none from the middle of the thirteenth century until the beginning of the fifteenth (p. 11).
Following two introductory chapters setting out the historical and literary background, Coira analyses the corpora of poems that were composed for a number of individual aristocratic families, beginning with the MacDonalds and MacDougalls, and subjects their panegyric rhetoric to exhaustive scrutiny, discerning intriguing variations in the different sets of texts. The organising framework of the book is genealogical, with noble families grouped according to their position in the pseudo-historical schema that was developed (sometimes to political ends and through a process of tactical manipulation) by the Gaelic literati, and matters of family history treated in considerable detail. Thus all Gaelic families in Scotland claimed descent from one of five ancient progenitors, Colla Uais, Neimheadh, Corc mac Lughach, Niall Naoighiallach or Conaire Mór (p. 184); for purposes of Coira’s analysis, the Campbells and MacLeods are treated together as ‘the descendants of Neimheadh’, a classification that would probably be familiar to very few historians. The final group of families discussed are the kings of Scotland and Britain: ‘From the Dál Riada chiefs to the royal Stiúbhairt’. The concluding chapter provides a clear and concise summary of the book’s argument.
To supplement the painstaking discussion of genealogical matters, no fewer than 23 family trees or genealogical tables are presented. The volume also includes an edition of a previously unpublished short poem, ‘Námha an cheird nach taithighthear’ (‘The unpractised craft is an enemy’), perhaps composed by Cathal Mac Muireadhaigh (MacMhuirich) (fl. 1600-50), one of the last learned poets in that illustrious family.
The time frame for Coira’s study runs until c. 1700 but the basis for this chronological cutoff is not made entirely clear. It appears to coincide with the end of classical poetic tradition (which Coira dates more specifically to c. 1726, with the death of the learned poet Niall Mac Muireadhaigh (MacMhuirich in vernacular Gaelic)), and although classical (or ‘bardic’) verse is the principal focus Coira also gives due attention to material composed in the Scottish Gaelic vernacular, which becomes plentiful from the 1640s onwards. Within the corpus of vernacular verse Coira emphasises the poets with a ‘semi-official’ role ‘who appear affiliated’ to chiefs, but of lower status than the filidh (pp. 42-3). Although she stresses the substantial stylistic continuity between classical and vernacular verse, several thematic differences between the two bodies of work are highlighted, notably the relative prominence of royalist ideology in vernacular verse. This difference may be historical rather than literary in nature; affiliation to the Stewart kings as a political strategy among Gaelic chiefs only came to the fore in the 1640s, the very period when the surviving corpus of vernacular verse comes to be plentiful, and by which time the classical poetic tradition was already in serious decline. Conversely, in relation to understandings of older Gaelic tradition, especially genealogical matters, Coira notes the ‘filidh’s dogged refusal to accept new-fangled versions of history, and the vernacular poets’ tendency to be more influenced by these’ (p. 256).
Considering the material as a whole, Coira discerns ‘two clearly differentiated types of poetic rhetoric’, with the difference between them marked by the extent to which they conform to or deviate from ‘the rhetoric commonly found in poems by Irish authors for Irish subjects’. In Coira’s view, these deviations from the Irish model ‘can almost entirely be explained in the light of the specific social and political developments surrounding the Gaoidhil [Gaels] in Scotland’ (p. 319). The most important differences involve the role of kingship in the Scottish context, particularly following the de-Gaelicisation of the Scottish monarchy. While ‘only a few scraps’ of classical poetry composed for the kings have survived from before 1600 (p. 289), the small corpus of material from the pre-classical period (i.e. pre-1200) does present important political themes of the king as leader of his people and defender of his territory, notions that became increasingly rare in classical poems to individual clan chiefs. Striking by its absence in classical verse is rhetoric concerning the high-kingship of Scotland (although suitably for the high-kingship of Ireland, a very common motif in Irish poetry, does make a limited appearance in Clan Donald verse). Coira suggests, on limited evidence, that the theme of the high-kingship of Scotland may have emerged in the late ninth or early tenth century but that it disappeared in the early fourteenth century (p. 320). Similarly, Coira explains that there is no real Scottish counterpart to a related motif which is central to classical Irish verse, the concept of ‘the chief as the spouse of his territory, with the land being the goddess of sovereignty’ (p. 32).
Another difference between the Scottish and Irish material is the near-total absence of what Coira calls the ‘Gall motif’, i.e. depicting the chief as a Gaelic champion in a struggle against the foreigners, which is ubiquitous in Irish bardic poetry. The shifting semantics of the term Gall are important here; where once it meant ‘foreigner’ (and in Ireland, English invader), by the seventeenth century the normal and most direct meaning in Scotland was ‘Lowland Scot’, and it is only at this point that the Gall motif begins to appear in classical verse, perhaps under the influence of vernacular poetry and vernacular speech. This divergence in literary convention reflects substantive political differences between the two countries: Coira makes the important point that ‘the poetry offers no sign of Gaelic opposition to the crown, and no perception of the later Scottish monarchs as foreigners, despite their Norman origins’ (p. 341), a view which aligns with John MacInnes’s interpretation of the nature of Gaelic political identity in Scotland (MacInnes 2006c). Coira praises the poets’ ability to adjust the rhetorical framework of learned poetry to accommodate new Scottish political circumstances that were very different from those of Ireland, and also notes that this adaptation is ‘a testimony to the success of a largely non-confrontational Normanisation process of the kingdom of Scots’ (p. 344).
In contrast, certain other motifs concerning lordship and sovereignty are distinctively Scottish, notably the concept of ‘ceannas na nGaoidheal’, the supremacy of the Gaels, first attested in works to MacDonald chiefs but much more fully and boldly developed in Campbell poetry. Coira observes that ‘it is rather as if the Caimbéalaigh felt a need to assert their place in Gaeldom, particularly from the late sixteenth century onwards’ (p. 132).
A reader with no background in the field might find this exhaustive study hard going in places. The first chapter quickly immerses the reader in a dense account of the history of Gaelic poetry in medieval Scotland for which a degree of background knowledge is assumed. Although Coira includes a detailed and helpful glossary of ‘panegyric code motifs’ in an appendix (pp. 351-62), a number of other Gaelic terms are interposed without definition or explanation, including ollamh re dán, dinnsheanchas, dán díreach, and duanaire, (pp. 2, 9, 23 and 203). It is unfortunate that Coira has not yet been able to publish a detailed study based on her earlier investigation of perceptions and expressions of leadership in late medieval Irish poetry (Dewar 2006). Throughout the current book, she makes reference to the motifs and conventions of panegyric rhetoric in counterpart Irish verse and it would be very helpful if a comprehensive study of this material were available. Indeed, it is surprising how little has been written about the imagery and rhetoric of classical verse in general. Eleanor Knott’s very brief summary in her 1922 edition of the bardic poems of Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn (Knott 1922: li-lxiv), which Coira refers to (p. 319), is still the most useful presentation.
One important difficulty in assessing early Gaelic poetry from Scotland is that it requires drawing inferences, if not from silence, from very small corpora. For example, Coira comments that references to genealogical connexions with Gaelic heroes are common in poems composed for the Campbells, MacDonalds and MacDougalls, but are much rarer in poems for the MacGregors and Stewarts and entirely absent from poems to the MacLeods. But the bodies of surviving verse for these different families varies very significantly in terms of both quantity and periodicity. The corpus of classical poetry to the MacLeods is thin and late, for example; only eight poems in all, one from c. 1420, one from c. 1500, and six post 1600 (p. 158). Coira is aware of these difficulties, commenting for example that with only two surviving poems to MacDougall chiefs it is not possible to draw wider conclusions (p. 113) and that classical poems to Gall patrons are so few that ‘our conclusions can only be tentative’ (p. 277). Indeed, it is important to remember that there is no significant body of classical poetry composed for any family in Gaelic Scotland in comparison what is available in relation to leading Irish families. Observations about the extent to which particular motifs and topics are present or not are thus inherently risky; a reader might view some of Coira’s comments on the significance of missing motifs as drawing too much from too little evidence. This may be particularly true of her discussion of lost poems to the Scottish kings between c. 900 and c. 1200, as to which she speculates on possible themes that might have been developed in these texts (p. 329).
A related issue is Coira’s practice of classifying the use of particular names, titles or motifs as ‘passing references’ or ‘isolated statements’ (e.g. pp. 88, 99, 164, 190). It is not always clear how the line is to be drawn between such offhand usages and what should be understood as more deliberate or substantive statements.
It is no simple matter to select appropriate orthographic conventions for the spelling of Gaelic personal names across centuries and different stages and varieties of the language and at some point there tends to be a need for some kind of Gordian knot-cutting. Coira has adopted the unusual practice of spelling all personal names according to Classical Gaelic conventions rather than those used for the Scottish Gaelic vernacular (e.g. Caimbéal instead of the vernacular Caimbeul, Mac Gille Eóin instead of MacGill’Eathain), except for those of poets who composed in the Scottish Gaelic vernacular (xv-xvi). This leads to some odd juxtapositions (e.g. in the same line of text on p. 180 the first name of the late seventeenth-century vernacular poet An Clàrsair Dall is given as Ruairidh while that of the MacLeod chief for whom he composed is spelled as Ruaidhrí) as well as a few lapses (e.g. the vernacular form Gilleasbaig is used systematically in place of the classical Giolla Easbuig (except on p. 140); the classical form Gaoidheal is sometimes replaced by English Gael (pp. 336, 340) or vernacular Gaidheal (pp. 279, 304); and Máiri NicDhomhnaill on p. 112 should be Màiri NicDhòmhnaill, according to the conventions applied elsewhere). Scottish historians may find the forms Brús, Stiúbhart and Grám (which are actually little-attested in Gaelic sources) for Bruce, Stewart and Graham somewhat difficult to interpret, particularly with inflected forms such as Stiúbhairt which a non-Gaelic speaker would probably not recognise as being plural rather than singular.
The book is carefully edited and contains very few typographical or other technical errors, no mean achievement in a work of this complexity. A number of words are given line-end hyphenation in inappropriate places, most strikingly on p. 163 where the emended form of the nominative plural article ‘[N]a’ is broken between the [N] and the a.
The system of citing poems is somewhat unwieldy; a poem that is initially cited in a footnote directs the reader to the index of poems at the end of the book, which then gives a list of all the places in the book where the poem is cited. The last of these will give the requisite bibliographic details, which are set out in appendix 3, which itself contains 53 sub-sections (arranged according to individual families), with poems within each sub-section listed alphabetically. Thus the anonymous sixteenth-century poem ‘Maith an chairt ceannas na nGaoidheal’ is cited twelve times through the book, as noted in the index of poems (p. 398), but the source details are given the twelfth and last of these (on p. 364).
By Poetic Authority is a major scholarly achievement that will be of considerable value to both literary scholars and historians alike. Although a challenging read, the wealth of detail and the care of its analysis make it an important contribution to the field and an enduring resource for future researchers.
References
Dewar, Pía (Pía Coira). ‘Perceptions and expressions of leadership in Gaelic sources: Ireland 140-1600’. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Aberdeen.
Knott, Eleanor, ed. (1922, 1926). A Bhfuil Aguinn Dár Chum Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn (1550-1591)/The Bardic Poems of Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn (1550-1591). London: Irish Texts Society.
MacInnes, John (2006a). Dùthchas nan Gàidheal: Selected Essays of John MacInnes, ed. by Michael Newton. Edinburgh: Birlinn.
MacInnes, John (2006b [1978]). ‘The panegyric code in Gaelic poetry and its historical background’, in MacInnes 2006a, 265-319. Edinburgh: Birlinn.
MacInnes, John (2006c [1989]). ‘The Gaelic perception of the Lowlands’, in MacInnes 2006a, 34-47. Edinburgh: Birlinn.
Review by Professor Wilson McLeod, University of Edinburgh
19 May 2015