Abstract
Figure 1 Daniel Maclise, Irish, 1806–1870. The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife, c.1854. Oil on canvas. 315 × 513 cm. Photograph © National Gallery of Ireland, NGI.205
On July 21, 1879, art collector Richard Wallace of London wrote to Henry Doyle, then Director of the National Gallery of Ireland:
It has long been my wish to become the purchaser of Daniel Maclise’s picture The Marriage of Strongbow with a view of presenting it to the National Gallery of Ireland as I always felt that this masterly painting of our great Irish artist ought to find a permanent home on Irish soil. I am sure that you will be glad to hear that I have now been able to realize my idea, and the picture is mine, until it is accepted, as I hope it will be, by the Director of the National Gallery in Dublin. (Minutes of the National Gallery of Ireland 336)
Wallace’s desire that Maclise’s nineteenth century painting of a medieval Irish marriage in the midst of a battlefield find “a permanent home on Irish soil” was based not only on its Cork-born painter but on its depiction of a pivotal event in the story of the English presence in Ireland. At 3.15 × 5.13 m, Daniel Maclise’s The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife is the largest painting held in the National Gallery, and the canvas hangs as imposingly in the Gallery as its subject does in Ireland’s collective memory (Figure 1).
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Notes
Cf. Goddard Henry Orpen, Ireland under the Normans 1169–1333 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005) 70–71.
Orpen, Ireland under the Normans 1169–1333 15–16, 91–106.
As Cambrensis’s account does not include specific dates, those included in the description below come from Orpen, Ireland under the Normans 1169–1333.
The other significant contemporary version is Goddard Henry Orpen, The Song ofDermot and the Earl, an Old French Poem from the Carew Manuscript No. 596 Edited with Literal Translation and Notes a Facsimile and a Map (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1892).
For more on Maclise and romantic medievalism, see Pamela Berger, “The Historical, the Sacred, the Romantic: Medieval Texts into Irish Watercolors,” Visualizing Ireland: National Identity and the Pictorial Tradition, ed. Adele M. Dalsimer (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993). See also the essays in Peter Murray, ed., Daniel Maclise (1806–1870)—Romancing the Past. Cf. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, “Dreaming of the Middle Ages” (Orlando, FL.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986) where he discusses the term neo-medievalism.
Maclise’s own attitude in relation to the painting’s two populations has been the subject of intense critical debate. For a concise summary of this debate, see Tom Dunne’s essay on The Marriage ofStrongbow and Aoife in Peter Murray, ed., Daniel Maclise (1806–1870)—Romancing the Past (Kinsale, Cork: Crawford Art Gallery Gandon Editions, 2008) 70–75. John Turpin’s essay in the same volume, “Maclise and the Royal Academy,” offers a nuanced look at Maclise’s position relative to Ireland and the Royal Academy of Arts, London (147–59).
Cf. Michelle O’Mahony, The Famine in Cork City: Famine Life at Cork Union Workhouse (Cork: Mercier Press, 2005). Patrick Hickey, Famine in West Cork: The Mizen Peninsula Land and People, 1800–1852 (Cork: Mercier Press, 2002). The Cork Poorhouse was initially built for 2,000 but as of February 1847 housed over 4,400 paupers (Brendan 0 Cathaoir, Famine Diary (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999) 99). The dead were buried in mass graves or remained exposed on the roads.
Balfour refers here to A. G. Richey’s Lectures on the History oflreland, Down to A. D. 1534 (Dublin: E. Ponsonby, 1869).
Cf. Chris Jones, Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth Century Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). In “New Old English: The Place of Old English in Twentieth and Twenty- First Century Poetry” (Literature Compass 7, 1009–19), Jones traces the growing body of work interested in what he terms the “New Old English” and argues that modern and contemporary poets have ignored historical boundaries in order to incorporate the deep past.
Cf. Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren, eds., Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams, eds., Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Lisa Lamper-Weissig, Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies, Postcolonial Literary Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).
Joseph Nagy has noted the intersections between medieval Irish literature and modern Irish folklore in his “Observations on the Ossianesque in Medieval Irish Literature and Modern Irish Folklore,” Falaky: Journal ofAmerican Folklore 114.454 (Fall 2001). While the title of Richard Wall’s edited conference volume Medieval and Modern Ireland gestures toward a very rich intersection, the chapters remain divided between those dealing with the medieval literature (chiefly poetics) and the modern writers (Friel and Shaw). This division prevents the volume from productively engaging the moments at which the medieval invades Ireland’s modern texts. Richard Wall, ed., Medieval and Modern Ireland (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1989).
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Ulin, J.V. (2014). Introduction: Medieval Causes. In: Medieval Invasions in Modern Irish Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137297501_1
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