Abstract
In the preface to his Topographia Hibernica, written in 1188 for Henry II (“our western Alexander”), Gerald of Wales claimed that:
Sicut enim orientales plage propriis quibusdam et sibi innatis preeminent et precellunt ostentis, sic et occidentales circumferentie suis nature miraculis illustrantur. Quociens quippe tanquam seriis et veris fatigata negociis paululum secedit et excedit, remotis his partibus quasi verecundis et occultis natura ludit excessibus.
Just as the countries of the East are remarkable and distinguished for certain prodigies peculiar and native to themselves, so the boundaries of the West are also made remarkable by their own wonders of nature. For sometimes tired, as it were, of the true and the serious [Nature] draws aside and goes away, and in these remote parts indulges herself in these secret and distant freaks.1 Gerald went on to catalog the marvels and miracles of Ireland, a country, like the East, located at the edges of the world. Within Gerald’s lifetime, marginal illustrations were added to the text, and very soon thereafter copies of the Topographia were bound with bestiaries and other manuscripts containing accounts of the marvelous and the monstrous. All these manuscripts were ultimately derived from the works of classical authors—Megasthenes, Ctesias, and Pliny chief amongst them— but while classical and earlier medieval authors described and depicted marvels long ago and far away, Gerald’s account was contemporary.
Gerald went on to catalog the marvels and miracles of Ireland, a country, like the East, located at the edges of the world.Within Gerald’s lifetime, marginal illustrations were added to the text, and very soon thereafter copies of the Topographia were bound with bestiaries and other manuscripts containing accounts of the marvelous and the monstrous. All these manuscripts were ultimately derived from the works of classical authors—Megasthenes, Ctesias, and Pliny chief amongst them—but while classical and earlier medieval authors described and depicted marvels long ago and far away, Gerald’s account was contemporary.
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Notes
J. J. O’Meara, ed., “Giraldus Cambrensis in Topographia Hibernie: Text of the First Recension,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 52 (1948–50): 113–77, at 119;
Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland, ed. and trans. J. J. O’Meara (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 31;
Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed. J. E Dimock (London: Longman & Co., 1867), 5: 20–1.
See also J.-M. Boivin, L’Irlande au Moyen Âge: Giraud de Bari et la Topographie Hibernica (1188) (Paris: Champion; Geneva: Slatkine, 1993). All translations of the Topographia are O’Meara’s.
The literature on mapping and conquest is extensive, but see in particular: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Hybrids, Monsters, Borderlands: The Bodies of Gerald of Wales,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 85–104;
Alfred Hiatt, “The Cartographic Imagination of Thomas Elmham,” Speculum, 75 (2000): 859–86;
Susan Stuart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).
On this aspect of Gerald’s writings see John Gillingham, “Conquering the Barbarians:War and Chivalry in Twelfth-Century Britain and Ireland,” in The English in the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000), 41–68; Cohen, “Hybrids, Monsters, Borderlands”
See also Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 56–7.
See, for example, Steven Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonders of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991);
Andrew Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997);
Andrew Hadfield and W. Maley, “Irish Representations and English Alternatives,” in Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660, ed. B. Bradshaw, A. Hadfield, and W. Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1–23;
R. R. Davies, “‘Sweet Civility’ and ‘Barbarous Rudeness,’” in The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093–1343 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 113–41.
Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 73; Antonia Gransden, “Realistic Observation in Twelfth Century England,” Speculum, 47 (1972): 29–51. For a more theoretical analysis of the illustrations see
Rhonda Knight, “Werewolves, Monsters, and Marvels: Representing Cultural Fantasies in Gerald of Wales’s ‘Topographia Hibernica,”’ Studies in Iconology, 22 (2001): 55–86.
Topographia, part III, deals with the ignorance, vice, violence, and lack of religion of the Irish. See also Gerald of Wales, Expugnatio Hibernica (The Conquest of Ireland), ed. and trans. E X. Martin and A. B. Scott (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1978), 233.
A. Dooley and H. Roe, Tales of the Elders of Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), xxiii–xxviii.
Alan Lawson and Chris Tiffin, “Conclusion: Reading Difference,” in De-scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and Textuality (London: Routledge, 1994), 230–5, at 230.
Carolyn Walker Bynum, “Metamorphosis, or Gerald and the Werewolf,” Speculum, 73 (1998): 987–1013; Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001).
See Brendan Smith, Colonisation and Conquest in Medieval Ireland: The English in Louth, 1170–1330 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 22–7.
Kim McCone, “Werewolves, Cyclopes, Díberga and Fíanna: Juvinile Delinquency in Early Ireland,” Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 12 (1986): 1–22, at 2;
Joseph Falaky Nagy, The Wisdom of the Outlaw: The Boyhood Deeds of Finn in Gaelic Narrative Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 3. Werewolves in Ireland, particularly in Ossory, appear in the mirabilia of Patrick (p. 62) and in the Book of Ballymote (p. 205).
Sean Duffy, Ireland in the Middle Ages (NewYork: St Martin’s Press, 1997), 122;
Annála Connacht: The Annals of Connacht AD 1224–1544, ed. A. M. Freeman (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1944), s.a. 1249.
Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse,” Screen, 24.6 (1983): 18–36; “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October, 28 (1984): 125–33;
Patricia Clare Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 109–17.
See Harriet Spiegel, “The Male Animal in the Fables of Marie de France,” in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 111–26. See also Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, 170–3.
Leslie Dunton-Downer, “Wolf Man,” in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (NewYork: Garland, 1997), 203–18.
On the larger tradition, see M. Kratz, “Fictus Lupus: The Werewolf in Christian Thought,” Classical Folia, 30–1 (1976): 57–80. On female werewolves in Ireland, see
J. R. Reinhard and V. E. Hull, “Bran and Sceolang,” Speculum, 11 (1936): 42–58, esp. 53–5.
In, for example, Echtra mac Nechach Muigmedón and Cóir Anmann. See also Kim McCone, Pagan Past and Christian Present (Maynooth: An Sagart, 1990), 109;
Lisa Bitel, Land of Women: Tales of Sex and Gender from Early Ireland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 69–70;
R. A. Breatnach, “The Lady and the King: A Theme of Irish Literature,” Studies, 42 (1953): 321–36;
Pronsias Mac Cana, “Aspects of the Theme of King and Goddess in Irish Literature,” Études Celtiques, 7 (1955–57): 76–104 and 8 (1958): 59–65.
See also John Gillingham, “Killing and Mutilating Political Enemies in the British Isles from the late Twelfth to the early Fourteenth Century: A Comparative Study,” in Britain and Ireland 900–1300: Insular Responses to Medieval European Change, ed. Brendan Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 114–34, at 116.
See Richard Sharpe, “Hiberno-Latin Laicus, Irish Láech, and the Devil’s Men,” Ériu, 38 (1979): 75–92, esp. 82–5; Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives: An Introduction to ‘Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 319;
Joseph Falaky Nagy, Conversing with Angels and Ancients (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 296.
McCone, “Werewolves,” 2; Kuno Meyer, Fianaigecht (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1910);
Pronsias Mac Cana, “The Influence of the Vikings on Celtic Literature,” in Proceedings of the International Congress of Celtic Studies 1959, ed. Brian Ó Cuiv (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1962), 87–93.
Seán Mac Airt and Gearíud Mac Niocaill, eds. The Annals of Ulster (to A.D. 1131), Part 1: Text and Translation (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1983), s.a. 847: “Toghal Innsi Locha Muinnremair la Mael Sechnaill for fianlach mar di maccaibh bais Luigne ocus Galeng ro batar oc indriudh na tuath more gentilium” (Mael Sechnaill destroyed the Island of Loch Muinremor, overcoming there a large band of wicked men of Luigni and Gailenga, who had been plundering the territories in the manner of heathens); McCone, “Werewolves,” 5.
In several of the tales fían bands are described as plundering in Britain in addition to their “wolfing” in Ireland. See, for example, Togail Bruichne Da Derga or the genealogical tale of Conall Costamail and his daughter Créidne (a ban féindid [female Fenian]) in Corpus Genealogiarum Hiberniae, ed. M. A. O’Brien (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1962), 1: 154.
Macgnímartha Finn (The Boyhood Deeds of Finn), ed. and trans. Kuno Meyer, Ériu, 1 (1904): 180–90;
Acallam Bec (The Little Colloquy), partial edition, Douglas Hyde, “Am Agallamh Beag,” Lía Fáil, 1 (1924): 79–107;
Cath Fionntrágha (The Battle of Ventry), ed. Cecile O’Rahilly (Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies, 1962).
The text survives in four manuscripts: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud 610 (fifteenth century); Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson B 487 (fifteenth century); The Book of Lismore, Library of the Duke of Devonshire (fifteenth century); Killiney, MS A iv (sixteenth century). Nagy dates the composition of the earliest recension ca. 1200: J. E Nagy, “Compositional Concerns in the Acallam na Senórach,” in Sages, Saints and Storytellers: Celtic Studies in Honour of Professor James Carney, ed. Donnchadh O Corráin, Liam Breatnach, and Kim McCone (Maynooth: An Sagart, 1989), 149–58, at 149. Acallamh na Senórach, ed. Whitley Stokes, in
Irische Texte, ed. W Stokes and E. Windisch, 4th ser., vol. 1 (Leipzig: S. Herzel, 1900); Dooley and Roe, Tales.
See Donnchadh Ó Corráin, “Legend as Critic,” in The Writer as Witness. Literature as Historical Evidence, ed. T. Dunne (Cork: University of Cork Press, 1987), 23–38, especially 36–7.
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© 2003 Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren
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Karkov, C.E. (2003). Tales of the Ancients: Colonial Werewolves and the Mapping of Postcolonial Ireland. In: Ingham, P.C., Warren, M.R. (eds) Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980236_5
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