The Irish Tradition E-Book

Robin Flower

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 292

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1993

Beschreibung

First published in 1947, these celebrated lectures and introductions to the medieval and modern Gaelic-speaking culture, which was drawing to a close when Flower first came to Ireland in 1910, form a primary source for generations of scholars and readers, Celticists and medievalists. This edition is accompanied by Professor Delargy's In Memoriam and an updated bibliography of Flower's works.

Leseprobe

THE IRISH TRADITION

ROBIN FLOWER

THE LILLIPUT PRESS MCMXCIV

CONTENTS

Title Page

Preface

In Memoriam by Séamus Ó Duilearga

I The Founding of the Tradition

II Exiles and Hermits

III The Rise of the Bardic Order

IV The Bardic Heritage

V Ireland and Medieval Europe

VI Love’s Bitter-Sweet

VII The End of the Tradition

Bibliography

Copyright

PREFACE

THE present volume was first published by the Oxford University Press in 1947 with the following preface by Ida M. Flower and Barbara Flower:

‘When in 1945 Dr Flower felt he would never be able to write the history of Irish literature he had long planned, he decided on the advice of his friends Professors J.H. Delargy and Myles Dillon to publish a selection he had put together of what he had already said or written on the subject on various occasions over a long period of years. He was already too ill to revise and annotate the manuscript himself and he turned to his friends and colleagues for help. The references in this book, except in chapter V, where nearly all the notes are his own, are due to the kindness of Mr David Greene. Help has also been given by Professor Eleanor Knott and Mr Gerald Murphy. The main work of preparing the manuscript for the press has been generously undertaken by Professor Myles Dillon, and Dr D.A. Binchy has revised the proofs.

As Dr Flower intended, his Sir John Rhys Memorial Lecture for 1927, IrelandintheMedievalEurope, has been incorporated in chapter V by kind permission of the secretary of the British Academy, and part of the introduction to Professor T.F. O’Rahilly’s DántaGrádha (2nd edition 1926) has, with his permission, been inserted as chapter VI; where in that introduction Irish poems were cited in the original, Professor Dillon has substituted Dr Flower’s own translations published in Love’sBitter-Sweet (Cuala Press 1925), and in PoemsandTranslations (Constable 1931, Lilliput 1994).

A large part of the book covers the same ground as the Donnellan Lectures which Dr Flower delivered at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1938.

We should like to express our gratitude to all those who have thus made it possible to publish the book.’

Two days after my father, Robin Flower, died in 1946, Professor J.H. Delargy gave a most moving talk on Irish Radio entitled InMemoriam. The talk gives a masterly summation of Dr Flower’s scholastic achievements and it seems most appropriate to reprint it here. This is done by kind permission of RTE.

It was felt that the present volume would be a very suitable place in which to republish the bibliography of Robin Flower’s published works, originally printed at the end of his obituary by Sir Idris Bell in the Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol XXXII, and this is reprinted at the end of the book by kind permission of the secretary of the British Academy. The opportunity has been taken to make additions and minor corrections, and to bring the bibliography up to date with works published posthumously. I am indebted to my brother-in-law, Professor Charles Mitchell, the original compiler of the bibliography, for help and advice with this revision.

My family and I are much indebted to The Lilliput Press for bringing the book once more into print.

PATRICK FLOWER

IN MEMORIAM

ROBIN ERNEST WILLIAM FLOWER, Deputy-Keeper of Manuscripts in the British Museum from 1929 to 1944, died in London on 16 January 1946. He was sixty-five. In the obituary notices in the London and Dublin newspapers you will find enumerated the many honours and distinctions awarded to him by learned institutions and universities in Great Britain and Ireland. He was a Fellow of the British Academy, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Member of the Royal Irish Academy, Doctor of Literature of the National University of Ireland and also of Dublin University. But to his many friends both in Britain and in Ireland he was plain Robin Flower; to the people of the Great Blasket, which by his lectures and writings he immortalized, he was known as ‘Bláithín’, a playful rendering of his Yorkshire surname. I think that the honour from the little island kingdom was that which Robin Flower appreciated most of all.

I met Flower for the first time twenty years ago when he was lecturing on Irish literature in University College, Dublin. I saw him for the last time on 29 November 1945 in London. During all those years he had been my guide and counsellor, and, above all, my friend. Flower had a genius for friendship. He was not the type of scholar whose preoccupation with the study of the past has made him oblivious of the present.

Most of us here in Ireland who knew him, and who loved him, thought of him as an Irish scholar only. He was much more than that. He was at home in Anglo-Saxon, in Welsh, in Latin and Greek, and in most of the modern languages and literatures of Europe. For him beauty was to be found hidden in the lines of medieval vellum Mss as well as in the tale or song of the Corca Dhuibhne or Aran seanchai. In his delightful essay, IrelandandMedievalEurope, his introduction to the DántaGrádha of Professor Tomás Ó Rathile, his translations of Irish poetry, and in his last will and testament, TheWesternIsland, Flower had enriched the commonwealth of European Literature with his interpretation of beauty of the past which still lingers on the tattered fringes of the old Gaelic world, on the lips and in the hearts of the people he knew and loved in such places as the Blasket.

Whenever I visited London my first call was to the British Museum, and there Flower and I would talk of matters of common interest, in particular of Irish literature, and of the work of preservation of the living Irish language and the oral traditions enshrined in it. But this sanctum of Flower’s in the Museum was not secure refuge, for our talk was sure to be interrupted by those who, like myself, had come for advice and instruction. Flower spent a great part of his time in helping others. No one who sought scholastic alms was ever turned away, although many forgot to remember the aid he had so generously given them.

In the ever narrowing circle of Irish scholarship Flower occupies a place of unusual distinction. He was above all else a medievalist, whose thorough knowledge of the literature of the Middle Ages enriched his sensitive appreciation of the unique character of early and medieval Irish literature, as also the orally-preserved literature of the Gaeltacht which for Flower was part of the Irish culture-heritage—the unwritten counterpart of the literature of the Manuscript Tradition. His CatalogueofIrishManuscriptsintheBritishMuseum will remain as an abiding epitaph to his learning and to the humanity of his scholarship. He had intended to devote the years of retirement from his exacting administrative post in the Museum to the writing, as part of the third volume of the catalogue, of a book on Irish literature, of which a few preliminary sketches had appeared in print, or had been delivered in the form of public lectures. He told me last November (1945) that he had intended to write on a neglected subject, ‘The English of Ireland’; and there was much else besides which he would have committed to writing had his health and strength permitted. Unlike most scholars, he kept few written notes, relying on his amazing memory which had served until two years ago as an unfailing card-index to the learning accumulated in many fields over more than fifty years.

In my last conversation with him, he talked with animation of his first visit to the Great Blasket in 1910, saying that he had tried in his book, TheWesternIsland, to show his gratitude to the people of the island, to Tomás Ó Criomhthain, to Peig Sayers, to Gobnait Ní Chinnéide, and to many others, both living and dead, whose friendship had coloured his whole life and had enriched and warmed his scholarship. His mind went back to the days of his youth, to the Island Nights of storytelling, and the days on the hill or in the naomhóg speeding across summer seas to Dúnchaoin or Inis Icíleáin. These happy hours he had enshrined in a golden web full of wistful memory. They were with him to the last. Robin Flower will for ever live in the pages of the book he dedicated to the people he loved in that distant isle of the west ‘around which sea-horses glisten: a fair course against the white swelling surge’.

SolasgealnabhFlaitheasdotanam,aBhláithín!

SÉAMUS Ó DUILEARGA

RadioÉireann,18January1946

1

THE FOUNDING OF THE TRADITION

AVISITOR to Ireland familiar with Gaelic literature has his attention arrested everywhere in that beautiful island by many features, natural and artificial, which set him searching among his memories and clothing hill and river, rath and church and castle, with the lively and intimate colouring of long-descended tradition. And if he yields himself to the spell of that lure of recollection and summons back out of the past the kings and saints and scholars and poets whose names still cling about the places that they knew, he may be contented to recall that he is acting in the very spirit of those devoted scholars to whom that tradition owes its origin and survival. For the poets of Ireland cultivated with an unremitting assiduity a study to which they gave the name dindshenchas, the lore of the high places, until by the accretion of centuries there came into existence a large body of literature in prose and verse, forming a kind of Dictionary of National Topography, which fitted the famous sites of the country each with its appropriate legend. It was one of the obligations of a poet to have this knowledge ready at call, and if faced by a demand to relate the associations of some deserted rath or lonely pillar-stone he failed to render an exact and credible account, he was shamed to the very roots of his being.

An early text, edited by Miss Knott,1 gives us a clear picture of this function of the poets in action. It will appear later that the southern part of the County Antrim and the neighbouring portion of the County Down was an active centre of historical study in the sixth and seventh centuries. And it is here that the scene of our tale is laid, in the fort of Mag Line, the seat of the kings of Ulster at that period.

Eochu Rigéices was the chief poet of Ireland. Fiachna mac Boetaín was ever desiring him to come to make poetry for him, for Fiachna was king of Ulster and Eochu was of the Ulidians. ‘I will not be in your company,’ said Eochu, ‘of all the kings that are in Ireland, for there is a young lad with you, Mongán son of Fiachna. And that is the lad that is most of knowledge in Ireland, the evilly disposed will be setting him to contend with me, I shall put a curse on him, and that will be a matter of strife between thee and me.’ ‘Not so,’ says Fiachna, ‘I will speak to my son that he contend not with thee, he shall be the most courteous to thee of all my household.’ ‘’Tis well,’ says Eochu, ‘so shall it be done and so shall be to a year’s end.’ He was there one day relating matters of knowledge. ‘’Tis ill done of thee, Mongán,’ said the serving lads, ‘not to cross the clown that speaks a lie.’ ‘’Tis well,’ says Mongán. Fiachna went on his royal visitation with Eochu in his company. As they were going the way one day they saw six mighty pillar stones in front of them and four novice clerics about the stones. ‘What make ye there, clerics?’ says Fiachna. ‘We are here in quest of knowledge and information; God has brought to us the King poet of Ireland, to wit Eochu, to make clear to us who planted these stones and in what manner he set them in array.’ ‘Well,’ says Eochu, ‘I have no recollection of that. Methinks ’twas the Clanna Dedad that raised them for the building of the castle of Gúroi.’ ‘Good, Eochu,’ said one of them, ‘the novice clerics declare that thou art gone astray. 5 ‘Blame him not,’ says another. ‘Perchance he is in ignorance,’ says his fellow. ‘Well,’ says Eochu, ‘and you, what is your interpretation of them?’ ‘This is our information: there are three stones here of a champion band and three of a warrior band. ‘Twas Conall Cernach that set them, together with Illand son of Fergus that slew three men here in his prentice fight. He was unable to rear the stones being so young, and Fergus aided him to lift them, for it was a custom of the men of Ulster that, wherever they should perform their prentice deed of valour, they raised pillar stones to the number of the men they slew; and now begone, Eochu, with thy ignorance.’ ‘Be not shamed, Eochu,’ says Fiachna, ‘the clerics are a good match for thee.’

The story continues in the same way. Eochu fails to read the secrets of the two great raths and is mocked by the young clerics. They return home and the tale goes on.

Mongán was with his people in the house when they came. ‘’Tis well,’ says Eochu. ‘Thou, Mongán, hast done this thing, well I know.’ ‘Thou hast said it,’ says Mongán. ‘Thou shalt have no good of it,’ says Eochu. ‘I will leave a blemish on thee in requital of it. Thou hast made great sport for thyself and thou shalt be without sport because of it. Thou shalt have no issue but horseboys, thou shalt leave no great inheritance after thee.’

This whole story, its place and persons and motive, is significant. The question concerns the historical traditions of certain places, the persons of the debate are a famous poet, a learned princeling, and a company of young clerics, and the place is that Pictish kingdom of Dalaradia which had taken over the traditions of the ancient Ulidia, the themes of ancient saga. There is still no suggestion of a written record; it is a contest of rival memories. The poet is that Eochu Rígéices who has been identified with Dallán Forgaill, leader of the poets whom St. Columcille saved from exile, who composed the riddling elegy of the saint. We shall perhaps be justified in assuming that in some such environment our written tradition began.

The old Irish society was organized upon an intensely aristocratic basis, and, like all aristocratic societies, set great store by those memories of past achievement which feed the pride and enhance the prestige of a dominant class. The function of the poets was to keep alive this long-descended record in its full detail of genealogy and varied incident. It was inevitable that, when this mnemonic tradition met the Latin tradition of writing, it should be fixed in the new form which offered a greater guarantee of permanence. The kings and the poets and the clerics worked together to this end. So in the SenchusMór, ‘The Great Tradition’, the central compilation of the ancient Irish law, it is claimed that king and saint and poet co-operated to draw up the consecrated code. And there the relation between poet and cleric is clearly set down:1

Now until the coming of Patrick speech was not suffered to be given in Ireland but to three: to a historian for narration and the relating of tales; to a poet for eulogy and satire; to a brehon lawyer for giving judgement according to the old tradition and precedent. But after the coming of Patrick every speech of these men is under the yoke of the men of the white [blessed] language, that is, the scriptures.

The name fili, ‘poet’, originally with a wider meaning ‘seer’, comprehended all these functions of the men of learning in pre-Christian Ireland, and it was to them that the monastic historians of the sixth and seventh centuries had recourse for all those memories of the past which they desired to put on record in their new medium of writing. These men of the new learning set themselves from an early date to consider how the Irish history which they had received from their predecessors, vivid in detail, but regrettably loose in chronology, might be fitted into the scheme of universal history which ruled in the Latin church. Professor Eoin Mac Neill has shown us how they set about their task.2 This scheme had been laid down once for all for Christians in the Chronicle of Eusebius as translated and continued by St. Jerome and Prosper of Aquitaine. The theory at the basis of this remarkable compilation was that the great world kingdoms—Assyria, Egypt, Palestine, Greece—had all by a divine providence led up to the Roman Empire which, in its turn by the peace of the Church under Constantine, had become the Empire of Christ and had given the world constitution its final form. The actual arrangement of the Chronicle corresponded to this conception. The whole history of the ancient world was set out in a series of parallel columns, one for each kingdom, and the events of each kingdom were synchronized so that the advance of history, century by century, could be followed at a glance for each kingdom and for all the kingdoms. It was a simple matter to add another column for Ireland, but much less simple to settle the chronology so that the Irish kings might appear in a due succession and in a right relation to their contemporaries in the great world kingdoms. The monks set themselves to the task with an heroic ardour and, by methods which Procrustes might have envied, successfully achieved their complicated labour of synchronism. That they set great store by the method which achieved this curious fabric of history may be deduced from the fact that the favourite word for a historian in Irish at this time was fercomgne, ‘a synchronizer’. Once the process was completed by the columnar method of Eusebius and Jerome, they abandoned this schematic arrangement and reduced the whole fabric to the form of consecutive annals. A chronicle formed in this manner lies at the base of all the older Irish monastic annals, and there is reason to believe that it was already in existence in the early seventh century.

The language was still Latin except, of course, for the Irish names, but it is plain from the entries relating to Irish history that much of the epic material which has come down to us in texts of a later date was already in existence, though exactly in what form it would be hazardous to conjecture. By the seventh century the monks had accepted the pagan tradition and put it on one level with the historical material which came to them under the sanction of the fathers of the Church, who themselves had received it from the written tradition of Israel, Greece, and Rome. There was, admittedly, no written tradition in ancient Ireland. It was desperately necessary to give a validity to the oral tradition upon which they depended for the Irish events of their chronicle. How was this to be done? It has often been imagined since the advent of wireless telegraphy that those vibrations which are our voices, once surrendered to the air, never come to rest but wander about for ever in the ether as potentialities of sound. Thus, it is argued, if only an appropriate machinery could be devised and the wavelengths of the innumerable periods of the past be established, we might listen in to history and eavesdrop upon all that part of action which is committed to the living voice. Even if this fond dream were realized, it would be a one-sided communication, for we could not catechize the voices of the past. Our Irish historians improved upon this idea: they brought the saints who were their warrants for history into a personal relation with those who had figured in past events, and fabled that their accounts were authenticated by the actual testimony of eye-witnesses and participants of the great deeds of the past. They imagined two means by which this very desirable consummation might be achieved. Either the informant might be recalled from the dead, or by God’s grace his life might be miraculously prolonged until the time of the saints and the coming of the written record. For the first method they had the authority of the great Pope Gregory, who had sent forth the English mission and whose fame in Ireland, where he was known as Gregory Goldenmouth, was no less widespread than in England. It was fabled of St. Gregory that, passing through the forum of Trajan one day, he marvelled at its construction, which seemed rather worthy of a Christian than a pagan. For on the arch of Trajan was represented a scene in which Trajan going to the war was asked to do justice to a widow, but bade her wait till his return. ‘But,’ she answered, ‘Lord Trajan, if thou come not back who will help me?’ So he did her justice. So Gregory, passing into St. Peter’s, offered for Trajan’s soul his wonted floods of tears, until by his deserts he obtained the salvation of the emperor’s soul.

This story is found in many forms throughout the Middle Ages, appearing in the philosophy of Aquinas, the poetry of Dante and of Piers Plowman, and the art of Roger van der Weyden. But its first appearance is in the life of Gregory by a monk of Whitby written about 713. In an early commentary on Dante by Jacopo della Lana it appears in a different form. There workmen discovered a skull with the tongue still intact. The marvel was told to Gregory and he came to where the head was and bade it speak. The skull answered: ‘I am Trajan, emperor of Rome, who held lordship at such and such a time after Christ came down into the Virgin’s womb, and I am in Hell because I had not faith.’ St. Gregory then inquired concerning the emperor and, hearing the tale of his justice to the widow, brought him to life again by his prayers and baptized him. This theme of the answering skull probably came into the tale from the legend of St. Macarius who, coming upon a dry skull in the desert, questioned it concerning the state of those that had fallen asleep in the faith. The theme of the skull is found in Irish in the Glossary of Cormac,1 a text of the ninth century, and here the motive has passed from the ecclesiastical to the secular tradition. The tale relates the origin of the name of Corrievreckan, the whirlpool between Ireland and Rathlin Island. It runs thus:

Brecan, books relate, was wont to go carrying merchandise on fifty boats between Ireland and Scotland and they were all drowned at one time in the whirlpool so that not so much as one escaped to tell the tale of destruction. And the way of their death was never known until the blind poet Lugaid came to Bangor. His people went upon the strand of Inver Beg and found there a bare and speckled skull and brought it with them to Lugaid. They asked him whose it was and he said to them: ‘This is the skull of Brecan’s pet dog and it is a little thing remaining of greatness,’ said he, ‘for Brecan and all his people have been drowned in yonder whirlpool.’

That this combination of themes was known in Ireland in the seventh century is proved by an episode in Tírechán’s life of St. Patrick, written at the end of that century.1 There it is told how Patrick came to a place

where was a sepulchre of marvellous greatness and huge length, and those that were with him marked that it was 120 feet in length, and Patrick said: ‘If ye will ye shall see him.’ And they said: ‘We do so desire.’ And he smote the stone at its head with his staff and signed the sepulchre with the sign of the cross and said: ‘Open, O Lord, the sepulchre.’ And the holy man made the earth to open and there came forth a great voice saying: ‘Blessing on thee, holy man, for that thou hast raised me, if for but one hour, from great pain.’ Thus saying he wept most bitterly and said: ‘I will go with you.’ And they said: ‘It cannot be that thou shouldest go with us, for men may not abide to see thy face for the fear of thee, but believe in the God of Heaven and accept the baptism of the Lord and thou shalt not return to the place where thou wert, and make known to us of what kin thou art.’ And he said: ‘I am son’s son of Cass son of Glass, and the warband of Mac Con slew me in the reign of Cairbre Nia Fer a hundred years from this day.’ And he was baptized and made his confession to God and fell silent and so was laid again in the sepulchre.

It is but a step from this to the tale of the Spectral Chariot of Cú Chulainn in which St. Patrick summons the great hero of the Ulster Saga from the dead to testify of his doings to King Laegaire, plunging through the mist in his chariot drawn by his two famous horses and driven by his charioteer Laeg mac Riangabra.1 And in the tale of the Finding of the Táin the function of evocation has passed to a poet as in the legend of Corrievreckan. There the poet sits down by the grave of Fergus mac Roig, who had played so great a part in the story.

‘He sang an invocation to the stone as though he spake to Fergus himself,’ says the tale. ‘And at that a great mist fell all about him so that his people might not see him for the space of three days and nights. And Fergus came to him in seemly array, a cloak of green, a hooded tunic with a crimson border, a goldhilted sword, and shoes of bronze, with chestnut hair falling all about him. Fergus related then the whole Táin even as it befell from the beginning unto the end.’2

We have passed here very far from the forum of Trajan and the great Pope Gregory into the wild and pagan world of heroic story. But the use of the theme is plain, to authenticate the uncertain record of past things by the clear testimony of contemporaries called up from death to bear their witness. This was the method used for heroic saga. For historic tradition, the saga of the kings, another means was found. We have seen Mongán covering the poets with ridicule by beating them at their own game. And of Mongán it is recorded that he was identical with Finn mac Cumaill, the famous protagonist of the Ossianic saga.3 It was also told of him that he passed through many shapes of animals and birds, a motive adapted from the theme known to folklorists as the theme of the Oldest Animals. And there gathered about him many strange legends drawn from the inexhaustible treasury of Irish folk-lore. It has indeed been suggested that he is another person of the same name, the historical Ulster princeling having taken over legends which really belonged to an earlier mythical Mongán. I am not now concerned to decide whether this speculation has any basis in fact. The immediate question here is why these legends gathered round a particular historical personage living in a particular place at a particular time. An Irish rationalist of the twelfth century was puzzled by this same question and gave the answer which I should be inclined to give.1

‘Albeit,’ he says, ‘certain dealers in antiquarian fable do propound Mongán to have been son of Manannán and wont to enter at his pleasure into divers shapes, yet this we may not credit, rather choosing to take him for one that was but a man of surpassing knowledge and gifted with an intelligence clear and subtle and keen.’

This is indeed the impression which the tales about him, stripped of their fabulous elements, make upon us. He is a typical figure of his type, a scholar-prince interested in the antiquities of his people and meeting and defeating the poets upon their own ground. In the succeeding generation there was to be such another. Mongán died in 624. In 636 was fought the battle of Moira,2 one of the most famous battles of the North round which many traditions clustered. In the battle Cenn Faelad, son of Ailill, son of Baetán, a near descendant of two high kings of Ireland, was wounded in the head and, says the legend, his brain of forgetting was stricken out of him. He was carried for healing to Toomregan to the house of the abbot Briccíne

where the three streets meet between the houses of the three professors. And there were three schools in the place, a school of Latin learning, a school of Irish law and a school of Irish poetry. And everything that he would hear of the recitations of the three schools every day he would have it by heart every night. And he fitted a pattern of poetry to these matters and wrote them on slates and tablets and set them in a vellum book.

It has been argued by Professor Mac Neill1 that here we have the beginning of the written tradition of certain types of vernacular matter, and we find in later manuscripts a number of texts, legal and grammatical, attributed to Cenn Faelad. How far these are really his may be a matter of controversy, but there can be little doubt that writings by him existed in the period when the vernacular learning was being eagerly cultivated. He is the first poet quoted in the Annals, and the historical verses attributed to him all relate to his own kindred of the Northern Uí Neíll. He is given the title sapiens in the texts, a technical term meaning a head teacher or professor in the monastic schools. It is in this period that the Annals begin to record the deaths of sapientes. Before 700 the Annals of Ulster record the deaths of Cummíne Fota of Clonfert whose teacher was the Colmán Moccu Chluasaig to whom one of the earliest of Irish hymns is attributed (d. 662), of Sarán Ua Critáin of Tisaran in King’s County (d. 662), of Ailerán of Clonard, County Meath (d. 665), and of Lochéne abbot of Kildare (d. 696), to all of whom this title is given. All of these, and no doubt many others unrecorded, must have been active about the middle of the seventh century, the period of Cenn Faelad. And Bede in a famous passage tells us that at this very time English students were crossing to Ireland in great numbers in quest of learning.

At that time there were many of the English nation, both of noble and of lesser rank, who, whether for divine study or to lead a more continent life, had left their native land and had withdrawn to Ireland. Certain among them gave themselves up willingly to the monastic way of life, while others rather went about from cell to cell of the teachers and took pleasure in cultivating study. And all these the Irish most freely received, and made it their study to provide them with food from day to day without any charge, with books to read and with free teaching.1

It would be an easy matter to illustrate this passage with striking examples, but perhaps the most typical and the most famous case is that of Aldfrid son of Osuiu, who became king of Northumbria in 671. Bede says of him, in words which recall the passage just quoted:

Shortly before this he cultivated study among the Irish, submitting to a voluntary exile for the love of learning.

Alcuin also writes thus of him:

From youth’s first years in sacred learning dipped / Powerful in discourse, philosopher / Keenwitted, king and master in the schools.

We know from Bede that Aldfrid studied in Iona with Adamnan, and it may be taken as more than probable that the Irish tradition of his activities in Ireland has a basis in fact. It would be difficult on any other hypothesis to explain why he is so constantly reckoned as one of the great Irish sages. He had a special name in Ireland, Fland Fína, Fland the son of Fína. It does not appear to have been observed before that this Fína was the cousin of the great scholar Cenn Faelad. This may well explain Aldfrid’s visit to Ireland and his lasting reputation there. Cenn Faelad died in 678, Aldfrid’s father Osuiu in 671, and Aldfrid himself in 705. He may well have been in Ireland about 671–6, the period at which Bede says that Englishmen of noble birth were frequenting the Irish schools. In Irish manuscripts of a later date we find various texts attributed to Aldfrid:2 a poem in which he is represented as travelling throughout Ireland and praising the people he met there, and certain collections of a proverbial type such as are commonly attributed to the wise men of old. None of these can be of his composition, but they prove the existence of a tradition that he had learnt Irish and that, as a devoted scholar of his uncle Cenn Faelad, he had like him composed in that language. And the fact that Bede attributes his great learning to his studies in Ireland is a sufficient proof of the estimation in which the scholarship of that country was held in Northumbria.

The tradition of Cenn Faelad and his nephew Aldfrid justifies us in assuming that the vernacular was actively cultivated for literary purposes in Ireland about the middle of the seventh century. And we have seen that the tale of Mongán mac Fiachna suggests that at the beginning of that century the princes and the poets and clerics of southeastern Ulster were vying in the study of their country’s antiquities. There is much other evidence to support this conclusion. And the evidence points to the great monastery of Bangor on the shores of Belfast Lough as the centre of historical studies at that time. The monastery of Bangor was founded in 555. The founder was St. Comgall, who came from the Pictish territory of Dalaradia and was always regarded as the patron saint of that district, although his monastery was in Ulidian territory. A few miles from Bangor there was another famous monastery, Movilla, founded about 540 by St. Finnian. Both of these monasteries