Barrett, Siobhán and Stifter, David (2019) Blathmac’s stanzas 260–303 on Judgement Day. Celtica, 31. pp. 19-89. ISSN 0069-1399

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Abstract

Blathmac’s Poems are two long religious poe ms, addressed to the Virgin Mary, that were only dis-covered as late as the 1950s by Nessa Ní Shéaghdha and first published by James Carney 1964, stanzas 1–149 as Poem 1 (Tair cucum, a Maire boíd), stanzas 150–259 as Poem 2 (A Maire, a grían ar clainde).2 However, this edition is not complete. Stanzas 260–303, which constitute the final part of the second poem and which are contained on the last two folios of the seventeenth-century manuscript NLI MS G50,3 were not included in Carney’s edition of Blathmac’s Poems. Carney gives no explanation for his unusual decision not to include these stanzas with the rest of the text. It can only be surmised that he found the state of preservation of this part too challenging and solving all the problems associated with them would have unduly delayed the publication of his book. They were only published posthumously, posthumously both to the honorand and to the author, by Nessa Ní Shéaghdha in a memorial volume to James Carney in 1999. Ní Shéaghdha’s diplomatic edition of what she called ‘The Fragmentary Quatrains’ (although only some of them are fragmentary) is accompanied neither by comments nor by a translation. The present edition seeks to address these shortcomings by providing a diplomatic and a normalised text and a translation of these quatrains, together with a commentary on their language and contents. The text follows the new, provisional edition in Barrett 2017b (with occasional improvements). After weighing the pros and cons it was decided to use this new edition also as the basis for all other quotations from Blathmac’s Poems, not Carney’s 1964 edition. Barrett’s 2017b text, which is openly accessible at a stable institutional repository, differs substantially from Carney’s in wording and in spelling practice. It would have burdened this article unduly if every divergent editorial decision on stanzas 1‒259, which are not the topic of this article, had to be dis-cussed in commentary or additional footnotes.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Blathmac’s stanzas; 260–303; Judgement Day; Chronologicon Hibernicum;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Arts,Celtic Studies and Philosophy > School of Celtic Studies > Early Irish (Sean Ghaeilge)
Item ID:	12888
Depositing User:	Prof. David Stifter
Date Deposited:	07 May 2020 09:39
Journal or Publication Title:	Celtica
Publisher:	Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies
Refereed:	Yes
Funders:	European Research Council
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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