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The Sources of the Preface to the ‘ Tigernach ‘ Annals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2016

R. A. S. Macalister
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Extract

The ‘ Tigernach ’ Annals—the name is preferable to the current term ‘ Annals of Tigernach ’, which has grown out of a misunderstanding of an anonymous gloss—is one of the many varieties of a document which needs some such specific name as ‘ The Irish Annals ’ All the books of annals—‘ Ulster ’, ‘ Boyle ’, ‘ Inisfallen ’, ‘ Clonmacnois ’, ‘ Chronicum Scotorum ’, and the rest—are merely diversified forms of one fundamental text; this would be obvious if they were printed in parallel columns. The differences between them are due chiefly to interpolations, made not so much by compilers or scribes as by an endless succession of glossators.

Type
Articles
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 4 , Issue 13 , March 1944 , pp. 38 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 1944

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References

page 38 note 1 ‘ The authorship and structure of the “ Annals of Tigernach ” ’ in Ériu, vii. 30.

page 38 note 2 MS materials, pp. 57 ff., 517 ff.

page 39 note 1 Except the parts edited ‘ with gross inaccuracy ’ [teste Stokes] by Charles O'Conor in Rer. Hib. scriptores, ii. i ff.

page 39 note 2 Insert after ‘ a ‘ the words ’ Iohanne baptizatus est et'

page 40 note 1 It should be remembered that the extant gathering, thus the second of the series of four or five which contained the whole A-text of ‘ Tigernach ’, has only a factitious connexion with the codex in which we now find it, having merely been bound up with it.

page 42 note 1 Even the very late ‘ Four Masters’ is full of similar interpolations, and O'Donovan was not any more careful to indicate them than Hennessy.

page 42 note 2 Hennessy's successor in the editorship of ‘ Ulster ’, MacCarthy, is much more careful in this respect. MacCarthy's work may be faulty, but Whitley Stokes's venomous attack upon it throws more discredit on the assailant than on the victim.

page 43 note 1 Rawl. MSB/489.

page 44 note 1 See I.H.S., ii. 156. I concluded independently of Fr Paul Walsh that ‘ scripsit ’ in the ‘ Tigernach’ entry means ‘ wrote ’ (as a scribe) and not ‘ compiled ’

page 46 note 1 It is a curious fact (if I am not in error) that on days when Pepys records that he met his brother diarist Evelyn, Evelyn does not record that he met Pepys. At least I have been unable to discover such a coincidence. And (as follows immediately) the converse is equally true.

page 48 note 1 Ériu, vii. 40.

page 48 note 2 Ériu, vii. 33.

page 49 note 1 Even O'Curry has hinted at this possibility, MS materials, p. 522.

page 50 note 1 Ériu, vii. 41

page 51 note 1 Bede's shorter chronicle, in fact, has no dates ; only the regnal years.

page 54 note 1 Ériu, vii. 59-61.

page 55 note 1 Rev. Celt., xvi. 396.

page 56 note 1 This is significant, because both. MSS of the ‘ Tigernach ’ text are Clonmacnois MSS. Dr Best has proved this for A, by a comparison of the script with that of ‘Lebor na h-Uidre : and I can prove it for B by a very curious fact. In the margin of that MS, opposite the record of the death and burial at Clonmacnois of Toirdelbach ua Conchobair, there is a little sketch of his tombstone—crude and simple, but easily recognizable as representing a cross-slab of the Clonmacnois type, appropriate to his date. The stone has disappeared for many a year: it was already gone before Petrie, first in modern times, sketched the slabs there, in 1822. But the sketch in the MS is a contemporary record, by an inmate of Clonmacnois—by centuries the oldest record of the kind that we possess. If he had identified this stone, he was doubtless familiar with all the others, that of Admoer with the rest, and knew the secondary meaning of the superposed stroke.

page 56 note 2 And has made the mistake of isolating it and treating it as a ‘ Kalendae ’ symbol.