Customer Reviews

Tales of the Elders of Ireland (Oxford World's Classics)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a translation of 12th century Irish manuscripts, Acallam na Senorach. I purchased it while looking for Acallam Bec, a variant of the same story (although I am beginning to doubt it exists in English).

I recommend Tales of the Elders for scholars or serious celtophiles. I found the footnotes and references very helpful. It is a translation, not a dramatization, so if you are looking for entertainment this is probably not what you want.

great little book filled with wonderful stories, a must read for any one studying Celtic folklore or history.

This is a translation of important sources on the Fenians from the 12th Century. It adopts a format of dialog and story telling between the survivors of the Fenians and St. Patrick.

I found the translation a bit plodding but translating Middle Irish into Modern English is a very difficult task and therefore I have chosen not to deduct stars for that. I do not believe that it is possible to retain a lexically correct translation which also preserves the mood of the original due in part to syntactic differences between the languages.

At the same time, this is a great collection of stories which can be mined deeply for insights into Celtic social order, ideology, culture, etc. It's an incredibly important work and the translation is adequate for most purposes.

I'd highly recommend it.

I can't agree with the rather lukewarm assessment of the other reviews. This is a great book. The translation is workmanlike--you can find better translations of the poems in good anthologies of Irish poetry--but perfectly good; as one reviewer noted, medieval Irish is awfully hard to translate. The poems get into incredibly complicated patterns of rhythm, internal rhyme, vowel harmony, alliteration, and so on. Some of the ones here are masterpieces, but you have to learn some Gaelic to get it.

So, what is left is an amazing story. I think everyone interested in the human condition and the human spirit should read and consider it. Someone, early in Irish history, saw the full glory of the old hard pagan times, but saw that Christianity was inevitable and necessary (in his mind, at least) to tame the violent and bloody but beautiful and noble world of Finn and the Fianna. So this book is a novel in which Cailte, the last surviving Fianna member, tells St. Patrick of the old days. It manages a sustained tone of tragic loss but hope for the new age which I have not found elsewhere in literature. Many of the poems and stories of grief for particular individuals' tragic deaths are played as laments for the whole lost past. The new peaceful world supersedes it, but the old glories--as Robinson Jeffers said of one of the stories--"shine terribly against the dark magnificence of things."