Paper with References for H and his World - Dr. John Carey, MRIA, Dept. of Early & Medieval Irish, UCC. For additional information including audio recordings to accompany this presentation please click here - http://www.ria.ie/library/exhibitions/lebor-na-huidre-conference.aspx. Disclaimer: The Royal Irish Academy has prepared the content of this website responsibly and carefully, but disclaims all warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy of the information contained in any of the materials. The views expressed are the authors’ own and not those of the Royal Irish Academy.

1. H and his World [1]
John Carey
It is often the case that a paper’s title will give some indication of how clear, or how
vague, a sense of their topic the speaker had at whatever more or less distant point in time
they were obliged to commit themselves to one. From this point of view, my own title is
a dead giveaway. To the extent that I had anything at all in mind when I came up with it,
I may have been entertaining a notion that, by making as comprehensive a survey as I
could of H’s interventions in the manuscript, I would gain a sense of some of the larger
contours of his mental landscape – and there may, indeed, be something of this in what
follows. For the most part, however, I have found myself in pursuit of H as an individual.
In aspiring to find my way, to however modest an extent, inside H’s head, I have
pursued a course comparable to that taken by Ann Dooley in the chapter which she
devoted to him in her richly provocative study of the Táin. While distancing herself from
the details of Gearóid Mac Eoin’s speculations concerning the scribe’s identity and date,1
Dooley commended his Ulidia paper for having had ‘the effect of creating the sense of a
real person behind the traditional cipher, and thus casting H himself into higher relief
than before’; and she went on to describe H on her own account as ‘a close, one might
almost say an obsessive, reader’, profoundly engaged with the materials with which he
worked, and indeed ‘an essential link and an enabling voice in the self-conscious
negotiation from one model of heroism to another’.2
So: with these impressive predecessors, and these half-formulated aims, where to
begin? After more than a century of scholarship, what is there left to say about the third
of the hands of Leabhar na hUidhre?3
One obvious question, in any consideration of the coming into being of LU, is that
of the relationship – or lack of it – between the three scribes; and, not surprisingly, this is
a question to which scholars have returned again and again. Opinions have ranged from
Best’s view that the three ‘appear to belong to the same school, and are I think of the
same period’;4 to Thurneysen’s portrayal of A as the ‘übergeordnete Persönlichkeit’ to
whom M was a subordinate, while H worked some two centuries later;5 and on from
there to Oskamp’s vision of an M who was as much at odds with A as H appears to have
been at odds with M, and of the manuscript itself as having been executed in at least three
scriptoria.6
An adequate reexamination of all of the relevant evidence would go far beyond
anything which can be undertaken here, and well beyond my own competence as well. I
would however like to call attention to what seems to be a continuity of purpose linking
1
‘The Interpolator H in Lebor na hUidre’, in Ulidia: Proceedings of the First International Conference on
the Ulster Cycle of Tales, ed. J. P. Mallory and G. Stockman (Belfast, 1994), pp 39-46.
2
Playing the Hero: Reading the Irish Saga Táin Bó Cúailnge (Toronto, 2005), pp 65, 77, 100.
3
I say ‘more than a century’, although this conference has been organised to mark the centenary of the
publication of R. I. Best’s seminal article on the manuscript. As Best himself noted, the distinct existence of
H had already been noted (albeit only in passing) by J. O’Beirne Crowe in 1871: ‘Palaeographical Notes II:
Lebor na hUidre’, Ériu 8 (1916) 117-19.
4
‘Notes on the Script of Lebor na hUidre’, Ériu 6 (1912) 161-74: p. 163.
5
Die irische Helden- und Königsage bis zum siebzehnten Jahrhundert (Halle, 1921), pp 29, 31.
6
‘Notes on the History of Lebor na hUidre’, PRIA 65C (1966-7) 117-37: pp 118, 129-30.

2. all three hands: a concern with eschatology. [2] A wrote the opening of Fís Adomnáin,
the most elaborate surviving Irish account of a vision of the afterlife, the text then being
completed by M. [3] Having in this way taken up the theme from his predecessor, M
alone wrote LU’s copy of the brief tract Dá Brón Flatha Nime, a description of the Day
of Judgment and of some of the other tribulations of the end time. [4] Whatever text
immediately followed M’s conclusion to Fís Adomnáin, beginning in the same column in
which that text ends, was then erased by H to provide space for Scéla Laí Brátha,
followed by Scéla na Esérgi: these are of course homilies on the Day of Judgment and
the resurrection of the dead respectively. Not only do these two compositions resemble
Fís Adomnáin and Dá Brón Flatha Nime in dealing with the Last Things; Fís Adomnáin
can for its part be compared with H’s two homilies insofar as it is structured as a sermon:
beginning with a scriptural passage and exordium (although this is somewhat obscured in
the LU version of the text), and finishing with a peroration.
The one generally accepted date associated with the writing of LU is 1106, when
one of the scribes – M in the view of Best and of most who have written on the subject
since, H according to Tomás Ó Concheanainn and some other scholars – is said by the
Annals of the Four Masters to have been killed ‘in the mist of the stone church of
Clonmacnoise by marauders’.7 Precisely a decade before, according to the same annals,
the whole of Ireland had been gripped by panic because it was believed that the falling of
the feast of John the Baptist on a Friday in that year would be accompanied by some
annihilating catastrophe. During at least some of the time in which major sections of our
manuscript were being written, then, the subject matter of these four interconnected texts
was a theme of widespread and consuming concern. While there may have been further
considerations which led the three scribes to pursue, to this extent at least, a continuing
programme, the contemporary climate of eschatological anxiety must have been at least a
factor.
That being said, it may be remarked that H betrays no particular interest in LU’s
eschatological content apart from his writing out of the two homilies themselves. His
glosses, relating both to vocabulary and to subject matter, are scattered unevenly but
pervasively throughout the manuscript; but he found nothing to remark upon in Dá Brón
Flatha Nime, in Fís Adomnáin (where M inserted two lexical glosses), or even in his own
two homilies, even though Scéla na Esérgi includes unusual technical terminology in
both Latin and Irish.8 Of the four other texts written exclusively by H, by contrast, three
have glosses: however much or little weight can be placed on this circumstance, it can at
any rate be said that these were works which engaged his interest sufficiently for him to
wish to clarify their content. While it would be going too far to claim on the strength of
this evidence alone that H did not feel the same kind of interest in the homilies, it is at
least fair to say that there is no indication that he did.
Potentially, then, there is a certain irony in the circumstance that it is the homilies
which have given H his siglum: when he added them, he may simply have been
following in the footsteps of predecessors with whose outlook he was not entirely in
sympathy, and/or have been acting in deference to a contemporary preoccupation. In
7
AFM ii.982: Maolmuire mac mic Cuind na mBocht do mharbhadh ar lar doimhliacc Cluana mic Nóis lá
haos aidhmhillte. It is ironic that M should, in copying out the text of Fís Adomnáin, provide us with
another instance of the use of the phrase áes admillte applied to ravagers of churches (LU 2175).
8
See for instance the discussion by Rudolf Thurneysen, ‘Irisches’, ZCP 24 (1941) 24-38: pp 24ff.

3. trying to get more of a sense of what really mattered to H, we can turn to the four other
texts in LU of which he is the sole scribe: Aided Echach meic Maireda, Fotha Catha
Cnucha, Cath Cairn Chonaill and Comthóth Loegairi co Creitim 7 a Aided.
Of these, Aided Echach describes events in Ulster; Fotha Catha Cnucha is set in
Leinster; Cath Cairn Chonaill celebrates both Diarmait mac Aedo Sláine king of Tara
and the Connacht king Guaire Aidne; and Comthóth Loegairi is concerned with Loegaire
king of Tara. Whatever clues to H’s geographical background may be afforded by other
aspects of LU, therefore, we are unlikely to find any in his personal selection of secular
tales. But let us look at the stories individually, and see whether they have anything else
to tell us.
[5] Aided Echach has been carefully analysed by Helen Imhoff, who proposes that
it is ‘a sophisticated typological exposition of theological issues concerning baptism’.9
This is not the place for a detailed evaluation of her arguments; but it does need to be
pointed out that such a typological exposition, if present, depends largely on the
manipulation of preexisting sources. As emerges from Imhoff’s discussion of the text,
and more fully from Ranke de Vries’s new edition, Aided Echach is to a great extent a
compilation. The first section, describing the wanderings of the brothers Echaid and Ríb,
and the catastrophic origins of Lough Neagh and Lough Ree, is closely based on the
dindshenchas accounts of these two lakes, often indeed echoing details of their wording;
this account is supplemented with older lore from genealogical tracts, and with a
prophetic poem whose existence is also reflected in glossaries. Two longer poems follow,
dealing with the bursting of Lough Neagh, the survival and transformation into a water-
creature of the princess Lí Ban, and her eventual capture and baptism. The first of these,
‘Fo Loch Echach adba dam’, survives in a shorter but evidently independent copy in NLI
G7; while ‘Muirgein is gein co mbuadaib’ is otherwise attested in four manuscripts of the
commentary to Féilire Oengusso, where it is preceded by a highly compressed account of
Lí Ban’s capture and conversion, loosely corresponding to the prose narrative which
concludes Aided Echach but omitting a great deal of the latter’s content. Even apart from
these omissions, the Féilire commentary is highly unlikely to have been Aided Echach’s
source for this material: Pádraig Ó Riain has shown that the commentary must have been
written after 1170, and sees it as having drawn upon a version of Aided Echach ‘very
close to that now preserved only in LU’ rather than vice versa.10 Despite this, ‘Muirgein
is gein co mbuadaib’ and some accompanying prose may have been associated with one
or more copies of the Féilire itself before the commentary was composed: indeed, the
poem quotes from the martyrology, and invokes the authority of Oengus ua Oíbléin in the
final quatrain.
Imhoff makes the intriguing suggestion that the author of Aided Echach was H
himself.11 Her reasons for advancing this idea, which have to do with the theological
subtext which she discerns in the tale taken in conjunction with the theological interests
which have been attributed to H, seem to me to be debatable; but the hypothesis may be
worth considering on other grounds as well. [6] H’s only gloss on the prose of Aided
Echach identifies a place called Tír Cluchi Midir 7 in Meic Óic as being the same as Mag
Find. Here the source is the prose dindshenchas, where we are told that Ríb was
9
‘The Themes and Structure of Aided Echach maic Maireda’, Ériu 58 (2008) 107-131: p. 131.
10
Feastdays of the Saints: A History of Irish Martyrologies (Brussels, 2006), pp 183-4, 192-3.
11
Ibid., p. 110.

4. confronted by Midir i Muig Fhind 7 ba sead on tir cluichi Aengusa 7 Midir.12 Whoever
supplied the gloss was consulting the same source that was used by the author,13 a
scenario which could be streamlined if we imagined that author and glossator were in this
instance identical.
Whether or not he was responsible for composing of Aided Echach, H’s inclusion
of the tale in LU indicates that he was interested in lore of this kind. If the Mag Find
gloss is not evidence of authorship, then it means that H took the trouble to consult one of
the story’s sources in order to elucidate an obscure placename - itself an indication of
more than casual engagement. [7] As Imhoff has pointed out, there is further evidence to
the same effect in H’s glossing of the Annals of Tigernach in Rawlinson B 502, where he
has supplemented the annalist’s account of the bursting of Lough Neagh with a reference
to ‘the bursting of the lake of Ríb mac Maireda across Mag nAirbthen’.14 This bit of
information corresponds precisely with what we find in Aided Echach. It may be noted in
passing that this correspondence indicates that H’s glossing of the annals postdated his
work on LU, at least in part: if he had been aware of what the Annals of Tigernach say
about the bursting of Lough Neagh when writing Aided Echach, he would almost
certainly have been moved to make use of this knowledge, if only by way of further
glossing.
The main narrative focus of Aided Echach is the fate of Lí Ban: a survivor out of
the depths of the pagan past, her life supernaturally preserved and extended, who comes
at last under the protection of saints to whom she recounts her adventures. In these terms
she is a figure reminiscent of Tuán son of Cairell, a fragmentary copy of whose story
appears earlier in LU: the opening is in the hand of A, but the remainder is rewritten in
rasura by H. While A’s segment of the text follows the consensus of the other
manuscripts, H diverges from this sharply.15 [8] The most conspicuous difference is the
introduction of three late Middle Irish poems, all placed in the mouth of Tuán himself,
describing his feelings at finding himself transformed into a stag, a boar, and a bird of
prey; there was presumably a poem relating to his existence as a salmon as well, which
has been lost together with the rest of the end of the story. H begins his part of the tale
with the words introducing the first of these poems, indicating that it was specifically in
order to insert the poems that he intervened in the text; [9] the situation is somewhat
reminiscent of his first interpolation in Táin Bó Cuailnge, where what M had written was
erased to make room for the poem ‘At-chiu fer find firfes cles’. The poems added to Scél
Tuáin do not appear to be attested elsewhere; their net effect is to lend Tuán a pathos
comparable to that of Lí Ban’s portrayal in Aided Echach.
On the strength of both of these texts H appears to have had, not only an interest
in lore of the deeper past, but also an imaginative empathy with those who survived into
the Christian period to bear witness to it. Yet another tract dealing with such undying
rememberers is Cethri Arda in Domain, an account of four such figures placed in the four
quarters of the world ‘to relate the lore and wonders of the world to the race of Adam’.
12
Whitley Stokes, ed. and trans., ‘The Prose Tales in the Rennes Dindshenchas’, RC 15 (1894) 272-336,
418-84: pp 481-2; cf. idem, ed. and trans., ‘The Edinburgh Dinnshenchas’, Folklore 4 (1893) 471-97: pp
474-5.
13
This fact undermines the significance proposed for this gloss by Dooley, Playing the Hero, p. 99.
14
Tomaidim Locha Rib maic Maireda dar Mag nAirbthen: R. I. Best, ‘Palaeographical Notes I: The
Rawlinson B 502 Tigernach’, Ériu 7 (1914) 114-20: p. 115. Cf. Imhoff, ‘Themes and Structure’, p. 111.
15
For a discussion of the differences, see my ‘Scél Tuáin meic Chairill’, Ériu 35 (1984) 93-111: p. 95.

5. The main text is written by M, who has provided two glosses. [10] Between the columns,
however, H has contributed a genealogy of Fintan mac Bóchrai which is otherwise found
only, so far as I know, in the version of Airne Fíngein preserved in the Book of Fermoy
and Liber Flavus Fergusiorum: this too appears to reflect a particular curiosity concerning
such figures.
[11] Although H’s copy of the Fenian tale Fotha Catha Cnucha is not unique -
there is another in the Yellow Book of Lecan, an edition of which has been prepared, but
not yet published, by Patricia Kelly - the tale resembles Aided Echach in appearing to be
largely a reworking of earlier materials. At various points in the narrative, the author
inserts four quatrains from the dindshenchas poem ‘Almu Lagen, les na fian’, which
survives in its entirety only in the Book of Leinster; and much of the wording of the prose
is evidently indebted to the same source. Two further quatrains in the text are taken from
a poem found early in the tale Macgnímartha Find. For other aspects of the tale - mainly
involving the names and interrelationships of persons, and some names of territories - I
do not however know the source or sources.
As Kuno Meyer exerted himself to show, stories concerning Find were already
circulating in the Old Irish period, and some of these have survived in later manuscripts.
All the same, it is worth noting that LU’s copy of Fotha Catha Cnucha is the oldest
physical specimen of a Fenian prose narrative that we have: there are no others in LU,
and also none in the manuscripts closest to LU in date, Rawlinson B 502 and the Book of
Leinster. Too much should not be made of this - there are after all plenty of Fenian poems
in LL - but even so, his stepping out of line with the standard practice of his day in order
to include this text suggests that Fenian lore may have been another subject which
particularly appealed to H. Further evidence pointing in the same direction may be
provided by LU’s copy of Amra Coluim Chille. H’s interest in this work was relatively
slight: he only provided 14 glosses for it, by contrast with the 100 glosses on the text by
M. [12] Four of those 14 glosses – almost a third - are on the poem ‘Scél lem dúib’,
attributed to Find ua Baíscni: here, to an extent evident nowhere else in the ten pages
occupied by the LU Amra, H found something to engage him. There is one further Fenian
verse in the Amra commentary in LU, a quatrain placed in the mouth of Gráinne: H has
not glossed this, presumably because when he got to it this brief passage had already been
supplied with two glosses by M.
I cannot find much to say concerning H’s adding to the manuscript of Cath
Chairn Chonaill: this is a tale found in three other manuscripts, one of them the Book of
Leinster. [13] H has provided only two glosses on the text, despite the fact that - as
Stokes noted in his edition - it is full of rare and obscure words.16 One of these identifies
Grip as being the name of the horse of Diarmait mac Aedo Sláine; while the other,
glossing the word lústa in the following line, was probably only added because H’s
attention had already been aroused by the horse.
[14] The fourth and last of the narrative texts written solely by H is Comthóth
Loegairi co Cretim 7 a Aided. This resembles Aided Echach in being attested in no other
manuscript, while at the same time consisting largely of a conflation and development of
material known to us from other sources: if Helen Imhoff’s suggestion that H was the
author of Aided Echach seems plausible, then the same hypothesis could be entertained of
Comthóth Loegairi.
16
‘The Battle of Carn Conaill’, ZCP 2 (1901) 203-19: p. 203.

6. The greater part of the text is a version of the story otherwise known to us as The
Pseudo-historical Prologue to the Senchas Már. In an edition of the Pseudo-historical
Prologue published eight years ago, I proposed that it and Comthóth Loegairi go back
independently to a shared source.17 Liam Breatnach has however noted his dissent from
such a reading of the evidence; and there could scarcely be a weightier opinion in this
area.18 Fortunately, I do not think that this question has any great bearing on the issues
being considered here: the main point is that Comthóth Loegairi is closely based on an
earlier text, one which – by contrast with any of the sources of H’s interpolations
considered so far - goes back to the Old Irish period. It preserves much of the early
language of its source, and it is noteworthy that H seems to have felt that little in it
required clarification: [15] there are only two lexical glosses, bunched within five lines of
one another at the foot of the first column. The text has also however been modernized in
places, with forms suggesting a date little if at all earlier than that of H himself, such as
use of the stem do-rón- for the preterite active of do-gní, and of the independent personal
pronoun as direct object of the verb.
Instead of the concluding paragraphs of the Pseudo-historical Prologue, which
relate how filid lost the prerogative of acting as judges save in their own affairs,
Comthóth Loegairi ends with a narrative, in late Middle Irish, of the end of Loegaire’s
reign. The circumstances are essentially those associated with his death in the Bórama,
although there is no verbal agreement between the two accounts.19 [16] This is followed
by two quatrains: one, cited in the Bórama and in several chronicles, taken from the
poem ‘A chóicid choín Chairpri cruaid’, by Orthanach ua Coelláma;20 and the other from
the poem ‘Eól dam i ndáirib dréchta’ attributed to Flann mac Maelmaedóic:21 these two
quatrains are presented as if they comprised a single composition. The description of
Loegaire’s burial at Tara with his weapons and armour closely follows that in Tírechán’s
Collectanea, without however exhibiting any verbal similarities to the Irish rendering of
the latter in the Tripartite Life. Unparallelled in any surviving source is the bizarre and
unpleasant statement, inserted close to the beginning of the narrative, that ‘the earth
however swallowed Loegaire the druid [sic] through Patrick’s word, so that it is upon his
head that all the dogs that come into Tara defecate’. This seems almost like a parody of
Tírechán’s story, echoed as I have just noted at the end of Comthóth Loegairi itself, that
Loegaire was buried in the ramparts of Tara so as to protect his territory even in death.
In considering H’s relationship to this eclectic text, a crucial piece of evidence is
provided by the third and last of his glosses on it: [17] the ‘specific man’ whom Loegaire
and the men of Ireland commission with the assassination of Patrick’s charioteer, thus
triggering the crisis which is resolved by the judgment that is the story’s climax, is
identified in the margin as ‘Nuadu Derg, the fosterling of Loegaire; it is he who slew
him’. That the culprit’s name was Nuadu can be inferred from the wording of the
17
‘An Edition of the Pseudo-historical Prologue to the Senchas Már’, Ériu 45 (1994) 1-32: pp 7-9.
18
A Companion to the Corpus Iuris Hibernici (Dublin, 2005), p. 346 n. 7.
19
Gearóid Mac Eoin is accordingly unlikely to be correct when he says that Comthóth Loegairi ‘borrows
the story of Loegaire’s death from the Bórama tract’: ‘The Mysterious Death of Loegaire mac Néill’,
Studia Hibernica 8 (1968) 21-48: p. 24.
20
Máirín O Daly, ed. and trans., ‘A chóicid coín Chairpri crúaid’, Éigse 10:3 (Winter 1962-3) 177-97: p.
186 q. 19; discussion in Mac Eoin, ‘Mysterious death’, pp 25-6.
21
Kuno Meyer, ed. and trans., ‘Mitteilungen aus irischen Handschriften’, ZCP 8 (1912) 102-20, 195-232,
559-65: p. 118 q. 25; cf. Mac Eoin, ‘Mysterious death’, p. 26.

7. judgment at the heart of the Pseudo-historical Prologue; but he is nowhere named in
Comthóth Loegairi proper, nor in the copy of the Pseudo-historical Prologue in TCD MS
1337 – the most conservative version of the story, and the one whose wording is closest
to that of our text. The somewhat later version in TCD MS 1336 identifies the assassin as
‘Nuadu Derg’, but says no more about him; [18] it is only in the most evolved and
linguistically latest copy, that in Harleian 432, that we find him described as ‘Nuadu Derg
mac Néill … Loegaire’s brother, and a hostage to Loegaire’. While this is not exactly
what we find in H’s gloss, where Nuadu is described as Loegaire’s fosterling rather than
his hostage, it is certainly comparable; we can compare the tale Tochmarc Becfhola, in
which a Leinster prince at the court of the king of Tara is said to be both his fosterling
and his hostage.22
H accordingly had access to another and more developed version of the story -
similar to that version which seems to have been most current in the later Middle Irish
period23 - and to have drawn upon it when glossing Comthóth Loegairi. While other
scenarios are certainly possible, it seems to me that the easiest interpretation of this state
of affairs is that Comthóth Loegairi was not in fact composed by H himself, but that he
added the gloss to elucidate a text of which he was only the copyist. As a composite work
transcribed by H, assembled quite late despite the age of at least one of its sources,
Comthóth Loegairi can perhaps most readily be compared with Fotha Catha Cnucha. If
we are obliged to relinquish the likelihood of H’s authorship of this text, it may be
prudent to consider relinquishing it in the case of Aided Echach as well.
While it would be exciting to feel confidence in claiming H’s authorship for one
or more of the works which I have been discussing, even the simple fact of his inclusion
of them in LU tells us a fair amount. He clearly felt an affinity for compositions which
drew material together from various sources, in the attempt to create more or less
coherent accounts of one or another aspect of the past. This kind of literary activity
appears to have been widespread in the later Middle Irish period: other examples which
come readily to mind are Macgnímartha Find and - although in this case the author
brought considerably more creativity to the shaping of his borrowed materials - Scél na
Fir Flatha.
[19] One further bit of text should probably also be counted as having been
contributed to LU by H. Having written the end of the saga Siaburcharpat Con Culainn
on a page erased for the purpose, and before his copy of Cath Cairn Chonaill, H provides
two alternative genealogies of Cú Chulainn: both trace his ancestry back to Cermait son
of the Dagda, but the while one of these proceeds to give the Dagda the same pedigree
which is assigned to him in Lebor Gabála and other sources, the other bizarrely has him
descend from Éremón son of Míl Espáine. [20] Versions of this second genealogy also
appear in Rawlinson B 502 and in the Book of Leinster: in the former, all but the first six
names have for some reason been erased.
A further source of insights into H’s interests is the body of glosses which, as
already briefly mentioned, he added to the first fragment of the Annals of Tigernach
which forms part of Rawlinson B 502. While Best thought that he might have detected
H’s hand supplying a word in rasura on folio 3r, almost all of his contributions occur on
six consecutive pages, running from folio 9v to folio 12r. Most of these relate to the
22
Máire Bhreathnach, ed. and trans., ‘A New Edition of Tochmarc Becfhola’, Ériu 35 (1984) 59-91: p. 72.
23
Carey, ‘An Edition’, p. 2.

8. events and personalities of the Ulster Cycle; where H supplies some words to the notices
of the death of the poet Persius, and of Nero’s attempted killing of John the Evangelist,
he is rectifying a corrupt segment of text but not adding anything on his own account.
[21] Beginning with the birth of Cú Chulainn, H goes on to note [22] the hosting of the
Táin; [23] he also expands upon the original annalist’s account of the events following
the death of Cú Chulainn, adding in the margin references to the death of Emer, the
slaying of Erc son of Cairpre Nia Fer and of Lugaid son of Cú Roí by Conall Cernach,
and ‘the invasion of the four fifths of Ireland by the seven Maines from Ulster’. The
amount of detail here is interesting, as these occurrences do not figure in the Ulster Cycle
material preserved in LU. [24] H also refers to the battle of Airtech, the story of which he
drew upon in LU when writing his conclusion of the saga Táin Bó Flidais. Besides his
reference to the bursting of Lough Ree, already mentioned, H also adds some comments
on the kingship of Ireland, [25] stating that seven years intervened between the death of
Conaire Már and the accession of Lugaid Reóderg, and adding the acid comment sed
certe falluntur to an earlier glossator’s statement that ‘some say’ that the destruction of
Da Berga’s hostel took place in AD 42, rather than in 31 BC as had been asserted earlier.
H’s interest in, and knowledge of, the Ulster Cycle is obvious from his work in
LU, and so there is nothing surprising in his preoccupation with it here. That he should
have confined his attention to these few pages in the Annals of Tigernach is also not
particularly remarkable, given that they deal with the years in which the events of the
Ulster Cycle are supposed to have taken place. More interesting is what H does not feel
called on to enlarge upon in this period. This was not only the time of Cú Chulainn and
Conchobur, but also the era of the life of Christ, of the missions and martyrdoms of the
apostles, and of the establishment of the first Christian churches. In none of this,
however, does H find anything to remark upon - not even the beheading of John the
Baptist, a matter of such acute concern in the Irish eschatological thinking of the period.
Where he does comment on a non-Irish entry, it is a secular one: [26] a few lines below
his insertion of the phrase Slógad tána bó Cualngi, H glosses the statement ‘I sang of
pastures, of farms, of leaders’ in Vergil’s epitaph as referring to the poet’s authorship of
the Bucolics, the Georgics and the Aeneid. In his additions to the Annals of Tigernach we
have, in my own view, telling support for the earlier suggestion that H had relatively little
interest in religious matters as such, despite his transcription of the two homilies which
were to provide him with a label.
[27] After all of this, have we come any closer to getting a sense of H? In
attempting to characterize him it would be a mistake to lean harder on the evidence than
it will bear. Thus we must be wary of the temptation to exaggerate supposedly distinctive
traits, as I believe that Ann Dooley does when she describes H’s ‘special delight in
highlighting and creating disjunctive syllabic etymologies’ as ‘the most striking aspect’
of his approach to texts:24 the technique in question, known as bélrae n-etarscartha, is
ubiquitous in the literature and is discussed as a standard type of diction in Auraicept na
nÉces. I am also not entirely comfortable with Tomás Ó Concheanainn’s statement that H
‘seems to have been familiar with the early Irish manuscript tradition, probably more so
than either of the original scribes... we may reasonably regard him as a busy scholar
rather than a professional scribe’.25 This would seem to imply that H’s predecessors were
24
‘Playing the Hero’, p. 91; cf. p. 96.
25
‘The Reviser of Leabhar na hUidhre’, Éigse 15:4 (1974) 277-88: p. 277.

9. professional scribes rather than busy scholars; but the range of erudition reflected in M’s
glossing, which could easily provide material for a second paper, weighs heavily against
any such view. I would be more inclined to say that M and H were both busy scholars, M
being a busy scholar with better handwriting.
Even if it would be an exaggeration to claim that H was indifferent to religious
matters, it does seem evident that his main interests lay elsewhere: in lore concerning the
Irish past. To judge from what he has left to us, he had a taste for antiquarian narratives
knitted together from preexisting materials, and enlivened by poetic interludes; in this
respect, and in his enthusiasm for the Finn cycle, he appears to have been a man of his
time. That he may indeed have thought of himself as belonging to a sort of new wave of
Irish antiquarianism could explain his readiness to erase the work of his predecessors -
the ‘rude and violent’ intervention which, whether one deplores or condones it,
characterizes him more vividly than any other trait.26 Although his work in LU reflects a
mainly literary interest in the Irish past, his annotations in the Annals of Tigernach show
that the historical veracity of the legends was important to him as well. An occasional
weakness for exotic and unorthodox knowledge is suggested by the eccentric genealogies
for Fintan mac Bóchrai and Cú Chulainn.
[28] The last word that H wrote in LU as we have it is iarfaigis ‘asked’. This is
pretty nearly all that I have been doing this morning. I hope that I may have managed in
the process to catch some of H’s answers.
26
The phrase is that of R. I. Best and O. J. Bergin: Lebor na hUidre: Book of the Dun Cow (Dublin, 1929),
p. xvi.