An Caoine agus an Chaointeoireacht by Breandan O Buachalla Cois Life, 110pp, £14/£9
This book is a study of the lament Caoine Airt Ui Laoire (1773), written by Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill, Art's widow, after his death. The poem is part of the Irish schools curriculum and its content is usually summarised and simplified as follows: O Laoire beat the High Sheriff of Cork, Abraham Morris, in a horse race; Morris offered O Laoire five pounds for the horse - as he was entitled to do under the Penal Laws; O Laoire refused, went on the run, and was eventually shot and killed by Morris and his soldiers.
Over the years, a single interpretation of the poem and the tradition from which it emerged has been advanced, and this, through the passage of time, has become an unquestioned and perceived wisdom. Essentially, the poem has been granted a dispensation from the rigours of inquiry.
O Buachalla, professor of modern Irish literature and language in UCD from 1978-1996, sets out to question this perceived wisdom by seeking to correct what he believes to be three misunderstandings: that the poem is a realistic telling of historical events and, because of that, that it is possible to establish a correlation between text and background; that caoine (the lament genre) and caoin teoireacht (the tradition of keening), in terms of use and background, are the same and that they are best understood in a mutual context; and that rosc is not the metre of the lament genre.
Adopting the role of the Socratic gadfly, O Buachalla offers a radical reassessment of this work. Divided into three parts, the monograph contains much specific argument and closely mustered details which will appeal more to specialists than casual readers.
It is to O Buachalla's credit that, for the most part, the technical explanations offered do not overwhelm the argument. His re-evaluation offered is lucidly and progressively expressed. He effectively challenges assumptions (regarding authorship, for example) which, it must be said, seem to have been encouraged by a certain amount of lazy scholarship.
The monograph can, on one level, be read as a forensic detective story - who did and said what. This is in no way to belittle the impressive (and, as regards part three, the highly specialised) scholarship which informs its every page. O Buachalla's method is to give primacy to text over all accepted interpretations.
While O Buachalla reassesses the work of other scholars, he does so in a way which does not seek to embarrass them. Rather, he compares their interpretations with his own and offers evidence as to why he feels theirs are lacking. His conclusions are bald but polite. Certainly, O Buachalla's argument would indicate that the traditional readings of Caoine Airt Ui Laoire will have to be set aside or, at the very least, argued once again with renewed vigour and, if possible, with new evidence.
Ostensibly this monograph is about a single poem. There is, however, another narrative to be heard. Writing in the introduction, O Buachalla argues against the pernicious effect of "orthodoxy" and hopes that his essay might inspire "some young, courageous, imaginative scholar" to reexamine this text in its entirety.
Writing that his "limited" aim is only to clear the way for that reexamination, O Buachalla, perhaps deliberately, underplays the importance of his monograph. What he has done is to set a template which any "young, courageous, imaginative scholar" would do well to follow in his or her work in any field of scholarship. Define the parameters of the argument, present evidence, and, above all, do not allow yourself to be swayed by arguments from authority. Simply put, combine scholarship with rigorous, systematic and honest questioning and you won't go far wrong.
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