The Irish Texts Society has just launched three new books. Kevin Murray (Dept. of Early and Medieval Irish, UCC) has prepared an edition, translation and analysis of the early Irish vision-tale Baile in Scáil that throws considerable new light on its origins and development. Very topically in the light of recent public debate concerning the future of the site, the tale is set on the ramparts of the hill of Tara, which is presented as a gateway to the ‘Otherworld’. Here Conn is said to have met the ‘sovereignty of Ireland’ in the form of a beautiful maiden, and for every drink that she gave him the god Lug named a future king of Ireland.
Over the ten years that this new volume in its Main Series has been in production, the Society has added thirteen volumes to its Subsidiary Series, two of which have just been published. One is a collection of essays on the early nineteenth-century diary kept by Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin, edited by Liam P. Ó Murchú (Dept. of Modern Irish, UCC). Amhlaoibh’s diary has begun to attract renewed attention in recent years, through the work of such scholars as Prionsias Ó Drisceoil and Breandán Ó Madagáin, both of whom have contributed to the present volume, together with Gearoid Ó Thuathaigh, Cathal Ó hAinle and Neil Buttimer. The second Subsidiary Series volume consists of a new Introduction to the Poems of Aogán Ó Rathaile—volume 3 of the Society’s Main Series—which has been prepared by Breandán Ó Buachalla, a leading authority on Irish poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His reassessment of the poems of Aogán represents another significant contribution to the modern reception of the oeuvre of this very important poet.
The Society has also announced the publication later in the year of two new volumes. One, in the Main Series, is a critical edition of the Middle Irish text Coir Anmann, ‘Fitness of Names’, prepared by Sharon Arbuthnot (University of Aberdeen). This fascinating text, full of lore on the origin of the names of famous people, will be published in two volumes, the first of which is now going to press. Another publication soon to appear is the second fascicle of the Society’s new Historical Dictionary of Irish Placenames, edited by Pádraig Ó Riain, Diarmuid Ó Murchadha and Kevin Murray, of the Locus Project at UCC, which will deal with placenames beginning with ‘B’. The Locus Project is supported by a substantial grant from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Enquiries: HON.TREAS@irishtextssociety.org, www.irishtextssociety.org.