LINGUISTIC EDUCATION AND LITERARY CREATIVITY IN MEDIEVAL IRELAND

Résumé

Texts in medieval Irish were traditionally used as a source from which to excavate the remnants of a radically ancient language and world-view – Celtic, oral, pre- Christian, ultimately Indo-European. In the past twenty years a new perspective has become dominant, emphasising the sophisticated contemporary concerns of the monastic literati who composed the texts that have come down to us. However, the disjuncture between those two approaches remains problematic. This article attempts a new approach to the question, emphasising the educational and scholarly context of medieval Irish creativity. Many of the monuments of the early Irish language are part of an enquiry into the history of language and languages, in which Irish interacts closely with the « three sacred languages » and especially Latin; the texts’ depiction of the pagan past of Ireland is oriented through a scholarly engagement with Graeco-Roman paganism; and some of the key discourses of Irish saga literature are influenced by the programmes and methodologies of the Latin-based educational system of the time, especially questionand-answer dialogues. The article applies this approach in a case study from the heroic tale Tochmarc Emire, « The Wooing of Emer », in which a riddling dialogue between lovers is shown to be directly related to the lore of the canonical glossaries of Old Irish.

.