Abstract
The years of the Celtic Revival (c. 1880-c. 1920) shaped the work of an interconnected group of playwrights, poets, and artists on both sides of the Irish Sea, whose creativity responded to its background of political and linguistic activism but tended to prioritize an emotive and often emotional sympathy for the ideals of a reimagined, deeply romanticized ‘Celtic’ past. Exemplified by W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) and Augusta, Lady Gregory (1852–1932), Anglo-Irish Revivalist authors claimed direct inspiration from medieval Gaelic prose tales such as Táin Bó Cúailnge (‘The cattle-raid of Cooley’), but also reacted against the formality perceived in the narrow range of nineteenth-century English-language translations on which, without competence in Irish, most were actually dependent, while seeking also to promote a version of Ireland’s ‘Heroic Age’ acceptable to a modern audience. Ironically, therefore, Revivalist authors’ depictions of characters such as Cú Chulainn, Fionn mac Cumhaill, Queen Maeve, and Deirdre retained their initial popularity post-Revival without recognition of the extent to which those portrayals have been revised, bearing often tenuous comparison to their alleged originals. This disparity emerges clearly from Revivalist renditions of episodes in medieval texts that convey violence or violent death, sexuality, bereavement, or other forms of heightened emotion, in which those episodes may be edited, bowdlerized, or omitted altogether, at the same time as the impact of those emotions upon the characters involved may be minimized, diverted, or shaped to reflect the gaze of modern, not contemporary moral codes.
This chapter will explore key episodes in a selection of Revival-era versions of Táin Bó Cúailnge and Longes mac n-Uislenn (‘The exile of Uisliu’s sons’), in which their characters’ emotional activity has been subject to significant revision, or in which, more rarely, its audience’s expectation of the emotional range attached to particular activities has been managed with well-informed precision. Focusing on one well-known and several lesser-known works – Yeats’s Deirdre (1907), The triumph of Maeve by Eva Gore-Booth (1902), and The Táin by Mary Hutton (1907) – it will contend that, while extremities of violence could be omitted or retained arbitrarily, sorrow, regret, and displays of grief for the dead were most vulnerable to adaptation. While this could result from misunderstanding of a medieval source, it could also symbolize unusual familiarity with the nuance of an author’s original, apparent chiefly in The triumph of Maeve in which Gore-Booth rewrites Táin Bó Cúailnge, bloodiest of heroic Ireland’s battles, as a pacifist fable in which its sources’ avaricious catalyst for waging war is reframed as Queen Maeve’s defence of women’s subjugation to male violence.
This chapter will explore key episodes in a selection of Revival-era versions of Táin Bó Cúailnge and Longes mac n-Uislenn (‘The exile of Uisliu’s sons’), in which their characters’ emotional activity has been subject to significant revision, or in which, more rarely, its audience’s expectation of the emotional range attached to particular activities has been managed with well-informed precision. Focusing on one well-known and several lesser-known works – Yeats’s Deirdre (1907), The triumph of Maeve by Eva Gore-Booth (1902), and The Táin by Mary Hutton (1907) – it will contend that, while extremities of violence could be omitted or retained arbitrarily, sorrow, regret, and displays of grief for the dead were most vulnerable to adaptation. While this could result from misunderstanding of a medieval source, it could also symbolize unusual familiarity with the nuance of an author’s original, apparent chiefly in The triumph of Maeve in which Gore-Booth rewrites Táin Bó Cúailnge, bloodiest of heroic Ireland’s battles, as a pacifist fable in which its sources’ avaricious catalyst for waging war is reframed as Queen Maeve’s defence of women’s subjugation to male violence.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Emotional Alterity in the Medieval North Sea World |
Editors | Erin Sebo, Matthew Firth, Daniel Anlezark |
Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan |
Chapter | 10 |
Pages | 231-278 |
Number of pages | 48 |
Edition | 1 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9783031339653 |
ISBN (Print) | 9783031339646, 9783031339677 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 25 Aug 2023 |
Publication series
Name | Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions |
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Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan |
Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)
- Celtic Revival
- Irish Revival
- emotions
- William Butler Yeats
- Augusta Gregory
- Eva Gore-Booth
- Mary Hutton
- Longes mac n-Uislenn
- Táin Bó Cúailnge
- Cú Chulainn
- Deirdre
- Móirín Cheavasa
- J. M. Synge