BDL as a duanaire (‘poem-book’)

Even if we do not accept that BDL is the direct result of the exhortation to Dubhghall mac Eoin Riabhaich to compile a duanaire, it is nevertheless self-evident that it is a duanaire of a certain kind.  The occasional jottings in the MS may suggest that it functioned as a commonplace book from time to time, but the excellence of its material may lead us to believe that it was consciously designed as a compilation of considerable prestige.  We cannot now know what motivated the scribes in making and sustaining the collection.  With the benefit of hindsight, we may reasonably suppose that they were to some extent aware that the medieval Gaelic world, particularly in Scotland, was on the cusp of far-reaching change, following the forfeiture of the Lordship of the Isles.  Poised between two cultures, and operating within both, the BDL scribes were well placed to assess the forces which were shaping the Gaelic and Scots worlds, and they may have concluded that some significant aspects of Gaelic culture would soon be submerged by Scots domination.  Certainly, there is a marked element of retrospection, and a profound sense of loss, in the BDL poems directly concerned with the Lordship of the Isles.  BDL may therefore have been an attempt to gather and preserve a representative selection of the best poetic products of the various lordships, from western Scotland to Munster, before these were lost along with the patrons and scribes.  We may presume that the material was to be made available to readers who, like the BDL scribes themselves, would have been at home in the Scots-based orthography which is so distinctive a feature of the MS.

It would, however, be wrong to regard BDL solely as a response to the loss of the Lordship of Isles; the extensive range of material within it, going far beyond the bounds of the Lordship, the chronological span of texts from the thirteenth century to the early sixteenth, and the assured approach of the scribes in presenting their material, demonstrate that the compilation of the MS was no sudden notion and certainly no novel event; the lines of communication, across the Gaelic world, had been open for many centuries, and the BDL scribes were perhaps doing no more than reflecting a dominant mood of impending change which acted as a catalyst at a particular point in history.  The loss of the Lordship is only one among many strands of perception within the collection.  The world of the scribes looks not only westwards, but also eastwards and southwards, as the orthography alone makes clear. The presentation of certain texts, with their various levels of emendation and variant readings, possibly reflecting the principles of renaissance humanism, further suggests that impulses from the east were no less significant than those from the west in contributing to scribal methods.  The editorial features of the MS, showing scribes poring over different versions of poems, and trying to reconcile their divergent readings, sets BDL apart from most, if not all, surviving Gaelic MSS of the Middle Ages.

BDL is clearly a duanaire of a ‘mixed’ or miscellaneous type.  It is not focused on a particular region, chieftain or school of poets, nor is it devoted to one genre of verse, as many duanairí are.  Mixed duanairí, containing different genres of poetry (bardic praise poetry, ballads etc.), are known in Irish tradition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see, for example, RIA MSS 23 O 25, 23 O 28), and BDL is therefore not without parallel, though none of the other examples can match the range or quality of its material.  More common, however, are those duanairí which have particular themes, or contain particular genres of verse.  These are often associated with particular kindreds, and contain poems in their praise (Ó Cuív, Bardic Duanaire).

Of great relevance to the material in the present edition are those collections which are devoted solely to Gaelic ballads, espcially those relating primarily to Fionn and the Fiana.  These are found in some profusion in Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and we shall refer to these in our discussions of the Gaelic ballads in BDL.  The most important Irish collection of this kind is Duanaire Finn (‘The Poem-book of Fionn’), compiled at Ostend in Belgium in 1627 for the Irish soldier of fortune, Captain Sorley MacDonell.  It contains no less than 69 texts of Gaelic ballads, compared with the 27 or so found in BDL.