Kingship Ideology and Narrative Form: a Literary Analysis of the Mediaeval Irish Saga Togail Bruidne Da Derga

The chief objective of this project is to complete a book-length literary analysis of the Irish saga Togail Bruidne Da Derga ('The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel'). Set in Ireland's legendary past, this tragic tale tells of the fall of the peerless king Conaire Mór at the hands of his foster-brothers. The Togail has been hailed within the field as 'the most majestic and monumental of all extant early Irish sagas'; it is uncontroversially one of the most important works of mediaeval Celtic literature, equivalent in stature to Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland or the Nibelungenlied. Unlike these texts, however, it has never been systematically analysed as a literary work. As a result, its structure - blending terse action-sequences with extended poetic descriptions - is still poorly understood, even by specialists. Many commentators treat it as the result of clumsy compilation, accident rather than design; their admiration is often focused on a lost ninth-century 'original' rather than the eleventh-century composite text which survives today. My analysis will explore the artistry of the Togail on its own terms and in its own literary context to show that it was purposefully designed, not simply cobbled together, to produce a masterpiece of narrative architecture.

This kind of analysis is only just beginning to take root in this field. Most scholarship on Irish sagas has avoided systematic literary-critical elucidation of these tales (apart from the very shortest ones), instead conducting more narrowly focused studies of their historical contexts, or tracing a single theme across a tale or group of tales. No book has yet been published with the primary aim of providing a sustained literary analysis of a single indigenous Irish saga. As a result, the richest extant corpus of early-mediaeval vernacular narrative remains marginal to mainstream mediaeval studies. My book is designed to help restore Irish sagas to their rightful place on the European literary map. It will therefore be of interest beyond the specialist field, both for mediaevalists and for anyone interested in the cultural heritage of the Gaelic world. My interdisciplinary background and research interests make me ideally placed to undertake this work.

The Togail is above all a saga about kingship. My analysis will embed it within its historical context, focusing on the eleventh century rather than the periods in which lost earlier versions of the saga were allegedly produced. I shall suggest that the saga's structure was partly patterned on the biblical book of I Samuel, and tease out the ideological implications of this patterning, against the backdrop of mediaeval political thought. However, in contrast with much recent scholarship, I shall show that the Togail and related sagas are not simply political propaganda or parables, but are complex, often ambivalent literary works. Like Shakespeare's history plays they defy reduction to a single, straightforward 'meaning': the Togail explores contemporary concerns surrounding the theory and practice of kingship without preaching a specific solution.

I have been working on this project for ten years. During this time I have produced several conference papers and articles on Irish sagas, and completed more than half of a 140,000-word monograph on the Togail. In my leave period I shall consult and digest recent scholarship, check my quotations against the extant manuscripts in Dublin and London, and complete my book, as well as a short article and a seminar paper. Since I aim to instigate a fuller exploitation of literary criticism by Irish saga scholars and of Irish sagas by mediaevalists, my book will be written in an accessible style, appealing to students and general readers as well as academics. I have already developed a suitable style in my two previous books, both successfully targeted at similar dual audiences. I intend to submit the completed manuscript to my current publisher in May 2010.