The early Fenian corpus by Kevin Murray (review)

Reviewed by: The early Fenian corpus by Kevin Murray Mitchell B. Simpson (bio) Kevin Murray, The early Fenian corpus. Cork: Cork Studies in Celtic Literature, 2021. ISBN 978-0-99554-695-0. Pp. x + 78. $15.00 (paperback). It is probably best to think of this book as a supplement to Kevin Murray's The early Finn cycle (2017) rather than as a standalone volume. Murray announces as much himself in the introduction, explaining that he intends the content to be an appendix to the earlier book and urging readers to use this one 'in conjunction with the earlier volume as many of its constituent materials underpin opinions presented therein' (vi). The book collects and summarizes 99 texts and poems associated with Finn mac Cumaill and his fían, his son Oisín, his grandson Oscar, and a few additional fíana and associated leaders up to about the year 1200, which, with the composition of the Acallam na senórach, Murray (2017: 10 & 160–163) takes to be a watershed in the development of fíanaigecht literature, dividing two distinct phases of literary creation. Only seven entries postdate this cutoff, so scholars of later iterations of fíanaigecht or with wider temporal interests will need to look elsewhere, such as Natasha Sumner's on-line Fionn Cycle Bibliography https://scholar.harvard.edu/natashasumner/fenian-bibliography or Joseph Flahive's The Fenian cycle in Irish and Scots-Gaelic literature (2017), both of which Murray points to in his earlier volume. Murray splits his catalogue into five sections: §A, pre-1200 compositions about Finn and his fían (excepting two acallaimh, which both postdate 1200); §B, a proposed timeline of the pre-1200 poems about Finn and his fían in Duanaire Finn; §C, dindshenchas references to Finn and his fían; §D, pre-1200 non-fíanaigecht nor dindshenchas references to Finn and his fían (excepting four genealogical texts and a late tale, as above); and finally, §E, pre-1200 fíanaigecht concerning other fénnidi. All but one of the sections—that is, §C, the dindshenchas references, the dating of which is troublesome and has largely not been philologically verified—are presented in chronological order.1 Each entry includes a short summary of the text (sometimes very short if the title is descriptive) and where to find relevant editions and translations. §§A, B, D, and E include [End Page 117] a proposed date for the texts; §B (pre-1200 poems) indicates only the approximate year of composition for the 14 Duanaire Finn poems that Gerard Murphy ascribed to the late Middle Irish period, the latest date being ca. 1175 (1953: cxvi–cxvii). This section is the only one with a preamble, explaining the difficulty of dating the Duanaire Finn as a whole rather than dwelling on the specific linguistic characteristics of individual poems. The other three sections with dates offer thorough philological explanations for the current consensus on their dating and/or point to the relevant scholarship for further reading. Every entry in §A (pre-1200 compositions) and most entries in §E (other fíana) also name the manuscripts where the texts can be found. There is probably no better thesis statement for this volume than two of Murray's observations in his 2017 book: 'Fenian tales are noticeable in their absence from the medieval Irish tale-lists' (50), and '[i]n contradistinction to the difficulty in accounting for the emergence of the Acallam [na senórach] from fragmentary documented beginnings, there is no such problem in explaining the growth of fíanaigecht in the post-Acallam era' (163). In some ways, this volume is as much a continuation of a medieval tradition as it is in conversation with contemporary scholarship. So, the scholarly focus of the book seems to be in the first section, the pre-1200 prose compositions concerning Finn and his fían. Each entry in §A includes a thorough summary of the linguistic basis for the text's date. No other group of texts is treated as thoroughly, and subsequent sections seem to be primarily intended to assist the scholar in finding additional texts to support research on texts from that first section. For...