A Newly Discovered Fragment of the Early Irish Wisdom-Text Tecosca Cormaic in TCD MS 1298 (H. 2. 7)

Abstract

In 1909, a century ago, ‘Instructions of Cormac’ were edited and translated by Kuno Meyer (Tecosca Cormaic. The Instructions of King Cormaic Mac Airt. RIA Todd Lecture Series 15, Dublin). Meyer provided a normalised Old Irish version of the text which he mainly based on the readings of 23 N 10 (RIA 967, hereinafter N¹) and 23 D 2 (RIA 132, hereinafter D) manuscripts. He admitted that while N¹ was “a careful and trustworthy copy on the whole”, D contained “both the most complete and by far the best copy of the Tecosca” (Meyer, opp. cit., ix). However, a short fragment of initial part of Tecosca Cormaic that was not taken into account by Meyer is contained in H. 2. 7 (TCD 1298) manuscript. Starting immediately after the closing lines of Audacht Moraind, its opening two columns fill up lines 33–37 of the folio 420a – then the text continues on folio 421a–b in four columns and finishes off in the middle of 422a with the words ar is triasna techtaib sin do miditer rig ⁊ flaith ol cormac fri cairbre that correspond to the end of §6 according to Meyer’s edition. This fragment contains one of the earliest and most intriguing versions of the text. It cannot be definitely assigned to any of Meyer’s recensions, however, on the basis of its linguistic features, the order of its sections and some additional material, contained only in N¹, N² and H. 2. 7 one can probably maintain that it was based on version which was also used as one of the sources for the compilation of N¹. In our talk, we will look at various paleographic features of the text, such as the treatment of OIr. mr-, unstressed -e-, absence of -a- glides, preservation of -n- after -l- later verbal formations, as well as at some orthographical and grammatical nuances, eg. archaic features, nasalised genitive constructions, distinction of final vowels -a, -o, -u, etc. and finally propose a revised stemma of various recensions of Tecosca Cormaic.