NIALL FROSACH'S 'ACT OF TRUTH': A BARDIC APOLOGUE IN A POEM FOR SIR NICHOLAS WALSH, CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE COMMON PLEAS († 1615)

Abstract

Abstract:The Middle Irish story relating Niall Frosach's true judgement concerning a young woman and her fatherless child is told as an apologue in a late-sixteenth- or early-seventeenth-century Bardic poem attributed to Tuileagna (mac Torna) Ó Maoil Chonaire, and addressed to Sir Nicholas Walsh, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and Speaker of the third parliament convened in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Perrott's parliament of 1585–6. The poem, Labhram ar iongnaibh Éireann, was published in Tomás Ó Raghallaigh's Filí agus filidheacht Chonnacht (1938), but the apologue was censored in that publication. In this article the poem is edited with translation and critical notes from the only manuscript in which it has come down to us—RIA 23 L 17 (RIA 3). The two copies of the Middle Irish text that have survived (from LL and the Liber Flavus Fergusiorum) are also presented and compared in an appendix to the article; and a second appendix provides the text and translation of an Early Modern Irish version of the story found in An Leabhar Eoghanach and published (without translation) by Ó Donnchadha in Leabhar Cloinne Aodha Buidhe.