Prímchenéla and fochenéla in the Irish Sex Aetates Mundi

Abstract:This paper discusses aspects of the terminology used in the Irish Sex Aetates Mundi (SAM), a Middle Irish historical text that displays special interest in the origins, languages and identities of nations. The efforts by the author of SAM to construct a comprehensive genealogy of mankind presented him with a problem that Christian scholars had attempted to deal with in various ways over the preceding centuries, namely, the apparent proliferation of nations beyond the canonical number of seventy-two. This paper argues that the solution to his problem proposed by the Irish scholar demonstrated a degree of imagination and innovation with which he has generally not been credited. Borrowing, and apparently redefining, terminology found in Old Irish legal and genealogical texts, he distinguished between two classes of nations—primary- and subordinate-nations—on the basis of whether or not they possessed their own languages.