Remember the glories of Brian the brave,
Though the days of the hero are o’er.
Even the danger of interference from without could not permanently unite the Irish among themselves. The Scandinavian settlers had turned this weakness to account by siding now with one and now with another of the factions, and had finally made good their possession of the seaport towns, where they stood towards the rest of the island much like the Ulstermen of to-day, a hardy race of alien origin and long of hostile faith, merchants and seamen to whom the natives left all the traffic with other lands. One cannot but think from the small part they seem to have played in the struggle between the Irish and the Norman invaders that their heart was rather in trading than in war, and that the old wiking spirit had flickered down among them, or at least found a new vent. Not so with the Norman adventurers. That marvellous people had as yet preserved their restless activity, their boundless ambition, and their love of martial enterprise. Conquerors, courtiers, or crusaders, they were always lords in the end; the glamour of lordship was ever present above the Norman horizon. Ireland alone knew them not, and thither they had now begun to cast eager eyes. The wave that had spread itself over England and Wales had now gathered up its strength anew, and the time had come for it at last to break on the Irish shore.
It is at this point that the curious poem Mr. Orpen has so ably edited comes to our aid as an historical authority of singular value and importance. Although long known to scholars from Michel’s publication of its text (1837), it was described by Mr. Dimock, who knew its value, in the preface to his edition of Giraldus, as then “in great measure useless” from the want of competent annotation. He observed with truth that “no more valuable contribution, perhaps, to the history of the first few years of the English invasion of Ireland could be made” than a worthy edition of this poem. Such an edition Mr. Orpen may justly claim to have produced. The corrupt and obscure condition of the text demanded elucidation no less urgently than the Irish names with which it teems required special knowledge for their correct identification. It is not too much to say that Mr. Orpen has shown us how much can be done by skilful editing to increase the value of an authority. Avoiding the over-elaboration that one associates with German scholarship, he has provided his readers with an apparatus at once sufficient and concise. Text, translation, notes, map, chronology, and glossary, all are admirable in their way; and the patience with which the barbarous names, both of places and of persons, have been examined and explained is deserving of warm praise. As to the way in which a text should be treated scholars will generally differ in certain points of detail, but Mr. Orpen’s method shows us, at least, the exact state of the text from which he worked. There is still room, perhaps, for further conjectural emendation. For instance, in the lines—
Crandone pus a un barun,
Ricard le flemmeng out anun—
where the editor is fairly baffled by ‘Crandone,’ perfect sense might at once be made by reading—
Slan donat pus a un barun,
which would satisfy at once the conditions of metre, of locality, and of the context. So too, in the interesting Lacy charter printed on page 310, the editor might have detected in Adam de ‘Totipon,’ the Adam de ‘Futepoi’ of Giraldus, and the Adam de ‘Feipo’ of the poem: in records the name appears in both forms. The case of this man, one may add, is peculiarly interesting, because I have detected him as a knightly tenant of Hugh de Laci in England in the returns of 1166, in which he seems to be disguised as “Putipo.” He thus came, we see, to share in his lord’s greatness, becoming one of the leading ‘barons’ in his new dominion of Meath.
It is necessary to explain that although this poem, in the form here preserved to us, dates only from about 1220 to 1230, it enshrines materials contemporary with the actual invasion and conquest. For it is based upon a narrative which seems to have closed not later than 1176, and for which the trouvère or compiler of the poem was indebted to Maurice Regan, the interpreter, and, one might almost say, the diplomatic agent of king Dermot, whose matrimonial adventures were the causa causans of the whole story. In giving to the poem the name of “the Song of Dermot and the Earl,” the editor has brought out the fact that its narrative is chiefly concerned with the doings of Dermot and his son-in-law, ‘Strongbow,’ as the earl of Pembroke has been commonly named.[341] It is not improbable that the original work was only carried down to the earl’s death in 1176. Mr. Orpen lays special stress on the fact that there are but “two allusions pointing to a much later date,” and claims it as “a remarkable fact that, with the exception of these two allusions ... there is nothing, so far as I have observed, pointing to a later date than 1177.” He would seem, however, to have overlooked an allusion to John de Curci’s subsequent troubles in Ulster in the lines: