If Scottish cultural activists haven't yet deified or sainted Thomas Owen Clancy, then they probably should, and soon.  From the political or the cultural point of view, it's very hard to fault his role as an editor of Scotland's multilingual poetic traditions, even if certain academic questions remain nonetheless.  Working from within the Celtic Department at Glasgow University, it appears that his agenda is one of bringing to light many of the obscured threads of the Scottish linguistic identity in ages past, and doing so through the agency of major Scottish publishers who have previously come to prominence via the clientship of figures such as Alasdair Gray.

In collaboration with Gilbert Markus, also based in Glasgow, Clancy offers us Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery.  Here, we have bilingual text in either Latin and English or Gàidhlig and English, depending on the source poem's linguistic bent.  Taking in the major poems and plainchant texts of the first millennium Christian communities connected with Iona, overtly regardless of and despite (but always critically cognisant of) the academic contestation of the poems' actual provenance, Clancy and Markus take us through a throrough-going tour of early Goidelic Christianity, providing on the one hand a source reference for the originals, and at the same time, a critical guide to the debates surrounding the texts and their hermeneutic traditions.  Highlights include, of course, the 'Altus Prosator', allegedly written by St. Columba himself, as well as other classics such as the 'Amra Choluimb Chille'.  Of course, the sadness, as ever, is that while we have the literary survivals of these textual artefacts, we have no idea, musicologically, of how they actually sounded.  Reconstructions have been made, of course, not least John Purser's reconstruction of the Columba prayer for his early-90s Radio Scotland series, but such reconstructions remain (and must do so) infinitely speculative.  Thankfully, though, we have the Inchcolm Antiphoner which provides us with knowledge of the tradition of plainchant within the Columban church, and devotees are sorely recommended to seek out Capella Nova's recording of selected parts of this MS on the Gaudeamus CD label.

However, despite the apparently small number of poems presented here (seven in all), we also have an English monolingual version of Colmán mac Béognae's 'Alphabet of Devotion' across eight pages, and a bibliography of the likely texts which made up the library at the Iona monastery.  Of course, due to certain somewhat infamous Norse excesses one millennium ago, we have no material proof of exactly what the original Iona community was reading, but from a thorough-going textual analysis of their surviving writings, Clancy and Markus have deduced the likely contents of that famous library, and supplied us with a useful reading-list.  Moreover, Colmán's text - written outwith Iona, but very much within its pedagogical and epistemological criteria - provides us with direct clues through allusion to canonic monastic texts in the tradition following St. Martin of Tours, so beloved of the early Goidelic Christian communities.  Unfortunately, though, the monolingual rendition of Colmán's text renders it fairly useless for serious scholarly application.

But nonetheless, overall, this is a very worthy reconstructionist text, taking the surviving elements of the Iona tradition and subjecting them to not only an intriguing collation, but also a detailed critical examination.  Any student of either early Scottish literature or Christianity can hardly afford to be without a copy of this text.

Clancy's other, and more recent offering, The Triumph Tree: Scotland's Earliest Poetry AD 550-1350, is equally intriguing as a publishing proposition.  Here, we have a collation of texts entirely in English translation, albeit flagged with the names of the original languages: Latin, Welsh (or, more accurately, Brythonic), Gàidhlig, Old English, or Norse.  What's missing here, of course, is an acknowledgement of the fact that what blithely goes under the name of "Old English" is in fact the forerunner of Scots, and distinct from Southern British forms of the Anglo-Saxon traditions.  For sure, we have a modern rendition of the text of the Ruthwell Cross poem, but to characterise that Anglian (Northern) text as simply and unproblematically "English" is surely deep and uncritical folly in the days following the establishment of the new Edinburgh parliament and the ensuing revival of awareness of the very linguistic traditions which Clancy hopes himself to promote.

But this book's merits are not to be underestimated either: not least in Clancy's recovery of the Brythonic traditions of poetry from the Lowlands.  For sure, we all tend to think of Scottish Celticity as being primarily Gàidhlig, and on occasion Pictish (when we can allow ourselves the intellectual audacity to think of the Picts as unproblematic Celts).  But the raw fact of the matter is that, prior to the Anglian invasions of the South-East, Lowland Scotland was neither Gàidhlig nor Pictish, but Brythonic-speaking.  Indeed, the first poem in Brythonic, the "Welsh" language to survive into modern times was written not in Wales but in Edinburgh, or, as the ancient Welsh-speakers called it, Din Eidyn.  And Clancy here provides us with English translations of both surviving versions of Aneirin's Y Gododdin: a brave publishing policy indeed.  Equally, we are also given translations of Taliesin's poems written in honour of political dignitaries in Strathclyde (Y Strad Glud).  Effectively, Clancy rehabilitates both Aneirin and Taliesin as Scottish poets, rather than "Welsh" as such, and very convincingly so.  What remains unconvining, however, is his attempt to make Taliesin's Elfed poems out to be unproblematically Scots.  Northern British they obviously are, as Taliesin was himself, despite his birth in what we now call "Wales".  But to attempt to claim his Elfed poetry for a Scottish, rather than West Yorkshire (Northern English) provenance, seems a little hasty.

Moreover, one has to question, particularly if one has an interest in Scots as a language, why this collection assiduously avoids Scots (although one could easily argue that the Ruthwell Cross inscription is not "English" as such, but "Scots").  One might be forgiven for asking why, after treating us to the multilingual heritage which is Scottish poetry, encompassing Latin, Brythonic, Gàidhlig, Norse, etc., does Clancy not offer us a taste of early Scots, labelled as such?  If the end of the collection's time-frame is 1350, one could easily wonder where Thomas of Erceldoune is, and why 1350 rather than 1375 was chosen - the date on which John Barbour went public with his epic and canonic Scots poem The Brus?

Regardless, this oddly and incongruently anglophilic aspect aside, Clancy has yet again achieved a hail clanjamfrie of poetry translations which opens the eyes of the uninformed far more than any other editor's work has to date.  Hopefully, the slightly timid aspects of his work will soon be bolstered and enhanced by the new cultural, political, and, above all, linguistic confidence which is sweeping across Scotland.  I look foward to his first collection of poetry in Scots.
 

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Copyright © Steve Sweeney-Turner, 1999
This edition copyright © Celtic Cultural Studies, 1999
ISSN 1468-6074