Publication of the Great Book of Irish Genealogies
One of the most momentous achievements in the history of Irish academic publishing has recently occurred with the publication – three and a half centuries after it was written of Leabhar Mor a nGenealach, The Great Book of Irish Genealogies, which was compiled by the Co. Sligo scholar Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh. This great work – one of the largest books ever written in the Irish language – has just been published in five large volumes, beautifully printed and bound, by Eamonn de Burca, of De Burca Rare Books, Blackrock and Dawson St. The edition is the work of Nollaig O Muraile, formerly of Queen’s University, Belfast, and now of the University of Ulster, Coleraine, who has spent more than thirty years engaged in this massive undertaking.
Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh (alias Duald Mac Firbis) was the last of a line of hereditary Gaelic scholars based at Lacken near Enniscrone. An earlier member of the family, about the year 1400, produced two great manuscript repositories of medieval Irish literature and learning – the Yellow Book of Lecan and the Great Book of Lecan.
Born after the year 1600, Dubhaltach was trained as a traditional Gaelic scholar at a school conducted by Flann MacEgan at Ballymacegan in north Tipperary. He may have also been at school in Galway city since, together with a knowledge of Irish unrivalled in his day, he also know English, Latin and Greek.
Mac Fhirbhisigh, through his scribal work, has preserved copies of several sets of Irish annals without which there would be major gaps in our knowledge of the history of medieval Ireland. He also transcribed ancient Irish legal texts and translated material from Irish into Englsh and English into Irish.
His most significant work, by far, was the Great Book of Irish Genealogies. Most of the manuscript of 953 pages (now preserved in the library of University College, Dublin) was written in Galway in the years 1649-50, although a portion dates from 1645. The work was done at a time of great unrest, in the midst of the devastating Cromwellian wars. As the storm of war moved inexorably towards the City of the Tribes, Dubhaltach laboured on his book beside the medieval church of St. Nicholas. He completed the work on 28 December 1650, just as the Cromwellian armies crossed the Shannon eastwards.
Mac Fhirbhisigh made later additions to the manuscript in 1653, 1657 and – most notably in 1664. In the mid-1660s he worked in Dublin for the great Anglo-Irish historian Sir James Ware, who lived on Castle St. (Jonathon Swift was born in a nearby house less than a year after Ware’s death and Dubhaltach’s departure.) In 1666 he began compiling a shorter version of the Book of Genealogies, the Cuimre (Abridgement) – the original manuscript is now lost but two early copies survive.
The Great Book is a collection of the genealogies, or pedigrees, of the great families of Gaelic and Anglo-Norman Ireland. Much of it is derived from various medieval genealogical collections (some now lost), but with a good deal of updating and revision. It also contains many poems and prose texts – mostly in Middle and Early Modern Irish, but some in Latin and Old Irish and a small amount in English.
The book records the ancestry of many significant figures in Irish history, including the high-king Brian Boroimhe (or Boru) (d. 1014), Ulick Bourke, marquess of Clanricarde (d. 1657), James Butler, duke of Ormond (d. 1688), Somhairle Buidhe, or Sorley Boy, Mac Donnell (d. 1589), Randal MacDonnell, marquess of Antrim (d.1683), Garrett Og Fitzgerald, earl of Kildare (d. 1536), Dermot MacMurrough, king of Leinster (d. 1171), Myler Magrath, archbishop of Cashel, bishop of Killala, etc. (d. 1622), Feagh MacHugh O’Byrne (d. 1597), Rory O’Conor, last high-king of Ireland (d.1198), Red Hugh O’Donnell (d.1602), Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone (d. 1616), Owen Roe O’Neill (d. 1649), and many, many more – not forgetting the Gaelic and Hiberno-Norman ancestry of the Stuart Kings, Charles I and II.
Both in terms of size and significance, the Great Book of Genealogies is on a par with that other great 17th-centrury Gaelic compilation, the Annals of the Four Masters. Unlike the Annals, however it is the work not of a team but of one man.
Although several extracts (mostly brief) from the book have been printed over the past two centuries (including about forty pages by John O’Donovan), some 90% of the work (including almost all of the Cuimre) has never hitherto been edited, translated and published.
There was a proposal as far back as 1772 that the book ‘be transcribed and translated’. In 1836 the great scholar Eugene O’Curry transcribed the entire text, while almost a century later Michael Duignan, soon to be professor of archaeology in University College, Galway, commenced work on an edition but it was later abandoned.
Nollaig O Muraile began the latest attempt at producing an edition in the autumn of 1971. It was suggested to him as a suitable topic for a PhD dissertation by his mentor, the then Professor of Modern History at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, Fr (Later Cardinal) Tomas O Fiaich.
The work has been slow, tedious and sometimes difficult. As Prof. Gearoid O Tuathaigh of NUI Galway has remarked, it was the kind of task that nowadays is undertaken by a team of postgraduate researchers, backed by a hefty research grant and using the most modern IT equipment. This, instead, was the work of a single individual, without external funding, done in his spare time. The early work of transcription was done with pencil and paper, later moving on to electric typewriters, and only using computers in the later stages of the enterprise. Not that far removed, in some respects, from the work of Dubhaltach himself!
The completed edition runs to five large volumes (bound in full buckram gilt and in presentation slipcase) and about 3,640 pages. Following a lengthy introduction and detailed table of contents, the entire Irish text of Mac Fhirbhisigh’s larger and smaller genealogical works (the Book of Genealogies proper and the Cuimre) and (on facing pages) and English translation of both prose and poetry occupy the first three volumes.
The fourth volume includes:
- A detailed catalogue of every extract from the work that has hitherto appeared in print,
- A series of cross-references to other genealogical manuscripts, colour photographs of more than forty manuscript-pages, and a series of indexes:
- A general index;
- An index of some 6,000 families, tribes and other population-groups;
- An index of more than 3000 surnames and their bearers – most numerous being the Burkes, or Burcaigh, with 750 named bearers –
- An index of more than 3,300 place-names, with identifications where possible; and
- A series of other indexes – initial lines of poems, sources and authors cited in the book; epithets used to form nicknames; the 200 most notable historical figures who feature in the book; anglicised forms of the principal surnames.
- Also a list of subscribers
The fifth and final volume contains the most valuable feature of the entire work, and the one which required the greatest amount of backbreaking hard work over several years – an enormous index of nearly 700 pages of all the personal names in the book. This, the largest collection of Irish-language names ever compiled, contains the names of some 30,500 separate individuals: between them they bore 6,625 different personal names. (So if ever you have difficulty in choosing a name for a christening this is the place to look!) Incidentally, the ten most numerous names are 1. Aodh (768 bearers), 2. Domhnall (613), 3. Donnchadh (401), 4. Tadhg (383), 5. Conchobhar (367), 6. Diarmuid (358), 7. Eochaidh (357), 8. Sean (340), 9. Uilliam, or Liam (308), 10. Aonghus (301), while Tomas is no. 11 with 298 bearers.
Nollaig O Muraile has pointed to a series of interesting coincidences in relation to his edition – he has spent one-third of a century preparing this enormous work, and it has appeared one-third of a millennium after its author, Dubhaltach Mac Firbhisigh, was stabbed to death in somewhat mysterious circumstances near Skreen, in his native Sligo, in January 1671 by one Thomas Crofton. The Irish text runs to one-third of a million words, while this edition – including text, translation, indexes, etc. – contains about one and one-third million words.
Dr. O Muraile, who was awarded a PhD by the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, in 1991, adapted part of his doctoral dissertation for publication as the Celebrated Antiquary: The Lineage, Life and Learning of Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh (c 1600-1671) in 1996; a revised edition of this large and meticulous work appeared in 2002.
A native of Knock, Co. Mayo, Nollaig worked for more than twenty years (1972-93) as a Placenames Officer with the Ordnance Survey and has studied thousands of placenames in all parts of Ireland. Following his appointment as Senior Lecturer in all Celtic at Queen’s University, Belfast, he became in 1995 Director of the Northern Ireland Place-Name project based in the university and General Editor of its publications. He has been editor since 1993 of Ainm: The Bulletin of the Ulster Place-Name Society. In 2003 he was appointed to the Irish Placenames commission. Among his numerous publications are a book on the placenames of his native county, Mayo Places: Their Names and Origins (1985), as well as a study of the place-names of Clare Island published by the Royal Irish Academy (1999).
In all, he has written, edited or co-edited more than twenty books and scores of learned articles, both in Irish and English. One of his most recent publications is Irish Leaders and and Learning Though the Ages, a collection (running to more than 630 pages) of essays and articles by a great historian of medieval Ireland, Fr Paul Walsh. He is also much in demand as a lecturer, having addressed audiences in every corner of Ireland, as well as in the Universities of Edinburgh, Cambridge and Harvard. In 1988 he was promoted to Reader in Irish and Celtic Studies in Queen’s University, and in recent months has taken up an appointment as Reader in Gaelic Literature at the University of Ulster, Coleraine.
Eamonn de Burca, who has published The Great Book of Irish Genealogies, is a native of Castlebar who on returning to Ireland soon became prominent in the antiquarian and rare books business. Over the past decade he has branched into republishing significant historical works that have gone out of print. Among the most notable items he has made available again – often after a gap of more than a century – are The Annals of the Four Masters, The Annals of Ulster, The Annals of Loch Ce, The Irish Fiants of the Tudor Sovereigns, Eugene O’Curry’s Manners and Customes of the Ancient Irish, Patrick W. Joyce’s Irish Names of Places, John Colgan’s Triadis Thaumaturgae, H.T Knox’s History of the County of Mayo to the Close of the Sixteenth Century, Dr. Browne’s Fasciculus Plantarum Hiberniae (published as the sumptuous Flowers of Mayo, edited by Dr E.C. Nelson and illustrate by Wendy F. Walsh), and many others.
Eamonn is himself the author of Burke, Bourke and De Burgh People an Places, a history of the great Anglo-Norman family to which he belongs and A Bibliographic Catalogue of the Three Candles Press. He has also issued several original works by other authors, most notably Tony Sweeney’s Ireland and the Printed Word. His splendid edition of the Great Book of Irish Genealogies – with a beautiful cover-design by the celebrated calligrapher Timothy O’Neill – is his most ambitious venture to date. It retails at €635.
The appearance of this great work is a historic development in the annals of Irish scholarship. Not since the publication of John O’Donovan’s monumental and magisterial edition of the Annals of the Four Masters in the mid-19th century has something on this scale been produced in Ireland by a private publisher from the hands of a single editor. It is a worthy monument to the great scholar Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh whose heroic labours in the mid-17th century have left us a work of unsurpassed scholarship which is now available – after a long delay – for future generations, many of whom will be able to trace their descent from some of the lineages detailed in this astonishing book.
This article originally appeared in the Irish Antique Dealers’ Association Yearbook 2004-2005.
