Observations on the text known as the Leabhar Oiris

The importance which Geoffrey Keating’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn attached to the O’Briens of Thomond as key figures in Ireland’s glorious past continued in subsequent Irish narrative tradition, resulting thereby in the emergence of what the present writer has termed elsewhere an ‘O’Brien Saga’, which was developed and promoted in five key eighteenth-century prose texts. The first of these is a romantic literary re-enactment of the battle of Clontarf with the title Cath Cluana Tarbh, one of the most popular prose texts to be transmitted in the post-classical Irish manuscript sources. Three discrete sets of annals, mainly concerned with Munster affairs, present their own particular encomium of the O’Briens of Thomond, while giving the battle of Clontarf and events surrounding it a central place in their respective narratives. The first in this post-classical triad of annals has come to be known as the ‘Dublin Annals of Inisfallen’ and the remaining two are described in the manuscript sources as extracts d’Annálaibh Innis Faithlionn (‘from the Annals of Inisfallen’). And, finally, the fifth text and subject of what follows below, that known in the manuscript sources as Leabhar Oiris (LO), which yet again praises Dál gCais and the heroic age with which this dynasty is associated.