O’Davoren Book (or Egerton 88)

[Sduddy]

Descendants of the O’Davorens* (also spelled Davoran and Daveron) may be interested to know that the most important book associated with the O’Davoren Law School of Cahermacnaghten is on loan from the British Library to Galway City Museum until January 2020**. I gather that this book is usually referred to as Egerton 88.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Davoren

** https://www.galwaycitymuseum.ie/new-pho ... 2-2-2-2-2/

I went there to see it. The book is under glass and only a couple of pages are on view, showing the perfectly beautiful script, which is much smaller in reality than it appears in the images online. I suppose the parchment was too precious to be used wastefully.

It is part of an exhibition entitled “Keepers of the Gael: Culture and Society in Gaelic Ireland 1200-1600 AD” and there is an accompanying booklet by Liz Fitzpatrick which gives short outline on the Physician, the Poet, the Lawyer, the Musician etc. of the medieval period. In the section on The Lawyer, there’s a short piece on Donall O’Davoren under the sub-heading: ‘The book of Donal O’Davoren’:

Donall was an ollamh of the O’Davoren learned family of brehon lawyers in the Burren, Co. Clare. When compiling his book, which included a legal glossary and other material, between 1564 and 1570, he and his scribes visited the MacEgan law school at Park, Co. Galway, the O’Doran law school at Ballyorley, Co. Wexford and the O’Mulconry school of seanchas (history) at Ardkyle, Co. Clare. Completing the work in 1570, he wrote, ‘I am well pleased with that quantity of the old book which I have today finished off’.

Sheila

[Sduddy]

Well, Dr. George U. Macnamara doesn’t agree with me about the script. He says, “None of the handwriting is very good, with the exception of Cormac ua Briain’s and Magnus ua Dabhoirenn’s”: http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/coclar ... ton_88.htm

Maybe I was looking at one of the good pages.

Sheila

[Sduddy]

I came upon this article by Dr. George U. Macnamara, and enjoyed reading it just for the style: http://www.limerickcity.ie/media/NMAS%2 ... Namara.pdf
I was amused to find that the word “submerged” is used to describe a family ending with just females and their descendants (see page 198: “It will be seen from a careful perusal of the explanatory notes, that there are now existing no known representatives in the male line of Aodh o Dabhoireann of the deed of 1606, that line having become apparently extinct or else submerged").
If you read on to page 201, you are not finished: a 37 stanza poem in Irish follows, which Dr. George U Macnamara translates into English. He was an amazing man.

Sheila

[Sduddy]

Well, Dr. G. U. Macnamara was an amazing man, of course, but I'm finding that he did not translate the 37 stanza poem; that translation was done by Douglas Hyde - as I found when I looked at Macnamara's first article on the O'Davorens, "The O'Davorens of Cahermacnaughten, Burren, Co. Clare": http://www.davoren.org/pdf/davoren.pdf. In that article, he says, "The genealogical poem written for Giollananaomh og O'Davoren by Tadhg mac Daire is a most elaborate composition in seadna metre. As it was altogether beyond my powers, my good friend, Dr. Douglas Hyde, kindly offered to translate it for me. He tells me that it consists of most exquisite rhymes and elaborate and ingenious wordspinning, and that it is so full of difficult and obsolete terms that his translation must be considered only tentative. The author, Tadhg mac Daire, was an accomplished poet, and a most voluminous writer. A great deal of his poetry still survives, but although he was a well-known man in his day, very little of his personal history has come down to us and is practically confined to a notice of him in a work by Theophilus."

Sheila