Brian Merriman facts for kids
Brian Merriman or in Irish Brian Mac Giolla Meidhre (c. 1747 – 27 July 1805) was an 18th-century Irish language bard, farmer, hedge school teacher, and Irish traditional musician from rural County Clare.
Long after his death, Merriman's life drew wide attention after his single surviving work of substance was collected from the local oral tradition, written down, and published for the first time. The poem is a 1000-line long parody of the Aisling, or Dream vision poetry tradition, the battle of the sexes, and Mythopoeic fictionalisations of Irish mythology: (Irish: Cúirt an Mheán Oíche) (The Midnight Court).
The poem describes a lawsuit before the judicial bench of Aoibheal, a former goddess from Irish mythology who had been demoted to queen of the fairies since the Christianization the Irish people by Saint Patrick. In what has been described as, "a battle of the sexes in fairyland", the women of Ireland are suing the men for refusing to get married and father children. The poet versifies the self-justifying arguments and bottomless self-pity of the morally bankrupt lawyers for both genders, which are then answered by the judge's ruling that all laymen must marry before the age of 20 or face punishment. The poet is saved from being the first puishment victim at the last minute by waking up and realizing that the trial was all a nightmare.
Brian Merriman's Cúirt an Mheán Oíche has been compared to the works of Ovid, Geoffrey Chaucer, Miguel de Cervantes, François Rabelais, Dante Alighieri, Jonathan Swift, Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, William Blake, Robert Burns, and Helen Fielding. It is widely regarded as the greatest work of Irish comic poetry and one of the most iconic works in the history of Irish literature in any language. Merriman's parody of the fantasy genre and of the moral foibles of small town Gaels have also had many emulators; including Fr. Allan MacDonald, Liam O'Flaherty, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Flann O'Brien, and Seamus Heaney. Merriman's poem has also been adapted at least twice into a stage play and once into an opera by living composer of Classical music Ana Sokolovic.
Contents
Merriman's life
In accounts collected from the local oral tradition long after his death, Brian Merriman was said to have been born illegitimately in Clondagad or Ennistymon, County Clare. His father is said to have been either an outlawed and fugitive Roman Catholic priest who was on the run from the priest hunters, or an Anglo-Irish landlord. His mother, though, is known to have been surnamed Quilkeen.
Shortly after his birth, Merriman's mother married a stonemason who was working on the walls of the Deer Park at Ennistymon House, which later became the Falls Hotel. The family moved to Feakle, where Merriman would have grown up travelling for illegal and secret religious worship to a Mass rock, which is still extant at the megalithic tomb in the nearby Ballycroum bog.
According to Daniel Corkery, it is still not known, "how nor where", Brian Merriman, "got his education. Perhaps in some hedge school, or intermittently at the feet of some wandering poet or priest, one bearing with him the relics of a nation's culture, the other the credentials of Louvain or Salamanca."
Merriman is known, after he grew up, to have become the teacher of the illegal hedge school for the townland of Kilclaren. He is also said in the local oral tradition to have been a stout man with black hair with an interest in Irish traditional music and who was reportedly a very talented fiddler.
Also according to the local oral tradition, Brian Merriman was employed for a time as resident tutor to the children of a local Protestant and Anglo-Irish landlord.
According to Daniel Corkery, this would not have been uncommon at the time. The Irish language was still spoken so pervasively throughout 18th-century Ireland that many landlords and their families had to learn at least Irish to communicate with their household servants, tenant farmers, and hired labourers. Furthermore, the oral poetry composed in Munster Irish throughout the 18th century, which is replete with allusions to both Classical and Irish mythology, includes many of the greatest and most immortal works of Irish literature in the Irish language.
Corkery writes, therefore, "Such men cannot be thought of as wayside singers who rhymes the local event. They were what they claimed to be, the literati of a people."
It is unlikely, however, that Merriman's employers were aware of this fact or of their resident tutor's enormous significance to Modern literature in Irish. As Daniel Corkery further writes, "The first article in an Ascendancy's creed is that the natives are a lesser breed and that anything that is theirs (except their land and their gold!) is therefore of little value. If they have had a language and a literature, it cannot have been a civilised language, cannot have been anything but a patois used by the hillmen among themselves; and as for their literature, the less said about it the better."
Corkery further explains that Merriman and other poets of the era like him, "were all poor men, very often sore-troubled where and how to find shelter, clothing, food, at the end of a day's tramping. Their native culture is ancient, harking back to pre-Renaissance standards; but there is no inflow of books from outside to impregnate it with new thoughts. Their language is dying: around them is the drip, drip of callous decay: famine overtakes famine, or the people are cleared from the land to make room for bullocks. The rocks in hidden mountain clefts are the only altars left to them; and teaching is a felony."
Even so, Corkery continues, the Irish-language poetry of the era, "is, contrariwise, a rich thing, a marvellous inheritance, bright with music, flushed with colour, deep with human feeling. To see it against the dark world that threw it up, is to be astonished, if not dazzled."
According to the local oral tradition, Brian Merriman was inspired to compose Cúirt an Mheán Oíche, just as the poem describes, by having a nightmare while sleeping along the shores of Loch Gréine. According to other accounts, Merriman composed the poem while recovering from a leg injury that left him unable to work. As is the tradition in Irish culture, Merriman taught his poem to the local seanchaithe, who memorised it and passed it down generation after generation. Like many other works of Munster Irish poetry from the same era, "The Midnight Court", according to Daniel Corkery, "almost two hundred years after its creation, has been found alive on the lips of fishermen and ditchers!"
According to Frank O'Connor, Brian Merriman "was a fine poet" and was every bit the equal of his contemporaries Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, and Robert Burns. Ciaran Carson, however, has gone even farther and has compared Merriman's mastery of language with that of Italian national poet Dante Alighieri.
According to Seán Ó Tuama, "The Midnight Court is undoubtedly one of the greatest comic works of literature, and certainly the greatest comic poem ever written in Ireland. … It is a poem of gargantuan energy, moving clearly and pulsatingly along a simple story line, with a middle, a beginning and an end. For a poem of over one thousand lines it has few longeurs. It is full of tumultuous bouts of great good humour, ... verbal dexterity ... It is a mammoth readable achievement with little need of gloss."
As the morally bankrupt lawyer for the women famously urges him to do in the poem, Merriman married Feakle resident Kathleen Collins around 1787 and became the father of two daughters. Some years later, possibly due to relaxation of Penal Laws forbidding Catholics from owning land by the 1793 Catholic Relief Act, Merriman is known to have owned a 20-acre (81,000 m2) farm near Loch Gréine. In 1797, the Royal Dublin Society awarded Merriman two prizes for his flax crop.
Around 1800, the Merriman family moved to Limerick City. There, Merriman continued to teach.
Brian Merriman died on Saturday 27 July 1805. His death was recorded two days later in the General Advertiser and Limerick Gazette: "Died – on Saturday morning, in Old Clare-street, after a few days' illness, Mr Bryan Merryman, teacher of Mathematics, etc." About Merriman's death, Frank O'Connor has alleged, incorrectly, "Irish literature in the Irish language may be said to have died with him."
Yeats, on the other hand, wrote, "Standish Hayes O'Grady has described The Midnight Court as the best poem written in Gaelic, and as I read Mr. Ussher's translation I have felt, without sharing what seems to me an extravagant opinion, that Mac Giolla Meidhre, had political circumstances been different, might have founded a modern Gaelic literature."
At his own request, Brian Merriman's body was returned to his native district and now lies buried in Feakle graveyard. In August 1992, a stone monument to Brian Merriman, with the opening lines of Cúirt an Mheán Oíche carved in Irish, was dedicated by Seamus Heaney and still stands overlooking the site of the 18th-century Bard's famous nap along the shores of Loch Gréine.
Furthermore, in 2018, Irish dialectologist Brian Ó Curnáin announced the discovery of an 1817 manuscript of Cúirt an Mheán Oíche in the archives of the Royal Irish Academy. The manuscript, which is signed Éamann Ó hOrchaidh, renders the poem not into the County Clare dialect of the Munster Irish spoken by Brian Merriman, but into the now-extinct dialect of Connacht Irish formerly spoken in County Roscommon. The discovery is regarded as priceless in what it reveals of a now vanished dialect of the Irish language.
Influence
Language and metre
The language of Merriman's poem is a mixture of the Classical Gaelic literary language of the Bards with everyday Munster Irish, the vernacular of rural County Clare during the late 18th century. The meter is the rarely used Dactylic Trimeter followed by a single Trochaic foot. The end rhymes are all feminine.
In a 1926 preface to Arland Ussher's translation, William Butler Yeats wrote, "Brian Mac Giolla Meidhre – or to put it in English, Brian Merriman – wrote in Gaelic, one final and three internal rhymes, pouring all his mediaeval abundance into that narrow neck."
The Poetic Courts
According to Daniel Corkery, in 18th century Munster, a custom similar to the Welsh Eisteddfod existed. In what was also both mimicry and satire of the ceremonial of the English-dominated legal and court system, the Chief-Bard of a district would preside over sessions of a Cúirt, or Poetic Court. Like the trial in Merriman's poem, a Munster Cúirt would begin with "bailiffs" delivering often humorously worded "warrants" which summoned local Irish-language poets to a Bardic competition presided over by the Chief-Bard as "judge". In many cases, two Irish-language poets at the Cúirt would engage in Flyting; a mixture of debate poetry and the improvised trading of insults in verse, much like that between the two lawyers in Merriman's poem. Also according to Corkery, much of the serious, improvised, and comic poetry in the Irish-language composed for sessions of the Munster Poetic Courts was written down by the Court "Recorders" and still survives.
Satire of Jacobite poetry
The poem begins by satirizing the Mythopoeic conventions of the Aisling, or Dream vision poem. According to Daniel Corkery, "The Aisling proper is Jacobite poetry; and a typical example would run something like this: The poet, weak with thinking of the woe that has overtaken the Gael, falls into a deep slumber. In his dreaming a figure of radiant beauty draws near. She is so bright, so stately, the poet imagines her one of the immortals. Is she Deirdre? Is she Gearnait? Or is she Helen? Or Venus? He questions her, and learns that she is Erin; and her sorrow, he is told, is for her true mate who is in exile beyond the seas. This true mate is, according to the date of the composition, either the Old or Young Pretender; and the poem ends with a promise of speedy redemption on the return of the King's son."
According to Ciarán Carson, "Merriman subverted all that. His fairy woman is not beautiful, but a threatening monster. The vision that she discloses is not of a future paradise, but a present reality. Merriman's poem, for all its rhetorical and satirical extravagance, gives us a real sense of what life must have been like in 18th century Ireland: its people and their speech, their gestures, their dress, their food and drink, their recreations ... The atmosphere of the 'court' is not so much that of a court of law, but of a country market, filled with verbal commotion and colour. For all that, it is still a dream-world, where Merriman can free himself from the restraints of conventional discourse, swooping from high rhetoric to street-talk in the space of a few lines – much as Dante did in the Inferno, which is also an aisling. And language is very much a concern of the aisling: a recurrent theme is the poet's lament for the decline of Irish, and its support mechanism of noble patronage."
Significance
Due to Merriman's mockery of a dystopian Ireland where the practice of Christian morality has been replaced by all of the Seven Deadly Sins, his satirical treatment of the battle of the sexes, and his devastating social commentary, Cúirt an Mheán Óiche is a truly unique work in the history of Irish poetry in either language.
Legacy
Literary and cultural legacy
Like much Irish and Scottish Gaelic oral poetry Cúirt an Mheán Oíche was preserved mainly by being memorized by successive generations of local seanchaithe although a manuscript of the poem written by Merriman himself does exist in Cambridge University Library. It was eventually published in 1850, by the Irish language poetry collector John O'Daly. Both before and since its first publication, Merriman's masterpiece has had an enormous literary influence.
In his comic verse drama in Scottish Gaelic, Parlamaid nan Cailleach ("The Parliament of Hags"), Roman Catholic priest Fr. Allan MacDonald (1959–1905) of Eriskay lampoons the gossiping of his female parishioners and the courtship and marriage customs of the Hebrides. Ronald Black, a well known scholar of Scottish Gaelic literature, has compared the play to similar works comic poetry from Irish literature in the Irish language, such as Domhnall Ó Colmáin's 1670 Párliament na mBan ("The Women's Parliament") and Brian Merriman's 1780 Cúirt an Mheán Oíche ("The Midnight Court").
In recent years, Merriman's poem and other Irish and Scottish Gaelic comic poetry have been admired, praised, and emulated by modern Irish poets, including Seamus Heaney and Thomas Kinsella.
The influence Merriman's Cervantes-esque parody of the fantasy genre may also be seen in the iconic 1938 metafictional, magical realist, and satirical novel At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien. O'Brien, a career official of the Irish civil service following the War of Independence, had studied Irish language comic literature at University College Dublin and accordingly wrote about a novelist whose characters, many of whom, similarly to Aoibheal, are extremely brutal parodies of revered figures from Irish folklore and mythology, are so outraged by their author's terrible writing that they revolt against him and plot his early demise in order to have control over their own lives.
Literary translations
In the 20th century, a number of translations were produced. Translators have generally rendered Cúirt an Mheán Óiche into iambic pentameter and heroic couplets. Ciarán Carson, however, chose to closely reproduce Merriman's original dactylic meter, which he found very similar to the 6/8 rhythm of Irish jigs, and heavy use of alliteration.
According to Frank O'Connor, a German translation of Cúirt an Mheán Óiche also exists.
Notable English versions have been made by Anglo-Irish poets Arland Ussher, Edward Pakenham, 6th Earl of Longford, and by the Irish Jewish poet David Marcus. A free verse translation has been made by Thomas Kinsella and a partial rhymed translation by Seamus Heaney. Brendan Behan is believed to have written an unpublished version, since lost.
Frank O'Connor's translation into heroic couplets is the most popular.
Legacy in County Clare
Cumann Merriman was founded in 1967 to promote the poet's work. They run an annual Merriman Summer School in County Clare each August. John Ardagh, who visited the annual Merriman festival in the region during the 1990s, described the event as, "very merry."
In 2005, the Clare County Library released a CD recording of a local seanchaí reciting Cúirt an Mheán Óiche in the traditional oral manner. Although it has not been made available for purchase, Cumann Merriman has posted excerpts on their website. For added contrast, the same passages are also reproduced from a modern dramatic reading of the poem.
See also
- Aisling
- Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair
- Bored of the Rings
- The Dream of Rhonabwy
- Flann O'Brien
- Irish poetry
- List of Irish poets
- Máirtín Ó Cadhain
