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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Conquest, colonial ideologies and the consequences for language
- Chapter 2 ‘A bad dream with no sound’: the representation of Irish in the texts of the Elizabethan conquest
- Chapter 3 ‘Wilde Speech’: Elizabethan evaluations of Irish
- Chapter 4 ‘Translating this kingdom of the new’: English linguistic nationalism and Anglicisation policy in Ireland
- Chapter 5 New world, new incomprehension: patterns of change and continuity in the English encounter with native languages from Munster to Manoa
- Chapter 6 The clamorous silence
- Conclusion
- Glossary
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Conquest, colonial ideologies and the consequences for language
- Chapter 2 ‘A bad dream with no sound’: the representation of Irish in the texts of the Elizabethan conquest
- Chapter 3 ‘Wilde Speech’: Elizabethan evaluations of Irish
- Chapter 4 ‘Translating this kingdom of the new’: English linguistic nationalism and Anglicisation policy in Ireland
- Chapter 5 New world, new incomprehension: patterns of change and continuity in the English encounter with native languages from Munster to Manoa
- Chapter 6 The clamorous silence
- Conclusion
- Glossary
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Scríte in uisce, le clipe de sciathán rotha,
ar scothóg feamainne mar phár.
Nuala Ní Dhomhnall, ‘An Mhurúch agus Focail Áirithe'
Two last texts, pitched at the poles of an incomprehension that is linguistic, artistic and epistemological and held in tense equipoise only by their shared subject, an Irish-speaker caught up in the havoc of a changing world, act out, in their own way, the paradox which, from the start, marks the experience of linguistic colonisation in Ireland. Some time in the 1580s, Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn addressed ‘D'fhior chogaid comhailtear síothcháin’, ‘By a man of war is peace kept’, to Brian na Murrtha O'Rourke, the lord of Breifne who challenged English rule in the north-west throughout the 1580s and who has made minor appearances throughout this work. The poet urges O'Rourke to unleash a maelstrom of destruction, driving the ‘fir Saxan’, ‘Saxon men’, from Ireland (Knott, Poems i, p. 108: 2.2). The poet conjures up images of apocalyptic violence: ‘muír chloch 'na gcuiltibh fiaidhmhíol’, the ‘stone castles’ of the Pale reduced to ‘lairs for savage beasts’; a famine-stricken mother eating ‘mír do chridhe a céidleanaibh’ (a bite of the heart of her first-born) (19.1; 20.4). Ó hUiginn stands the Elizabethans' taxonomy of ‘civil’ and ‘barbarian’ on its head: the English are ‘danair loma léirchrea-chaigh’ (rapacious, destructive barbarians) who pillage ‘Gaoidhil na ngníomh gcathardha’ (the Gaels of civil deeds) (32.4; 3.2).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Language and Conquest in Early Modern IrelandEnglish Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion, pp. 212 - 216Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001