The literary legacy of Keating's Foras Feasa ar Éirinn

The 9th annual seminar of the Irish Texts Society University College Cork, Ireland 10th November 2007In considering the legacy of Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (FFÉ) by Séathrún Céitinn, or Geoffrey Keating, we may reasonably expect that the work’s influence on prose histories of Ireland to have merited particular scholarly attention. The concern in what follows here, however, is not so much with the work’s effect on the course of Irish historiography, but rather with its literary legacy as a significant link in a carefully forged chain of literary prose narratives. While this significance applies to narrative content, it also incorporates the more abstract matter of the dynamic role of the transmitter of narrative — that of the scribe — in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In other words, it will be argued that the literary legacy of Keating’s FFÉ not only influenced the content itself of the material being transmitted, but also spurred the literary creativity of scribes to engage with a given text and indulge in editorial intrusions, thereby resulting in a newly created text, or, if you will, a re-created text.Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Science