Foras Feasa ar Éirinn: establishing a literary canon

One-Day Irish Studies Conference III, University College Dublin, Ireland, 2 December 2006Geoffrey Keating's Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (FFÉ), or the ‘Basis of Knowledge about Ireland’, is an account of the history of Ireland which is divided into two books, the first detailing events from the beginning of time down to the coming of Christianity to Ireland, and the second continuing down to the twelfth-century Norman Invasion. There follows a collection of genealogies of major Irish families (both native and of Old English stock) as well as tables of synchronisms from the Flood to the early years of the seventeenth century. The original source has not survived nor do we have an exact date of compilation for the work, although internal textual evidence points to a terminus post quem of 1633: in that year Sir James Ware published Two histories of Ireland which included Edmund Spenser’s A view of the state of Ireland and Meredith Hanmer’s Chronicle of Ireland, two of a number of authors which Keating cites in the introduction to FFÉ. In addition, we may note that the work must have been completed by 1635 because the Tipperary scribe Michael Kearney embarked on an English translation of FFÉ in that year