“Ovre londe” / “Irlonde”: Appropriating Irish Saints in the Aftermath of Conquest
STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY Volume 113 Winter 2016 Number 1 by A pair of textual errors in the Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 108, South English Legendary Lives of St. Brendan and St. Brigid (ca. 12801320) misidentify these two saints as coming from "ovre londe" ("our land"; implicitly, England) and "Scotlond" instead of from Ireland. These errors reflect English anxiety about possessing and reclaiming Irish culture as well as Irish land during a period when AngloNorman forces are colonizing and occupying portions of Ireland. The Brendan error claims Ireland for England in order to justify England's colonization projects. The Brendan and Brigid errors also construct Ireland as well as Scotland as exotic spaces whose wonders distinguish them from England, while at the same time appropriating Celtic exoticism for English culture and Celtic lands for an Anglo-Norman empire. SEint Brendan, þe holi man : was here of ovre londe. Monek he was of harde liue : as ich me under-stonde. [Saint Brendan, the holy man, was here, of our land. He was a monk of a difficult practice, as I understand.]1 1Life of St. Brendan, lines 48992, in Carl Horstmann, ed., The Early South English Legendary or Lives of Saints, EETS, o.s., 87 (London, 1886). Henceforth I will identify texts in Horstmann, ESEL by individual saint's name and line number only. Like Horstmann, I follow the allographic conventions of the manuscript Laud 108, which uses the pointed `v' and rounded `u' interchangeably, in order to represent the strange and compelling voice of the manuscript. 1 © 2016 Studies in Philology, Incorporated OW do colonizers imagine the lands that they have colonized? How do ordinary people, implicated in the acts of colonization which their compatriots and predecessors have performed, respond to that implication? A hundred and fifty years into the troubled and incomplete Anglo-Norman occupation of Ireland, a Middle...
