Kingship, history and mythmaking in medieval Irish literature

My dissertation deals with the ways medieval Irish texts represent and mythologize the past---both the world history medieval writers inherited from classical and Christian antiquity and the particularly Irish history they were engaged in creating. Focusing primarily on the medieval and early modern Irish texts surrounding the mythical First and Second Battles of Mag Tuired, I examine the literary construction of Irish kingship and history---most notably the ways Irish texts allude to, claim authority from, and translate the traditions they adapt from biblical and classical frameworks. As an important part of this project, I have prepared translations of an as-yet-unstudied group of Irish tales about the biblical David, Solomon, and Absalom.;The Early Irish saga Cath Maige Tuired (Second Battle of Mag Tuired), dating in its present form from around the 11th century, has long been viewed as the central tale of the "Mythological Cycle" of Early Irish literature, and as such has been positioned by critics as a survival of Indo-European myth. Instead of focusing on the "archaic" strands in the text, I take the saga as a medieval literary myth and explore the ways that it represents the Irish past while writing that past into a literary tradition rooted in biblical and classical sources. Chapter 1 engages with issues surrounding myth, legend, and history, and places Cath Maige Tuired in a medieval European context. In Chapter 2, I discuss the learned traditions---biblical, classical, and vernacular---that shape Cath Maige Tuired, examining the ways that the saga brings mainstream medieval ecclesiastical culture into native Irish legend, simultaneously "nativizing" biblical tradition and putting a biblical imprint on native tradition. Chapter 3 focuses on the ways the saga textualizes the landscape and deploys a sophisticated set of allusions and symbols related to monuments and pillar stones, encoding Irish history into the Irish landscape. Chapter 4, building on my study of biblical ideas about kingship in the saga, is devoted to a consideration of medieval Irish representations of biblical kings and kingship, especially a group of tales in Irish about the biblical kings David and Solomon, most of which are translated here for the first time.