A Digital Edition and Analysis of the Auraicept na nÉces

Auraicept na nÉces ('The Scholars' Primer') is the richest surviving witness to Carolingian interest in the vernacular. The text is the earliest grammatical description of any European vernacular language. No comparable description of a vernacular is found in any European literature before we get the Icelandic First Grammatical Treatise towards the middle of the twelfth century and no similar defence of a vernacular is mounted before Dante Alighieri's defence of the Tuscan dialect in his De vulgari eloquentia at the turn of the fourteenth century. In short, Auraicept na nÉces is a crucial document for our appraisal of Irish and European vernacular activity during the Early Middle Ages. The research project 'A Digital Edition and Analysis of Auraicept na nÉces', led by Nicolai Egjar Engesland (PhD), has made this text available for both a specialized and general audience by providing digital transcriptions/semi-diplomatic editions (TEI XML) of hitherto unedited witnesses from several recensions. These are presented in the web service Corpus Grammaticorum Hibernicorum (https://cgh.uio.no), developed by the Principal Investigator (PI) as part of the project and tailored to this material. Through the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), the service provides access to images of the manuscripts themselves. This enables the user to compare the text of the editions with the primary sources kept in collections in libraries in Dublin (Royal Irish Academy, National Library of Ireland, Trinity College Dublin), Edinburgh (National Library of Scotland), and London (British Library). The manuscripts date to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The new editions of Auraicept na nÉces in Corpus Grammaticorum Hibernicorum are an important resource for Irish textual scholarship and to Latin philology and Medieval studies more generally. The digital format will hopefully stimulate future research of the text. With this digital publication, the project has laid the groundwork for a new critical edition of one recension of Auraicept na nÉces, building on a broader evidential basis than previous editions. The PI has presented the findings of the project at several international conferences, including the XVIIth International Congress of Celtic Studies (ICCS XVIIth), organized in 2023 by Universiteit Utrecht (Netherlands) and Tionól (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 2024). The results have also been presented at workshops in Norway and abroad, such as Digital Humanities Research Group (Galway, 2023), Classics Postgraduate Research Symposium (Galway, 2022), and Old English and Old Norse Symposium (Oslo, 2024). In 2023, the PI presented some findings as a guest lecturer for Faculteit Letteren, KU Leuven (Belgium). A previously unedited passage from the Book of Uí Mhaine appeared in an anthology edited by Michael Clarke, Erich Poppe, and Isabelle Torrance under the title Classical Antiquity and Medieval Ireland: An Anthology of Medieval Irish Texts and Interpretations for Bloomsbury Academic in 2024. Some of the presentations above dealt with the question of influence between the Irish and Icelandic grammatical traditions. In 2024, the PI wrote two articles on particular issues of Old Norse-Irish loanword phonology with relevance to the idea of written transmission between Ireland and Scandinavia. These will appear in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology in 2025 (April, July).

This project has produced a cutting-edge instrument — Corpus Grammaticorum Hibernicorum (https://cgh.uio.no) — that will be indispensable to future research on the medieval Irish treatise first edited under the title Auraicept na nÉces ('The Scholars' Primer'). The web service, hosted by the University of Oslo, provides a model for how small corpora can be edited and published online. The web service follows modern standards of software development and packaging; its architecture has been designed with a view to future expansion so that further editions (diplomatic or critical) and translations can be included in the published catalogue with ease. The academic impact of the project influences the field of Irish philology, in particular, by presenting much hitherto unedited material online under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. The datasets produced by a collation of three freshly edited manuscripts, two of which are published for the first time in Corpus Grammaticorum Hibernicorum, have laid the groundwork for a critical edition and translation of one recension of Auraicept na nÉces. As it provides a new standard of textual editing and digital presentation, the prospects of the web service to impact Irish textual scholarship are considerable.

The Auraicept na nÉces is by far the richest surviving witness to Carolingian interest in the vernacular. In order for medieval scholars to reap the full benefits of this invaluable source, two steps are necessary. First, the text must be made available to Irish specialists and other medieval scholars in a reliable digital edition, including translation. Second, the prevalent, problematic dating of the text to the seventh/eighth century must be addressed and a thorough analysis of the text's connection to intellectual currents in the ninth century must be presented to the scholarly community. The text is the earliest grammatical description of any European vernacular language. No comparable description of a vernacular is found in any European literature before we get the Icelandic First Grammatical Treatise towards the middle of the twelfth century and no similar defence of a vernacular is mounted before Dante Alighieri's defence of the Tuscan dialect in his De vulgari eloquentia at the turn of the fourteenth century. In short, the Auraicept na nÉces is a crucial document for our appraisal of Irish and European vernacular activity during the Early Middle Ages. Due to its unique potential for informing our analysis of the Early Middle Ages, it is arguably the case that no other Old Irish text is in more need of an updated and thorough edition. Because of its European relevance, the edition must be accessible to scholars from a wide array of disciplines, with translation and commentary. A lengthy introduction to the text will produce the first integral analysis of the most prominent and least understood of all enterprises within the field of vernacular grammar in the Carolingian era.