Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson B 502

According to Robert Anthony Welch, it was compiled from around 1125–30. The manuscript as it exists today consists of two vellum codices which were originally separate works but were bound together sometime before 1648. This was done at the request of their new owner, Irish antiquarian Sir James Ware (died 1666), who thanks to Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh (died 1671) had been able to assemble a fine collection of Irish manuscripts. Every leaf has two columns of text written in regular minuscule. The calligraphy, with some decoration, is of a high standard. The parchment was well prepared, though the manuscript has been subject to wear and tear and several folios are now lost. By 2000, the Early Manuscripts at Oxford University project was launched, now entrusted to the Oxford Digital Library, which published digital reproductions of the manuscript. The scanned images include both vellum and paper leaves, with the exception of the 17th-century paper leaves found on fos. 105–171. Critical editions and translations of the individual texts, insofar as these have been undertaken, have been published separately in books and academic journals. ==Contents==

The first manuscript contains an acephalous copy of the Annals of Tigernach, preserving a fragment of the so-called Chronicle of Ireland, a world history in Latin and Irish based on Latin historians such as Eusebius and Orosius. Another secular group of Leinster texts, but written in verse, is the selection of poems collectively referred to as the Laídshenchas Laigen. Other verse texts include the wisdom poems Immacallam in Dá Thuarad ("The Colloquy of the Two Sages") and the legal instructional dialogue Gúbretha Caratniad ("False judgments of Caratnia"). The manuscript is also one of two pre-Norman sources for Irish genealogical texts, the other being the Book of Leinster. These genealogies, which come at the end in a sizeable section of some 30 folios, are mainly associated with Leinster, but others are integrated. Importantly, some material of early Irish law is preserved, such as the tract Cóic Conara Fugill ("The Five Paths of Judgment"). For a select but more detailed list of the contents of the manuscript, expand the following table: ==Disputed identity==

The identity of the second part of the manuscript, more especially its name and provenance, in sources long before it passed into the hands of Rawlinson has been a matter of some controversy. Saltair na Rann Sir James Ware himself referred to the second part as the Saltair na Rann by Óengus Céile Dé, after the metrical religious work of this name beginning on the first folio (fo. 19): "Oengus Celide, Author antiquus, qui in libro dicto Psalter-narran" and elsewhere, "vulgo Psalter Narran appellatur" ("commonly called Psalter Narran"). Ware’s contemporaries John Colgan (died 1658) and Geoffrey Keating (died 1644) also appear to have used this name for the manuscript as a whole. Complicating matters, this poem is not found in Rawlinson B 502, though Breatnach draws attention to the loss of folios and the trimming of pages which may account for the poem's absence. • In Keating's Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, a list of Irish manuscripts said to have survived into his own time. The case for identification was made by scholars like Eugene O'Curry (1861) and James Carney (1964), but it has been argued most forcefully and elaborately by Pádraig Ó Riain. He observed close textual affinities between copies of texts which acknowledge their source as being the Book of Glendalough, such as the first two items above, and versions of these texts in Rawlinson B 502. Caoimhín Breatnach, however, criticises his methodology in establishing textual relationships and concludes that Lebar Glinne Dá Locha and Rawlinson B 502 are two separate manuscripts. An important item of evidence is the poem Cia lín don rígraid ráin ruaid, which survives in three manuscripts: Rawlinson B 502, RIA MS 23 D 17 (which attributes its copy to the Book of Glendalough) and National Library of Ireland MS G 3. In Rawlinson B 502, the poem is embedded in a section on pious kings and accompanied by a short prose introduction as well as some marginal notes. In the versions of the poem given by MS G 3 and MS 23 D 17, the scribe explicitly cites the Lebar Glinne Dá Locha as his source, but the thematic context and the accompanying texts of the Rawlinson B 502 version are found in neither of them. Ó Riain objects, however, that Keating does not claim to have witnessed all these manuscripts in person and so might not have been aware that the manuscript he used, at least by the time he wrote Book III, was formerly known as the Book of Glendalough. ==Notes==

• • • , In Irish. Published by UCC CELT (Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition). ==Further reading==