Brian Merriman


Brian Merriman or in Irish Brian Mac Giolla Meidhre was an Irish language Bard and hedge school teacher. His single surviving work of substance, the 1000-line long Cúirt An Mheán Oíche is widely regarded as the greatest comic poem in the history of Irish literature.

Merriman's life

Merriman in an oral account collected after his death was said to have been born illegitimately in Clondagad or Ennistymon, County Clare. His father is said to have been either a Roman Catholic priest or an Anglo-Irish landlord. His mother was surnamed Quilkeen.
Shortly after his birth, Merriman's mother married a stonemason who was working on the walls of the Deerpark estate in Ennistymon. The family moved to Feakle and some years later Merriman is known to have owned a 20-acre farm near Loch Gréine. He is known to have taught the hedge school in the townland of Kilclaren. He is also said in the oral tradition to have been a stout man with black hair who was also a very talented fiddler.
According to the oral tradition, Merriman was inspired to compose Cúirt An Mheán Oíche after having a nightmare while sleeping along the shores of Loch Gréine. According to other accounts, Merriman composed the poem while recovering from a leg injury that left him unable to work. As is the tradition in Celtic culture, Merriman taught his poem to the local people, who memorised it and spread it by word of mouth.
According to Frank O'Connor, Brian Merriman "was a fine poet" and was every bit the equal of his contemporaries Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, and Robert Burns.
Merriman married around 1787 and had two daughters. In 1797, the Royal Dublin Society awarded him two prizes for his flax crop.
Around 1800 he moved to Limerick City. According to the oral tradition, Merriman moved his family because he feared that his prosperous farm in Feakle might cause local men to abduct his daughters and force them into marriage. In Limerick, he continued to teach.
His death was recorded in the General Advertiser and Limerick Gazette of July 29 1805: "Died - on Saturday morning, in Old Clare-street, after a few days' illness, Mr Bryan Merryman, teacher of Mathematics, etc." Frank O'Connor has alleged, incorrectly, that "Irish literature in the Irish language may be said to have died with him."
Brian Merriman lies buried in Feakle graveyard.

''Cúirt An Mheán Oíche''

In the opening section of the poem, the poet declares his love for walking alone in the countryside of County Clare, which he describes lyrically. After walking past a red fox being pursued by hunters on horseback, the poet walks to the shore of Loch Gréine and lays down to take a nap in a ditch. Then, a hideous female giant appears and drags him kicking and screaming to the court of Queen Aoibheal of the Fairies. On the way to the ruined church at Moynoe, the messenger explains that the Queen, disgusted by the twin corruptions of Anglo-Irish landlords and English Law, has taken the dispensing of justice upon herself. The giant further explains that Aoibheal is concerned that Ireland's men are refusing to marry and father children and that if something is not done, the Irish people will face extinction. When the giant and the poet arrive at the ruined church, there follows a traditional court case under the Brehon law form of a two-part debate followed by the judge's ruling.
In the first part, a young woman calls on Aoibheal declares her case against the young men of Ireland for their refusal to marry. She complains that, despite increasingly desperate flirtation at hurling matches, wakes, and pattern days, the young men insist on ignoring her in favour of late marriages to much older women. The young woman bewails the contempt with which she is treated by the married women of the village.
She is answered by an old man who first denounces the wanton promiscuity of young women in general, suggesting that the young woman who spoke before was conceived by a Tinker in a ditch. He vividly describes the infidelity of his own young wife. He declares his humiliation at finding her already pregnant on their wedding night and the gossip which has surrounded the "premature" birth of "his" son ever since. Then, however, the old man declares that there is nothing wrong with his wife's illegitimate children and denounces marriage as "out of date." He demands that the Queen outlaw it altogether and replace it with a system of free love.
The young woman, however, is infuriated by the old' man's words and is barely restrained from physically assaulting him.
The young woman explains that the old man's wife was a homeless beggar who married him to avoid starvation. She graphically describes the many, many attempts that the old man's wife made to consummate the marriage, only to find her elderly husband impotent. She tells the old man that if his wife has taken a lover, she well deserves one. The young woman then calls for the abolition of priestly celibacy, alleging that priests would otherwise make wonderful husbands and fathers. She declares that many lonely women are already being "consoled" by priests, who are regularly fathering children under other men's names. In conclusion, the young woman declares that she will keep trying to attract an older man in hopes that her unmarried humiliation will finally end.
Finally, in the judgement section Queen Aoibheal announces that there is nothing wrong with marriage and that she admires men who work hard every day to provide for their families. She therefore rules that all laymen must marry before the age of 21, on pain of flogging at the hands of Ireland's women. She advises the women to equally target the romantically indifferent, homosexuals, and male seducers who boast of the numbers of single and married women whose lives they have ruined. Aoibheal tells the women to be careful, however, not to flog any man until he is unable to father children. She also states that abolishing priestly celibacy is beyond her mandate. She expresses a belief, however, that the Pope will soon allow priests to openly act on their carnal urges and counsels patience until then.
To the poet's horror, the young woman angrily points him out as a 30-year-old bachelor and describes her many failed attempts to become his wife. She declares that, despite the poet's crooked back and extreme ugliness, Merriman must be the first man to suffer the consequences of the new marriage law. As a crowd of infuriated women gleefully prepares to flog Brian Merriman into a quivering bowl of jelly, he awakens along the shore of Loch Gréine to find it was all a terrible nightmare.

Influence

The poem begins by using the conventions of the Aisling, or vision poem, in which the poet is out walking when he has a vision of a woman from the otherworld. Typically, this woman represents Ireland. She will then lament her lot and/or call upon her 'sons' to rebel against foreign tyranny. In Jacobite versions, the woman will prophesy the return of justice when the House of Stuart regains the British and Irish thrones. But in Merriman's hands, the Aisling genre is satirised mercilessly.
The language of the poem is essentially the everyday Munster Irish of the time, the vernacular of County Clare during the 18th century. The meter is the rarely used Bacchic Trimeter followed by a single Iambic foot. The rhymes are all feminine.
Translators into English, however, have generally rendered Cúirt An Mheán Óiche into iambic pentameter and heroic couplets. According to Frank O'Connor, a German translation of Cúirt An Mheán Óiche also exists.
Due to Merriman's satire of a culture where Christian morality has collapsed, his parody of the battle of the sexes, and his biting social commentary, Cúirt An Mheán Óiche is a unique document in the history of Irish poetry in either language.

Legacy

Cúirt An Mheán Oíche was never written down by its author and was preserved, like much Gaelic poetry, in an oral format. It was first published in 1850 in an edition by the Irish language poetry collector John O'Daly.
In the 20th century, a number of translations were produced. Notable English versions have been made by Arland Ussher, Frank O'Connor, Edward Pakenham, 6th Earl of Longford, David Marcus, and Ciarán Carson. A free verse translation has been made by Thomas Kinsella and a partial rhymed translation by Seamus Heaney. Brendan Behan is believed to have written an unpublished version, since lost.
Frank O'Connor's translation, which is the most popular, was banned in Ireland by the Censorship Board in 1945. When his translation was attacked in The Irish Times by Professor James Hogan of the National University of Ireland, O'Connor responded in print that Professor Hogan, who knew Cúirt An Mheán Óiche only through a translation into German, did not know enough German to read an Irish language text in the original. O'Connor also wrote that everything in his translation that the Irish State considered to be obscene was also present in Merriman's original poem in Irish. In his book, A Short History of Irish Literature, O'Connor cites the banning of his translation among several other examples of the crippling effect that wartime censorship was having on Irish literature.
Cumann Merriman was founded in 1967 to promote the poet's work. They run an annual Merriman Summer School in County Clare each August.
In 2005, the Clare County Library released a CD recording of a local seanchaí reciting Cúirt An Mheán Óiche in the traditional oral manner. Although it has not been made available for purchase, Cumann Merriman has posted excerpts on their website. For added contrast, the same passages are also reproduced from a modern dramatic reading of the poem.
In recent years, Merriman's poem and other Irish and Scottish Gaelic comic poetry has been widely admired and translated by several modern Irish poets like Seamus Heaney and Thomas Kinsella.
Cúirt an Mheán Oíche has been dramatised by Tom MacIntyre and Celia de Fréine and has been turned into a comic opera by composer Ana Sokolović with English libretto by Paul Bentley.
In a review for The Guardian of Ciarán Carson's 2006 translation of Cúirt An Mheán Óiche, David Wheately wrote, "When it came to translating Merriman's poem, the temptation might have been to put its four-stressed lines into Swiftian octosyllabics, but instead he has opted for the hop, step and jump of an anapestic beat. According to Carson's introduction, however, his real inspiration was the 6/8 rhythm of Irish jigs, which as a fiddler himself Merriman would have known well.... The alphabet soup of earlier Carson books such as First Language serves him well here with the alliterative riffing of the Gaelic metre... For all its problems with the censor, Frank O'Connor's version is the drawing room performance; this one's for the shebeen in the wee small hours."
In 2018, Irish dialectologist Brian Ó Curnáin found an 1817 manuscript of Cúirt an Mheán Oíche in the archives of the Royal Irish Academy. The manuscript, which is signed Éamann Ó hOrchaidh, renders the poem not into the Munster Irish spoken by Brian Merriman, but into the now-extinct dialect of Connaught Irish once spoken in County Roscommon. The discovery is regarded as priceless in what it reveals of a now vanished dialect of the Irish language.
At the end of a 1993 lecture on Merriman's life and work, Seamus Heaney declared, "Perhaps I can convey the ongoing reality of the poem's life more simply by recollecting a Saturday evening last August when I had the privilege of unveiling a memorial to Brian Merriman on the shore of Lough Graney in Co. Clare, where the opening scene of 'The Midnight Court' is set. The memorial is a large stone quarried from a hill overlooking the lake, and the opening lines are carved on it in Irish. The people who attended the ceremony were almost all from the local district, and were eager to point out the exact corner of the nearby field where the poet had run his hedge school, and the spot on the lough shore where he had fallen asleep and had his vision. This was, and is, the first circle where Merriman's poem flourished and continues to flourish. Later that evening, for example, in a marquee a couple of miles down the road, we attended a performance by the Druid Theatre Company from Galway in which the poem was given a dramatic presentation with all the boost and blast-off that song and music and topical allusion could provide. Again, hundreds of local people were in the tent, shouting and taking sides like a football crowd, as the old man and the young woman battled it out and the president of the court gave her judgement. The psychosexual demons were no longer at bay but rampant and fully recognised, so that the audience, at the end of the performance, came away from the experience every bit as accused and absolved as the poet himself at the end of his poem. The 'profane perfection of mankind' was going ahead and civilisation was being kept on course; in a ceremony that was entirely convincing and contemporary, Orpheus has been remembered in Ireland."