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Cétamon
verse beg. Cétemain, caín cucht

  • Old Irish
  • verse
  • Early Irish poetry

Old Irish poem on May-day, which offers images of the season of May in all its vivid glory, from the blackbirds and bees to the appearance of the trees. The poem is extant as a composition incorporated in a later text, Macgnímartha Find (‘The boyhood deeds of Finn’), where it is attributed to Finn as a demonstration of his poetic skills after he had learned the three arts of poetry (teinm láeda, im-us forosna and díchetal di chennaib).

First words (verse)
  • Cétemain, caín cucht
“May-day”
Cétemain, cain cucht / ‘May-day, fair aspect’ in Gerard Murphy, ‘Anonymous: May-day’ in Early Irish lyrics... (1956); Cétamon / cáin rée / ‘Lovely season of May’ in James P. Carney, ‘Three Old Irish accentual poems’, Ériu 22 (1971); Céttemain cáin ré in Kuno Meyer, Four Old-Irish songs of summer and winter (1903).
Context(s)The (textual) context(s) to which the present text belongs or in which it is cited in part or in whole.
Speaker/Addressee
Speaker: Finn mac Cumaill
Finn mac Cumaill (Find úa Báiscni)
(time-frame ass. with Finn Cycle, Finn mac Cumaill, Cormac mac Airt)
Finn mac Cumaill (earlier mac Umaill?), Find úa Báiscni: central hero in medieval Irish and Scottish literature of the so-called Finn Cycle; warrior-hunter and leader of a fían
See more
Manuscripts
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 610 ff. 1–58 and ff. 73–122 = Leabhar na Rátha [1453–1454]
f. 120ra–rb
rubric: ‘Is ann sin doroíne Finn in laig si oc fromad a eícsi’
beg. ‘Cettemain cain ree’
Language
  • Old Irish
  • Originally composed in the Old Irish period (Meyer, Murphy, Carney).
Date
9th century (Murphy); 7th century (Carney).
Provenance
Origin: Ireland
Ireland
No short description available
See more James Carney takes mbreg mbras in st. 10, l. 2, to refer to Brega, concluding from this that “The poet probably comes from the district of Brega, or nearby”. It is not so certain that the placename is intended here and (m)breg may simply represent the gen. pl. of brí ‘hill’, as Murphy has it.
Form
verse (primary)
Metre
Gerard Murphy suggested that the poem was originally composed in lethrannaigecht mór (51 + 51 + 51 + 51) and offered a reconstructed text based on this assumption. James Carney, however, criticised his emendations of presumed scribal corruptions as being “over-confident”. Instead, he viewed the poem as an example of accentual verse, associating its metre with that of the Leinster poems: “couplets with monosyllabic end-rhyme. Each line has four phrases, the couplet eight, and hence is taken here as belonging to the ochtfhoclach (‘eight-phrased’?) type. Apart from the final monosyllabic rhyme there is no syllable count, and we find in practice that the number of syllables may vary considerably.”(1)n. 1 James P. Carney, ‘Three Old Irish accentual poems’, Ériu 22 (1971): 34–35.
    Length
    Number of stanzas: 14
    Textual relationships
    Related: Tánic samTánic sam

    Poem on the coming of summer, attributed to Finn mac Cumaill. It evokes an image of the season by referring, for instance, to the appearance and behaviour of stags, dogs, salmon and birds such as the cuckoo and the blackbird.

    Classification

    Early Irish poetryEarly Irish poetry
    ...
    Early Irish poetryEarly Irish poetry
    ...

    Keywords

    SummerSummer
    ...
    MaydayMayday
    ...

    Sources

    Notes

    1.
    James P. Carney, ‘Three Old Irish accentual poems’, Ériu 22 (1971): 34–35.

    Primary sources Text editions and/or modern translations – in whole or in part – along with publications containing additions and corrections, if known. Diplomatic editions, facsimiles and digital image reproductions of the manuscripts are not always listed here but may be found in entries for the relevant manuscripts. For historical purposes, early editions, transcriptions and translations are not excluded, even if their reliability does not meet modern standards.

    [ed.] [tr.] Carney, James P., “Three Old Irish accentual poems”, Ériu 22 (1971): 23–80.
    [ed.] [tr.] Murphy, Gerard [ed. and tr.], “Anonymous: May-day”, in: Gerard Murphy [ed. and tr.], Early Irish lyrics: eighth to twelfth century, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956. 156–159, 233–234.
    CELT – edition: <link>
    [ed.] [tr.] Murphy, Gerard [ed. and tr.], “Finn's poem on May-day”, Ériu 17 (1955): 86–99.
    89–91 (critical and diplomatic edition, with translation), 92–99 (notes and index) Compared to his predecessors or to Carney, Gerard Murphy produced an edition which is more radical in attempting to restore the original poem and its metre, which he believed would have been a perfectly regular lethrannaigecht mór.
    [ed.] [tr.] Meyer, Kuno [ed. and tr.], Four Old-Irish songs of summer and winter, London: Nutt, 1903.
    4ff
    [tr.] Meyer, Kuno [tr.], “The boyish exploits of Finn”, Ériu 1 (1904): 180–190.
    Internet Archive: <link>
    186–187 Translation reprinted from Meyer's Four Old Irish songs of summer and winter (1903), with slight changes. direct link
    [ed.] Meyer, Kuno [ed.], “Macgnímartha Find”, Revue Celtique 5 (1882): 195–204, 508.  
    comments: Corrigenda in Archiv für celtische Lexikographie 1 (1900): 482.
    Internet Archive: <link> CELT – edition: <link> CELT – translation: <link>
    [tr.] Jackson, Kenneth Hurlstone, Studies in early Celtic nature poetry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935.
    23ff + 41ff. Translation
    web page identifiers
    Contributors
    Dennis Groenewegen
    Page created
    May 2011, last updated: January 2024
    Retrieved from ‘https://codecs.vanhamel.nl/index.php?title=Cétamon&oldid=301732’