Lebor Gabála Érenn

Lebor Gabála Érenn is a collection of poems and prose narratives in the Irish language intended to be a history of Ireland and the Irish from the creation of the world to the Middle Ages. There are a number of versions, the earliest of which was compiled by an anonymous writer in the 11th century. It synthesised narratives that had been developing over the foregoing centuries. The Lebor Gabála tells of Ireland being "taken" by six groups of people: the people of Cessair, the people of Partholón, the people of Nemed, the Fir Bolg, the Tuatha Dé Danann, and the Milesians. The first four groups are wiped out or forced to abandon the island; the fifth group represents Ireland's pagan gods, while the final group represents the Irish people.
The Lebor Gabála was highly influential and was largely "accepted as conventional history by poets and scholars down until the 19th century". Today, scholars regard the Lebor Gabála as primarily myth rather than history. It appears to be mostly based on medieval Christian pseudo-histories, but it also incorporates some of Ireland's native pagan mythology. Scholars believe that the goal of its writers was to provide a history for Ireland that could compare to that of Rome or Israel, and which was compatible with Christian teaching. The Lebor Gabála became one of the most popular and influential works of early Irish literature. Mark Williams says it was "written in order to bridge the chasm between Christian world-chronology and the prehistory of Ireland".
The Lebor Gabála is usually known in English as The Book of Invasions or The Book of Conquests. In Modern Irish it is Leabhar Gabhála Éireann or Leabhar Gabhála na hÉireann.

Origin and purpose

The writers of Lebor Gabála Érenn sought to create an epic written history of the Irish comparable to that of the Israelites in the Old Testament of the Bible. This history was intended to fit the Irish into Christian world-chronology, to "find a place for Ireland in the Biblical history of the world". In doing so, it links them to events from the Old Testament and likens them to the Israelites. Ancestors of the Irish were described as enslaved in a foreign land, fleeing into exile, wandering in the wilderness, or sighting the "Promised Land" from afar. The writers also sought to incorporate native pre-Christian stories about the origins of the Irish, and to reconcile them with medieval Christian lore.
File:City of God Manuscript.jpg|thumb|The authors of Lebor Gabála Érenn were strongly influenced by such religious texts as St. Augustine of Hippo's 5th-century book, City of God.
The LGE seems to have been influenced by four major Christian works in particular:

St Augustine's De Civitate Dei,,
Orosius's Historiae adversum paganos, "Histories",
Eusebius's Chronicon, translated into Latin by St Jerome as the Temporum liber
Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae

The pre-Christian elements, however, were never entirely effaced. One of the poems in LGE, for instance, recounts how goddesses from among the Tuatha Dé Danann took husbands from the Gaeil when they 'invaded' and 'colonised' Ireland. The pattern of successive invasions recounted in the LGE is reminiscent of Timagenes of Alexandria's account of the origins of the Gauls of continental Europe. Cited by the 4th-century historian Ammianus Marcellinus, Timagenes describes how the ancestors of the Gauls were driven from their native lands in eastern Europe by a succession of wars and floods.
Numerous fragments of Ireland's mythological history are scattered throughout the 7th and 8th centuries. In his Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History, Eugene O'Curry, Professor of Irish History and Archaeology at the Catholic University of Ireland, discussed various genres of historical tales mentioned in the manuscripts:

The Tochomladh was an Immigration or arrival of a Colony; and under this name the coming of the several colonies of Parthalon of Nemedh, of the Firbolgs, the Tuatha Dé Danann, the Milesians, etc., into Erinn, are all described in separate tales. It is probably from the original records of these ancient stories that the early part of the various Books of Invasions has been compiled.

R. A. Stewart Macalister believes that the LGE was a conflation of two independent works: a History of the Gaedil, and an account of several pre-Gaelic settlements of Ireland. The latter was then inserted into the middle of the other work. Macalister theorised that the quasi-Biblical text had been a scholarly Latin work named Liber Occupationis Hiberniae.
The earliest surviving account of Irish origins is found in the Historia Brittonum, written in Wales in the 9th century. The story probably came from a now-lost Irish source. It says that Ireland was settled by three groups of people from the Iberian Peninsula. The first are the people of Partholón, who all die of plague. The second are the people of Nemed, who eventually return to Iberia. The last group are led by three sons of a warrior or soldier from Hispania, who sail to Ireland in thirty ships. They see a glass tower in the middle of the sea and set out to capture it, but when they reach it, all but one of their ships are sunk. Only one ship is saved, and its passengers are the ancestors of all the Irish.
When the Lebor Gabála was first compiled in the 11th century, the three waves of settlers had grown to six. Joseph Lennon says "These waves may, in fact, represent the redactors' attempts to account for numerous oral accounts in Irish of origin legends". It is also suggested that there are six waves to match the "Six Ages of the World".
These stories continued to be enriched and elaborated upon by Irish historian-poets throughout the 9th century. In the 10th and 11th centuries, several long historical poems were written that were later incorporated into the scheme of LGE. Most of the poems on which the 11th–12th century version of LGE was based were written by the following four poets:

Eochaidh Ua Floinn from Armagh – Poems 30, 41, 53, 65, 98, 109, 111
Flann Mainistrech mac Echthigrin, lector and historian of Monasterboice Abbey – Poems ?42, 56, 67, ?82
Tanaide – Poems 47, 54, 86
Gilla Cómáin mac Gilla Samthainde – Poems 13, 96, 115

It was late in the 11th century that a single anonymous scholar appears to have brought together these and numerous other poems and fitted them into an elaborate prose framework – partly of his own composition and partly drawn from older, no longer extant sources, paraphrasing and enlarging the verse. The result was the earliest version of LGE. It was written in Middle Irish, a form of Irish Gaelic used between 900 and 1200.

Versions

Within a century of its compilation there existed a plethora of copies and revisions of Lebor Gabála, with as many as 136 poems between them. It is "somewhat misleading" to refer to the Lebor Gabála as one narrative. No two versions are identical, although many elements remain the same. There are five recensions, surviving in more than a dozen medieval manuscripts:

First Redaction : preserved in The Book of Leinster and The Book of Fermoy.
Míniugud : this recension is closely related to the Second Redaction. It is probably older than the surviving MSS of that redaction, though not older than the now-lost exemplar on which those MSS were based. The surviving sources are suffixed to copies of the Second Redaction.
Second Redaction : survives in no less than seven separate texts, the best known of which is The Great Book of Lecan.
Third Redaction : preserved in both The Book of Ballymote and The Great Book of Lecan.
O'Clery's Redaction : written in 1631 by Mícheál Ó Cléirigh, a Franciscan scribe and one of the Four Masters. Unlike the earlier versions of LGE, this redaction is in Early Modern Irish but was admitted as an independent redaction by Macalister because there are indications that the author had access to sources which are no longer extant and which were not used by the compilers of the other four redactions. The work was compiled in the convent of Lisgool, near Enniskillen. O'Clery was assisted by Gillapatrick O'Luinin and Peregrine O'Clery.

The following table summarises the extant manuscripts that contain versions of LGE. Most of the abbreviations used are taken from R. A. S. Macalister's critical edition of the work :

Sigla	Manuscript	Location	Redactions	Notes
A	Stowe A.2.4	Royal Irish Academy	R²	A direct and poor copy of D
B	The Book of Ballymote	Royal Irish Academy	R³	B lost one folio after β, β¹ and β² were derived from it
β	H.2.4	Trinity College Dublin	R³	A transcript of B made in 1728 by Richard Tipper
β¹	H.1.15	Trinity College Dublin	R³	A copy, made around 1745 by Tadhg Ó Neachtain, of a lost transcript of B
β²	Stowe D.3.2	Royal Irish Academy	R³	An anonymous copy of the same lost transcript of B
D	Stowe D.4.3	Royal Irish Academy	R²
E	E.3.5. no. 2	Trinity College Dublin	R²
F¹	The Book of Fermoy	Royal Irish Academy	R¹	F¹ and F² are parts of one dismembered MS, F
F²	Stowe D.3.1	Royal Irish Academy	R¹	F¹ and F² are parts of one dismembered MS, F
H	H.2.15. no. 1	Trinity College Dublin	R³
L	The Book of Leinster	Trinity College Dublin	R¹
Λ	The Book of Lecan	Royal Irish Academy	R², Min	First text of LGE in The Book of Lecan
M	The Book of Lecan	Royal Irish Academy	R³	Second text of LGE in The Book of Lecan
P	P.10266	National Library of Ireland	R²
R	Rawl.B.512	Bodleian Library	R², Min	Only the prose text is written out in full: the poems are truncated
V¹	Stowe D.5.1	Royal Irish Academy	R², Min	V¹, V² and V³ are parts of one dismembered MS, V
V²	Stowe D.4.1	Royal Irish Academy	R², Min	V¹, V² and V³ are parts of one dismembered MS, V
V³	Stowe D.1.3	Royal Irish Academy	R², Min	V¹, V² and V³ are parts of one dismembered MS, V
K¹	23 K 32	Royal Irish Academy	K	Fair copy of the author Michael O Clery's autograph. K is contained in several paper manuscripts, but K¹, the "authoritative autograph", takes precedence.

The LGE was translated into French in 1884. The first complete English translation was made by R. A. Stewart Macalister between 1937 and 1942. It was accompanied by an apparatus criticus, Macalister's own notes and an introduction. Macalister's translation "synthesizes the versions of this already synthesized text".