Brian Merriman
Brian Merriman or in Irish Brian Mac Giolla Meidhre was an 18th-century Irish-language bard, farmer, hedge school teacher, and Irish traditional musician from rural County Clare.
Long after his death, Merriman's life drew wide attention after his single surviving work of substance was collected from the local oral tradition, written down, and published for the first time. The poem, called Cúirt an Mheán Oíche in Irish and The Midnight Court in English, is a 1000-line long parody of the Aisling, or dream vision poetry tradition, the battle of the sexes, and Mythopoeic fictionalisations of Irish mythology.
The poem describes a lawsuit before the judicial bench of Aoibheal, a former goddess from Irish mythology who had been demoted to queen of the fairies since the Christianization the Irish people by Saint Patrick. In what has been described as, "a battle of the sexes in fairyland", the women of Ireland are suing the men for refusing to get married and father children. The poet versifies the self-justifying arguments and bottomless self-pity of the morally bankrupt lawyers for both genders, which are then answered by the judge's ruling that all laymen must marry before the age of 20 or face flogging at the hands of Ireland's understandably frustrated and outraged women. The poet is saved from being the first flogging victim at the last minute by waking up and realizing that the trial was all a nightmare.
Brian Merriman's Cúirt an Mheán Oíche has been compared to the works of Ovid, Geoffrey Chaucer, Miguel de Cervantes, François Rabelais, Dante Alighieri, Jonathan Swift, Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, William Blake, Robert Burns, and Helen Fielding. It is widely regarded as the greatest work of Irish comic poetry and one of the most iconic works in the history of Irish literature in any language. Merriman's parody of the fantasy genre and of the moral foibles of small town Gaels have also had many emulators; including Fr. Allan MacDonald, Liam O'Flaherty, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Flann O'Brien, and Seamus Heaney. Merriman's poem has also been adapted at least twice into a stage play and once into an opera by living composer of Classical music Ana Sokolovic.
Merriman's life
In accounts collected from the local oral tradition long after his death, Brian Merriman was said to have been born illegitimately in Clondagad or Ennistymon, County Clare. His father is said to have been either an outlawed and fugitive Roman Catholic priest who was on the run from the priest hunters, or an Anglo-Irish landlord. His mother, though, is known to have been surnamed Quilkeen.Shortly after his birth, Merriman's mother married a stonemason who was working on the walls of the Deer Park at Ennistymon House, which later became the Falls Hotel. The family moved to Feakle, where Merriman would have grown up travelling for illegal and secret religious worship to a Mass rock, which is still extant at the megalithic tomb in the nearby Ballycroum bog.
According to Daniel Corkery, it is still not known, "how nor where", Brian Merriman, "got his education. Perhaps in some hedge school, or intermittently at the feet of some wandering poet or priest, one bearing with him the relics of a nation's culture, the other the credentials of Louvain or Salamanca."
Merriman is known, after he grew up, to have become the teacher of the illegal hedge school for the townland of Kilclaren. He is also said in the local oral tradition to have been a stout man with black hair with an interest in Irish traditional music and who was reportedly a very talented fiddler.
Also according to the local oral tradition, Brian Merriman was employed for a time as resident tutor to the children of a local Protestant and Anglo-Irish landlord.
According to Daniel Corkery, this would not have been uncommon at the time. The Irish language was still spoken so pervasively throughout 18th-century Ireland that many landlords and their families had to learn at least Irish to communicate with their household servants, tenant farmers, and hired labourers. Furthermore, the oral poetry composed in Munster Irish throughout the 18th century, which is replete with allusions to both Classical and Irish mythology, includes many of the greatest and most immortal works of Irish literature in the Irish language.
Corkery writes, therefore, "Such men cannot be thought of as wayside singers who rhymes the local event. They were what they claimed to be, the literati of a people."
But it is unlikely that Merriman's employers were aware of this fact or of their resident tutor's enormous significance to Modern literature in Irish. As Daniel Corkery further writes, "The first article in an Ascendancy's creed is that the natives are a lesser breed and that anything that is theirs is therefore of little value. If they have had a language and a literature, it cannot have been a civilised language, cannot have been anything but a patois used by the hillmen among themselves; and as for their literature, the less said about it the better."
Corkery further explains that Merriman and other poets of the era like him, "were all poor men, very often sore-troubled where and how to find shelter, clothing, food, at the end of a day's tramping. Their native culture is ancient, harking back to pre-Renaissance standards; but there is no inflow of books from outside to impregnate it with new thoughts. Their language is dying: around them is the drip, drip of callous decay: famine overtakes famine, or the people are cleared from the land to make room for bullocks. The rocks in hidden mountain clefts are the only altars left to them; and teaching is a felony."
Even so, Corkery continues, the Irish-language poetry of the era, "is, contrariwise, a rich thing, a marvellous inheritance, bright with music, flushed with colour, deep with human feeling. To see it against the dark world that threw it up, is to be astonished, if not dazzled."
According to the local oral tradition, Brian Merriman was inspired to compose Cúirt an Mheán Oíche, just as the poem describes, by 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 Irish culture, Merriman taught his poem to the local seanchaithe, who memorised it and passed it down generation after generation. Like many other works of Munster Irish poetry from the same era, "The Midnight Court", according to Daniel Corkery, "almost two hundred years after its creation, has been found alive on the lips of fishermen and ditchers!"
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. Ciaran Carson, however, has gone even farther and has compared Merriman's mastery of language with that of Italian national poet Dante Alighieri.
According to Seán Ó Tuama, "The Midnight Court is undoubtedly one of the greatest comic works of literature, and certainly the greatest comic poem ever written in Ireland. … It is a poem of gargantuan energy, moving clearly and pulsatingly along a simple story line, with a middle, a beginning and an end. For a poem of over one thousand lines it has few longeurs. It is full of tumultuous bouts of great good humour, verbal dexterity and rabelesian ribaldry. It is a mammoth readable achievement with little need of gloss."
Of the poem's infamous bawdiness, William Butler Yeats, "Had Mac Giolla Meidhre before his mind the fires of Saint John's Night, for all through Munster men and women leaped the fires that they might be fruitful, and after scattered the ashes that the fields might be fruitful also? Certainly it is not possible to read his verses without being shocked and horrified as city onlookers were perhaps shocked and horrified at the free speech and buffoonery of some traditional country festival. He wrote at a moment of national discouragement: the Penal Laws were still in force though weakening, the old order was a vivid memory, but, with the failure of the last Jacobite rising, hope of its return had vanished, and no new political dream had come."
As the morally bankrupt lawyer for the women famously urges him to do in the poem, Merriman married Feakle resident Kathleen Collins around 1787 and became the father of two daughters. Some years later, possibly due to relaxation of Penal Laws forbidding Catholics from owning land by the 1793 Catholic Relief Act, Merriman is known to have owned a 20-acre farm near Loch Gréine. In 1797, the Royal Dublin Society awarded Merriman two prizes for his flax crop.
Around 1800, the Merriman family 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 kidnap his two beautiful daughters for the purposes of forced marriage. In Limerick City, Merriman continued to teach.
Brian Merriman died on Saturday 27 July 1805. His death was recorded two days later in the General Advertiser and Limerick Gazette: "Died – on Saturday morning, in Old Clare-street, after a few days' illness, Mr Bryan Merryman, teacher of Mathematics, etc." About Merriman's death, Frank O'Connor has alleged, incorrectly, "Irish literature in the Irish language may be said to have died with him."
Yeats, on the other hand, wrote, "Standish Hayes O'Grady has described The Midnight Court as the best poem written in Gaelic, and as I read Mr. Ussher's translation I have felt, without sharing what seems to me an extravagant opinion, that Mac Giolla Meidhre, had political circumstances been different, might have founded a modern Gaelic literature."
At his own request, Brian Merriman's body was returned to his native district and now lies buried in Feakle graveyard. In August 1992, a stone monument to Brian Merriman, with the opening lines of Cúirt an Mheán Oíche carved in Irish, was dedicated by Seamus Heaney and still stands overlooking the site of the 18th-century Bard's famous nap along the shores of Loch Gréine.
Furthermore, in 2018, Irish dialectologist Brian Ó Curnáin announced the discovery of 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 County Clare dialect of the Munster Irish spoken by Brian Merriman, but into the now-extinct dialect of Connacht Irish formerly spoken in County Roscommon. The discovery is regarded as priceless in what it reveals of a now vanished dialect of the Irish language.