The Gaelic literary tradition continued to be transmitted by manuscript long after the invention of printing, so that poems had many versions, none of which was definitive; as a result, the editing of manuscripts has always been central to Gaelic scholarship.

When poems are edited by modern scholars, the resultant texts are, for all their contemporary textual apparatus, a continuation of this tradition of multiple rendition.

Modern scholarly editions bestow the benefits of accessibility and convenience. After all, the reading of every poem in manuscript form would knock out even Joyce's ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia. But even the most scholarly edition is still arbitrary and non-definitive, simply a further rendition, often appearing in standardised forms of spelling which would greatly puzzle the original poet.

In one of the essays in this collection, Padraig Breathnach makes the point that the editing process is no less demanding in the case of the popular song or amhran than in that of early modern poetry written in the standardised language of the bardic schools, and in a study of poems deriving from the death in 1754 of Murtai Og O Suilleabhai n, Breathnach lays bare his own approach to the editing of poetic texts of the post-bardic period.

As well as an extensive textual, grammatical, interpretative and metrical apparatus, he offers a historical explanation for the importance bestowed by tradition on O Suilleabh ain's death, an event which rivals the deaths of Art O Laoghaire and James Cotter in 18th-century Cork poetry.

O Suilleabhain had been a soldier in Spain but had returned to Ireland to become, like O Laoghaire and Cotter, a flamboyant provocation to the local Protestant establishment.

A revenue official called John Puxley became a threat to O Suille abhain's activities of smuggling and recruiting for the Wild Geese on his native Bearra peninsula, and when Puxley was on his way to attend a service at Bere haven church, O Suil leabhain and others shot him dead from his horse.

Soldiers eventually found the perpetrators, and O Suill eabhain, with his lackey Domhnall O Conaill, was forced to emerge from a house of burning thatch to be shot by a bullet "which pierced his back and came through his left breast".

His dead body was drooped over a horse "so fine a tall man was he that his hair touched the ground at one side of the horse, while his feet trailed it at the other".

The heroic status implied by the poetry and by these quotations did not go uncontested in the Gaelic tradition, and Breathnach cites a story in which a woman beat O Suilleabhain's corpse with her shoe in revenge for his pressganging her son into service with the Wild Geese. Similarly he instances a song collected in 1909 which, rather than mourning O Suill eabhain, mourns Puxley: "Go brath na choidhche airis ni Fheicfeam a short" (we will never see his likes again).

A poem attributed to his lackey celebrates O Suilleabh ain's generosity as master while simultaneously, and in the same verse, regretting ever having met him.

This poem, Marbhna Dhomhnaill Ui Chonaill, is closely linked to the popular song, Priosun Chluain Meala, and in the endless series of literary echoes to O Suilleabh ain's death, this song, translated by J.J. Callanan as The Convict of Clonmel has justifiably been included in anthologies from T.C. Croker's Researches in the South of Ireland (1824) to the Field Day Anthology of 1991.

This invigorating mixture of folk memory and literary composition which makes the O Suill

eabhain story so interesting is absent in the bardic poems which, written earlier, exist outside the folk memory, and texts must be reconstructed solely by reference to the manuscript tradition. As a result they have been often treated by scholars purely in terms of grammar and metre, but Breath nach contests this limitation.

Instancing a poem written by an unknown author in praise of Aodh Mac Domhnaill of what is now Co Laois, he shows the poet involved in a dialectic between convention and imagination in which the use of epithetic metaphor gives creative content to the entire poem, raising it "go plana ard mheanmnach, fathchiallach na healaine fileata", to the highminded allegorical plain of poetic art.

Proinsias O Drisceoil is an arts administrator and critic