#recension hell

Become a medieval literature specialist, they said. It'll be fun, they said.

Here's the previous segment of my An Táin Bot commentary, which possibly provides useful context for today's.

Quick explanation of recensions: a recension is a distinct version of a text. They're the same story, but there are enough differences to consider it a new version, not just a different manuscript. There are three recensions of the Táin, but the third is late and fragmentary, so most people focus on the first two. Recension one is found in manuscripts including Lebor na hUidre and the Yellow Book of Lecan. Recension two is primarily found in the Book of Leinster (twelfth century), but there's also a later version of it, fifteenth century, known as the Stowe MS. Stowe is mostly the same as LL but with later spellings and so on; however, in places it diverges sufficiently to be referred to as "Recension 2b", because it's not quite just another manuscript of the LL text.

An Táin Bot tweets a (somewhat old-fashioned) translation of the Táin by Joseph Dunn, published in 1914. To my knowledge, this translation makes no distinction between recensions, and is -- as far as I'm aware -- the only published translation to include the passages that are unique to Stowe. Since the section that diverges most is Comrac Fir Diad (the Encounter with Fer Diad), and since An Táin Bot has been tweeting this section for the past month... there's been a lot to talk about on this front.