The Gaelic version of the Seven Sages, surviving in only one manuscript in the National Library of Scotland and dating from c. 1690, is incomplete. Only the final four stories remain - but according to Greene (1944), they accord closely with the details and pattern expected of the Version A tradition. This prose text differs sufficiently in style and detail from the Middle English Version A (which is a verse redaction) to preclude the English from being its source. Greene has instead proposed a Latin text of Version A, found in an Irish manuscript (Dublin Trinity College Library Ms 667), as a possible original source for the Gaelic text. However, Greene also opperates on the assumption that the seventeenth-century Scots Gaelic manuscript that survives was a ('late and fairly bad') copy of an earlier, now lost, Gaelic text (Greene, p. 221). Though no earlier Irish/Gaelic translations of the Seven Sages narrative survive, there is a reference to one in the library of the Fitzgerald Earls of Kildare at Maynooth around 1526, according to a list in British Library Harley 3756 (Black, 1997). In her study of this medieval inventories of this library, including Harley 3756, Aisling Byrne has identified a text designated [51a] with the title 'Foilfylmurey / The VII sages', one of the Irish texts from the collection that is sadly no longer extant (Byrne 2013). Byrne suggests that 'The VII sages' refers to an early sixteenth-century Irish translation of the Seven Wise Masters tale, and points to the Scots Gaelic version (and Greene's edition) as the only surviving iterations of the text. Greene's analysis of the language of the Scots Gaelic text does correspond with this hypothesis; the language 'would accord well with an early sixteenth century origin', he notes (Greene, p. 221).
The National Library of Scotland's catalogue indicates that this text is associated with an 'Alexander MacDonald', who Ronald Black identifies as the famous Jacobite Gaelic poet Alasdair MacDhòmhnaill, also known as Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair (
Black, 1997). Black explains that Mac Maihsighstir Alasdair likely owned and heavily annotated the manuscript sometime c. 1739, with notes, receipts of financial agreements, and verses claiming ownership of the manuscript in his hand. However, the original scribe composed the body of the text some 40 years earlier, and Black has identified them as, possibly, Maol Moire mac Cathail Mhic Mhuirich (fl. 1694), a member of the Mhic Mhuirich bardic family of classical Gaelic scholars, and son of the famous poet Cathail Mhic Mhurich (
Black, 1979). In addition to the
Seven Sages, the other texts in the manuscript are suggestive of composition in the West Highlands or Islands (not Central Highlands, despite the location of Rannoch given in the marginal notations). These texts include three Catholic poems originating in Ireland (common in the West Highlands, according to Black), and poems addressed to both two Clanranald chiefs and a MacLeod chief whose tenure was 1690-1693, thereby supplying a composition date of c. 1693 (Black, 1997, p. 389).
| Language & Composition
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| Original language of version |
Gaelic
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| Translated into (languages) |
Scots Gaelic
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| Place of composition |
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| Date of composition |
1501 - 1526
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| Source for date of composition |
Byrne (2013), Black (1997)
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| Recorded branch of this secondary version
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| Connected prints
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No connected prints
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| Languages in Use
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| Language of text |
Gaelic
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| Regional or specific language of version |
Scots Gaelic
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| Notes
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| Note |
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| Notes on motifs |
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| Notes on the frame |
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| Pattern of embedded stories in this version
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