The Legend of the Lemnian Women in Togail Troí

This article addresses a self-contained episode in the Third Recension of Togail
Troí (c. 1150–1250?), concerned with the story of the man-slaying Women of
Lemnos. It is shown that the author of that recension began with a passage
of Togail na Tebe, the Middle Irish version of Statius’s Thebaid, consisting of
a long, autobiographical speech by Hypsipyle, foremost of the Women. He
rewrote this speech as a third-person narrative and inserted it at the appropriate point in Togail Troí’s account of the preliminaries to the Trojan Wars.
The episode has hitherto remained unpublished and little studied. A critical
edition is presented here, based chiefly on the two well-known manuscripts of
the Third Recension of Togail Troí (D, K), but also examining a variant version
found in a little-known fragment of the fifteenth or sixteenth century (N). The
Edition and Translation are followed by a Discussion of the adaptation of the
Togail na Tebe material for its new narrative context, and a commentary tracing
the process of rewriting and adaptation that underlies the text.
It is argued that the opening section of the source passage from Togail
na Tebe was at first imperfectly adapted for its new context, producing the
text witnessed by N, and that this was then revised to produce the more
smoothly flowing version seen in D and K. In the Commentary, changes,
improvements and occasional errors in transmission and rewriting are
examined, and the Togail Troí versions are compared with that in Togail
na Tebe and its ultimate source in Statius. Additionally, it is shown that at
certain points Togail Troí manuscripts contain readings that preserve the
original Irish translation of Statius more accurately than do the surviving
manuscripts of Togail na Tebe itself.