One hundred and eighty tales, counted; most are gone

Claim (verbatim)

Medieval Ireland kept lists of the tales a master poet was expected to know. Two of them - List A, embedded in the Book of Leinster and its congeners, and List B, recited by the fictional poet inside the tale Airec Menman Uraird maic Coise - are edited together by Proinsias Mac Cana in The Learned Tales of Medieval Ireland (Dublin, 1980), and between them they name on the order of two hundred titles, grouped by narrative type: Tana (cattle-raids), Togla (destructions), Tochmarca (wooings), Immrama (voyages), oitte (violent deaths), Echtrai (otherworld adventures), Fisi (visions), and the rest. The lists are a professional syllabus, and therefore a census of a canon - a canon most of which the surviving manuscripts do not contain. The loss mechanism is that the syllabus named an oral-and-written repertoire far larger than the parchment random survival has handed down; a title on the list is a claim that a story once existed under that name, not a guarantee that any copy outlived the Middle Ages. Set the list against the actual holdings of CELT and the manuscript corpus and the shortfall is countable. Restated: fewer than half of the roughly two hundred distinct titles in the learned tale-lists survive as an identifiable extant text. The poets listed the canon; the shelves kept a minority of it.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: matching the distinct tale-titles of Lists A and B (Mac Cana, The Learned Tales of Medieval Ireland, 1980) against the extant corpus in CELT and the wider manuscript record, fewer than half will survive as an identifiable text carrying that title's story (primary clause: a survival rate below 0.50 across the roughly two hundred distinct titles; the verdict follows it). A title counts as surviving only on a matching extant tale, not on a mere recurrence of the name in annals or genealogy; duplicate titles shared between the two lists are counted once. The test voids for coverage if fewer than 150 distinct titles resolve to a checkable entry.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Mac Cana's edition of the tale-lists (The Learned Tales of Medieval Ireland, DIAS 1980) as the census roster, matched title by title against CELT (celt.ucc.ie) holdings and the tale-identifications in the CODECS catalogue (van Hamel Foundation) for the survival determination.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

Mac Cana's edition is not only the census roster but the survival key: his apparatus identifies, title by title, which listed tales answer to extant texts, and his discussion states the conclusion the threshold encodes - the lists name a professional canon of which the identifiable survivors are a minority, many titles being otherwise wholly unknown. Toner's reconstruction of the lists' common original and Poppe's treatment of the lists as instruments of medieval Irish literary history carry the same point, and CODECS now keys the identifications to the manuscript record. Running the sub-0.50 arithmetic is transcription of Mac Cana's own printed annotation, not new counting with an uncertain outcome.

• P. Mac Cana, The Learned Tales of Medieval Ireland (Dublin: DIAS, 1980)
• G. Toner, 'Reconstructing the Earliest Irish Tale Lists', Eigse 32 (2000)
• E. Poppe, Of Cycles and Other Critical Matters: Some Issues in Medieval Irish Literary History and Criticism (E.C. Quiggin Memorial Lectures 9, Cambridge, 2008)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.