AI-generated conjecture · a wager, not a finding
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Neither the list nor the shelf is whole
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
Claim (verbatim)
It is tempting to treat the learned tale-lists as the true measure of the medieval Irish narrative canon and the surviving manuscripts as its lossy remainder. But the relation runs both ways, and that is the more revealing fact. There are extant early Irish tales that appear under no title in either List A or List B - stories the surviving parchment preserves that the syllabus, for whatever reason of date, region, or genre-boundary, never enumerated. And there are, far more numerously, list-titles with no surviving text. Put the two inventories into a bipartite comparison and neither is a subset of the other: each is a partial, differently biased sample of a narrative population larger than both. The loss mechanism is that a title-list and a manuscript-shelf are two independent nets over the same vanished sea - the list catches names, the shelf catches texts, and the mismatch in both directions is the shadow of everything neither caught. Restated: at least half of the list-titles have no extant text, and at the same time a non-trivial share of the identifiable early tales in the corpus appear in neither list, so the true tale-population strictly exceeds the union of what the lists name and what the manuscripts hold. Two lossy indexes, cross-checked, prove a loss neither could show alone.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: in a bipartite match between the learned tale-lists (Mac Cana 1980) and the extant early-tale corpus (CELT / CODECS), both mismatch directions will be substantial - at least half of the distinct list-titles will have no matching extant text, and at least 15 percent of the identifiable pre-1200 tales in the corpus will appear under no title in either list (primary clause: the conjunction of a >=0.50 titles-without-text rate and a >=0.15 tales-without-listing rate; the verdict requires both). Matching is by story-identity, not name-coincidence, and the corpus side is restricted to tales datable before 1200 to control anachronism. The test voids if either inventory resolves to fewer than 120 comparable items.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the tale-lists (Mac Cana 1980) and the pre-1200 extant tale corpus (CELT celt.ucc.ie, indexed via the CODECS catalogue of the van Hamel Foundation), matched bidirectionally on story-identity - measure the unmatched fraction on each side.
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Fresh blind generation by claude-fable-5, 2026-07-17, North Atlantic vernacular wave (Old Norse / medieval Irish / medieval Welsh) instrument-anchored on the Skaldic Project (skaldic.org), CELT (celt.ucc.ie) with eDIL (dil.ie), and the printed censuses (Mac Cana 1980; Bromwich TYP 3rd ed. 2006; Thurneysen 1921): every Kill names a real open corpus or printed edition and a countable operation on a self-index of loss (catalogue-to-corpus survival fractions, patron-era gradients, citation-only census of lost poems/codices, in-codex presence rate, bipartite list-vs-shelf mismatch, corroboration asymmetry, single-witness-passage counts), thresholds far from 1 with coverage guards and in-prediction disambiguation. Deliberately DISJOINT from the owned European ground: w01 no.23 'Prose is the ark' owns the skaldic.org stanza-embedding-in-prose fraction, w07 no.5 owns lausavisur legal distribution, w07 no.26 owns kenning-innovation decay, w07 no.37 owns the Mabinogi-as-legal-casebook coding, w07 no.38 owns the composition-vs-manuscript date-gap (uses skaldic.org only as one of four corpora), w07 no.47 owns bishops'-saga miracle registers, and w07 no.36 owns Irish scribal-marginalia seams - none of my operations reuse these; item 4 (treatise-only drapur) is adjacent to w01 no.23's poetics-treatise secondary clause but counts whole-poem transmission channel, not the metrical-anomaly rate, seam flagged. CONFIDENCE FLAGS (named facts kept out of load-bearing thresholds where soft): Skaldatal poet count '~140' is MODERATE (counts vary); the exact number of Snorra-Edda-only eddic compositions is MODERATE (threshold set at a robust >=3, with Grottasongr and Heimdalargaldr as certain); Mac Cana tale-list total '~200' is MODERATE (threshold set as a fraction, not a count); Cin Dromma Snechtai reconstructed contents are MODERATE (scholarly reconstructions differ - Thurneysen vs Carney/McCone); Bromwich TYP triad count '~90+' and survival rate are MODERATE; Ifor Williams's '12' historical Taliesin poems is the standard figure but approximate; White/Red Book single-witness-passage count '>=20' is MODERATE on exact number, robust in direction. Dropped candidates: (a) a lausavisur-only survival-channel item - dropped as duplicating w01 no.23; (b) a kenning-family type-token item - dropped as duplicating w07 no.26; (c) a Codex Regius great-lacuna prose-recovery item - dropped as leaning on the w01 no.23 prose-ark mechanism; (d) a second glossary hapax-rate item (Sanas Cormaic alone) - merged into the single eDIL fossil-bed item to avoid redundancy; (e) an Irish scribal-marginalia item - dropped as owned by w07 no.36. Item 9 (eDIL glossary-only headwords) is flagged not-yet-built: it needs a citation-source-provenance index over eDIL that the public interface does not expose in bulk.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The one-directional half of the mismatch is the published commonplace (and item 6's leak), and scholars have long noted extant early tales that no list names - the lists' selectivity and genre-boundaries are part of Mac Cana's and Poppe's discussions - but the bipartite computation is new: nobody has scored the pre-1200 corpus for non-listing at a 15-percent threshold, and the conjunction with story-identity matching on both sides has no printed counterpart. The materials (Mac Cana's lists, CELT, CODECS's tale inventory) are all available; the two-sided arithmetic and its coverage guard are not. Adjacent.
- P. Mac Cana, The Learned Tales of Medieval Ireland (Dublin, 1980)
- E. Poppe, Of Cycles and Other Critical Matters (Cambridge, 2008)
- CODECS (A.G. van Hamel Foundation), catalogue of medieval Irish narrative texts
Predictions
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