Technicalities…

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It has long been accepted… That christian clerics… Were largely responsible… For committing the oral Celtic stories to paper… And thus preserving them… Such a preservation… Seems to have been dependent upon… What today we might call… A christian spin being… Put on and… Written into the ancient Irish tales… The monastic ‘scriptoria’ where this process was carried out were, indeed, the state propaganda factories of their day and in many cases this spin… Was quite clumsily achieved… To this day it remains fairly obvious to even an untrained eye… The Voyage of Bran is a case in point.

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The ‘banshee’ or ‘fairy-woman’… Who appears at the beginning of the tale… Is stated in the text to have sung fifty quatrains to Bran and his host… Yet she only sings twenty-eight… When Manannan mac Lir appears… He is said to have sung thirty quatrains to Bran and his company… Yet he only sings twenty-eight… Bran sings one lay at the end of the tale… Which makes a grand total of fifty-seven quatrains… Quatrains twenty-four to twenty-six… Of the banshee’s lay… Relate to a ‘prophecy’ of Christ… Quatrains thirteen to seventeen… of Manannan’s lay… Also relate to such a ‘prophecy’.

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If we subtract the seven quatrains relating to… ‘The Prophecy of Christ’s Coming’… We are left with fifty quatrains… Which we can be assured represent… Musically speaking… The original content of the tale… The banshee sings twenty-five quatrains… Mannanan mac Lir sings twenty-four quatrains.. And Bran mac Febal sings one quatrain… Quite apart from this little tell… There do seem to be other number puzzles… Within the text… For example twenty-seven seems to be quite heavily indicated… The connection of the number twenty-seven… With music and premature death is today still current?