Cenn Fáelad mac Aillila

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Cenn Fáelad mac Aillila, Irish scholar, died 679.

Cenn Fáelad was a member of the Cenél nEógain, being a grandson of King Báetán mac Muircheartach Mor (King of Cenél nEógain); a great-great-great-great grandson of Niall Noígiallach; and an uncle of Aldfrith of Northumbria via his sister, Fina.

He fought at the crucial battle of Maigh Rath (Moira, County Down) in 636. During the battled he received a life-threatening head wound, and was afterwards carried to the abbey of Toomregan to be healed in the house of its abbot, Briccíne. This house was situated"where the three streets meet between the houses of the three professors. And there were three schools in the place; a school of Latin learning, a school of Irish law and a school of Irish poetry. And everything that he would heard of the recitations of the three schools every day he would have by heart every night."

Tradition states that as a result of head wound, Cenn Fáelad's "brain of forgetting was knocked out of him." The effect of this trauma led him to create "a pattern of poetry to these matters and he wrote them on slates and tablets and set them in a vellum book." His verses were all composed in quatrains of numbered syllables with regular rhyme, and moderate use of alliteration, in contrast to a more archaic form that was still practised in the south of Ireland at the time (i.e., Leinster and Munster). Most or all of his historical verse relate to his own dynasty, the Cenél nEógain.

This merging of Latin learning, native Irish law and vernacular poetry, in a country Pagan only a few generations before, ensured Cenn Fáelad's fame in his own time and beyond. He was the first poet quoted in the Irish annals, being referred to as sapiens, a technical term denoting a head teacher or professor in a monastic school (though not necessarily a monk himself). Later manuscripts of legal and grammatical texts were attributed to him, though the earliest of them seem to date from about fifty years after his death. Robin Flower stated "How far these are really his may be a matter of controversy, but there can be little real doubt that the writings by him existed in the period when the vernacular learning was being eagerly cultivated."