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Luccreth moccu Chiara


Luccreth moccu Chíara (floruit c. 665 AD) was a poet from County Kerry, Ireland who wrote in archaic Old Irish. Moccu is an archaic form marking affiliation to an ancestral population group or gens, in this case the Cíarraige. James Carney identifies the poet in genealogies of the Cíarraige as the last of six sons of a certain Áine, a descendant of Mug Airt, also known as Cíar, son of the legendary Ulaid hero Fergus mac Róich and supposed founder of the Cíarraige. The genealogies add that Luccreth had no children, and that "His dwelling-place faces the church of Cluain on the south".

Three poems attributed to Luccreth are preserved, all on genealogical themes. Eoin MacNeill describes him as "an experimenter in the production of new metres", blending older syllabic and alliterative verse forms with newer, accentual and rhyming verse forms.

The 73-line poem Conailla Medb Míchuru ("Medb enjoined evil contracts") is preserved, along with a later prose introduction, in a genealogical tract in the 15th-century manuscript Laud Misc 610 in the Bodleian Library, and has been edited and translated by P. L. Henry. It contains one of the earliest references in Irish literature to events and characters of the Ulster Cycle, telling of the Ulaid hero Fergus mac Róich's exile from his king, Conchobar, to queen Medb and king Ailill, and his involvement in their war over the Ulaid's cattle. However, his exile is not in Connacht, as in the extant versions of Táin Bó Cúailnge and related stories, but in Tara. Cú Chulainn does not appear, his role taken by Fergus' son Fiacc, who defends the Ulaid against his father's battalions. The poem goes on to tell how the descendants of the Ulaid hero Cethern settled in the midlands, and later migrated to Munster in the time of Óengus mac Nad Froích (d. 490). Luccreth refers to the material he presents as sen-eolas ("old knowledge"), traditional material passed down from his ancestors.


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