SOURCE: "Brian Merriman and His Court," in Irish University Review, Vol. 11, No. 2, Autumn, 1981, pp. 149-64.

In the following article, Ó Tuama argues that, whereas the prologue and epilogue sections of '"The Midnight Court" are based on the Anglo-French Court of Love tradition, the monologues that form the body of the poem come from the late-medieval tradition of popular Irish folk poetry. Ó Tuama then proceeds to connect the poem's examination of illegitimacy with the presumed illegitimacy of Merriman.

The emergence of an uniquely talented poet such as Brian Merriman in County Clare in the second half of the eighteenth century was in many ways an unlikely event. The renowned Irish literary figures of the previous century and a half had without exception come from counties east of the Shannon, and given what we know of the Clare literary tradition one would not have held out great hopes for a...