SOURCE: "Merriman's Court," in The Pleasures of Gaelic Poetry, edited by Seá n Mac Réamoinn, Allen Lane, 1982, pp. 111-26.

In the following essay, Ó Cuinn translates much of "The Midnight Court" into English, pointing out passages' connections to classical literature as he goes.

'Cúirt an Mheán Oíche' does not mean 'courting at midnight' as is said to have been assumed by whoever was responsible for refusing permission to erect a monument to Brian Merriman in Feakle graveyard in 1947. Just so, in 1957, the Archbishop refused to let the body of Nikos Kazantzakis lie in state in an Athenian Church. He, among a lot of other things, had written a sequel to Homer's Odyssey in a very countrified dialect of spoken Greek. There were so many words, collected from farmers and fishermen, and unintelligible to the urban lumpen-intelligentsia, that he had to provide a new dictionary. Again...