1 1 Introduction: Irish narrative literature and the Classical tradition, 900-1300 Ralph O‟Connor Ireland, like Scandinavia, was one of the few regions of Western Europe which never came under the official control of the Roman Empire, or even saw a Roman legion. Latin was not established in Ireland until after the island‟s conversion to Christianity and the establishment of monasteries, a process which began in the fifth century AD. Yet Ireland has long been famed as a bastion, indeed a wellspring, of Classical learning in the early and central Middle Ages. According to one still-popular view, a significant number of Classical texts and authorities owe their survival today to Irish scholars doggedly pursuing their calling amid the social and political turmoil of the Dark Ages, untroubled by the heathen content of the stories they preserved. 1 Like the Scottish „invention of the modern world‟ a millennium later, 2 this story of how the Irish „saved civilization‟ is too simple and too chauvinistic. It leaves out all the Frankish, Italian, German and other scholars who performed no less important and no less enlightened roles in the transmission of Classical literature and learning during the same period. Furthermore, the identification and significance of so-called „Insular‟ symptoms in manuscript copies – scribal features pointing to an Irish or British stage of transmission – has become a matter of controversy once again, because features described as „Insular symptoms‟ can often be explained as traces of much earlier stages of transmission on the Continent. 3 Irish scholars were not working alone. I am very grateful to Michael Clarke, Helen Fulton and Barbara Hillers for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 1 An early and influential example of this view was offered by Kuno Meyer, Learning in Ireland; a recent popular account is Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization. 2 The Enlightenment is the usual focal point: see Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World. 3 Reynolds & Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, 90-2; for discussion and full references, see Dumville, Early Medieval Insular Churches, which is a revised edition of Dumville, „The early medieval Insular churches‟.