tribe

tribe. The description of the political organization of early Christian Ireland as ‘tribal’ arose from the equation of tuath, a population group or petty kingdom, with ‘tribe’, and to a lesser extent the translation of the very different words cenél, a kindred or dynasty, and fine, an extended family or kin‐group, by the word tribe also. The practice went unchallenged until Eoin MacNeill, in objecting to P. W. Joyce's indiscriminate use of ‘tribe’, pointed out the wide range of meanings attributed to the word by the Oxford English Dictionary. Its use was thus in effect to explain the unknown by the unknown. In particular MacNeill warned against the romantic image of the clan chief perpetuated by Walter Scott, according to whom every subject of the chief, however poor and lowly, conceived himself orop herself to be distantly related to their leader. He argued that even in the petty kingdom or tuath, there were marked class distinctions, and the royal family was a small, well‐defined group as in kingdoms elsewhere in Europe. Subsequently D. A. Binchy was to revive the word ‘tribal’ as describing a primary aggregate of people under a headman or chief. This usage was hesitantly sanctioned by F. J. Byrne, to underline the fact that up to the 8th century the primary meaning of tuath was population group rather than territory, though not necessarily a population who believed in a shared ancestry; Byrne rejected the word as a translation of cenél or fine. As Byrne pointed out, Binchy's usage ignored five of the six definitions of tribe given by the OED. More recently the trend has been to translate tuath with the phrase ‘petty kingdom’ and avoid the word ‘tribal’ altogether.

Bibliography

Byrne, F. J. , ‘Tribes and Tribalism in Early Ireland’, Ériu, 22 (1971)

Katharine Simms