Foras Feasa ar Eirinn (The Foundation for the History of Ireland) is by definition a monumental task set for himself by one who had the means, the training, and the education to do so. Of aristocratic Anglo-Norman stock, the author, Seathrun Ceitinn (Geoffrey Keating), was educated at home and on the continent, and both his outlook and works are very much the products of his background and time.
His family held extensive land holdings in the vicinity of Cahir, and some of Ceitinn’s poetic output, panegyrics, and elegies, on the Butlers of Cahir point to his having been educated by the Mac Craith and other noted Munster poetic families such as Mac Bruideadha. The young Ceitinn was skilled in native lore and language by the time he left to further his education in the post-Tridentine seminaries of Reims and Bordeaux. His formation in the ratio studiorum developed by the Jesuits did much to form his methodology and style, and the evidence of his prose work point to extensive knowledge of classical, theological, and contemporary scholarship and a rhetorical mastery of homiletics and Christian apologetics.
Ceitinn’s early work in poetry and prose shows a passionate concern for the welfare of the homeland. The poem "Om sgeol ar ArdMhagh Fail, m chodlaim ofche" gives vent in biblical terms to his anger at the devastation of Ireland after the defeat at Kinsale in 1601; the later dramatic lyric, "A bhean lan de stuaim," suggests perhaps a vocational crisis. While his early religious prose works show a deep concern to adapt the best of contemporary liturgical and devotional works for the use of the faithful, the later Tr( Bior-Ghaoithe an Bhais shows a preoccupation with the theme of death, influenced perhaps by his experiences after his return to the home mission around 1610. On completion in 1631 he would have turned to his magnum opus, the Foras Feasa, completed around 1634, in the compilation of which the author has access to many printed sources and traveled extensively to examine valuable manuscripts, such as the Psalter of Cashel, in the possession of the learned family of O Maolchonaire of Clare. The work is not a chronicle but a synthetic, sympathetic interpretation of the story of Ireland from the beginning to the coming of the Anglo-Normans, divided into two books dealing with the periods before and after the coming of Christianity; a division that Ber-nadette Cunningham points out (The World of Geoffrey Keating) mirrors that of the Bible. Like the Bible, too, Ceitinn’s history is a compendium of mythology, topography, hagiography, and chronology. He is the first to use the word "bealoideas," (I, 48) now meaning "folklore," to describe the oral record and tradition of the people, influenced, perhaps by the developments in ecclesiastical historical methodology. The contemporary Louvain school of Irish history uses the more restrictive "bealphroceapta" to describe the traditional teaching of the church.
Ceitinn makes a spirited defense of his sources, which shows his highly developed critical sense: "If I make statements here concerning Niall Naoighi-allach which the reader has not heard hitherto, let him know that I have song or story to prove every statement I advance here." His defense too of the account of the pre-Christian king Connor’s empathy with the passion of Christ shows his knowledge and critical use of Christian apologetics: "And if anyone should deem it strange that Bacrach or any other druid, being Pagan, should foretell the death of Christ, how was it more fitting for the Sybils, who were Pagans, to have foretold Christ before His birth than for Bacrach or any of his kind? Hence the story is not to be thus discredited."
From the outset the work was enormously popular and copiously copied down to the nineteenth century; soon after its completion it was translated into English and John Lynch published a Latin translation at St. Malo in 1660. For all that it had its detractors from the outset. Bishop John Roche, in a letter to Luke Wadding in 1631, is dismissive of Ceitinn as a historian: "One Dr. Keating laboureth much in compiling Irish notes towards a history in Irish. The man is very studious, and yet I fear that if his work come to light it will need an amendment of ill-warranted narrations: he could help you to many curiosities of which you can make better use than himself." The criticism has continued: Donnchadh O Corrain, contending that the author’s post-Tridentine zeal for reform has considerable influence on his selective historical approach, dismissed his critical assessment of the story of the King with the horse’s ears (‘I think this part of the story is a romantic tale rather than history’) as no more than an assessment any schoolboy would be capable of. It should be noted, however, that Ceitinn’s inclusion of the tale here may have something to do with the moral of this international folktale "that truth will out," in keeping with that sense of poetic justice that informs his renderings of other tales, such as "The Story of Deirdre" and "The Death of Conraoi." Breandan O Buachalla contends that the popularity of the Foras Feasa has more to do with its style than its contents, but the contention that Ceitinn is "the father of Irish prose" has been contested by Cainneach O Maonaigh, who illustrates, successfully, that Aodh Mac Aingil was master of a more pithy, poetic style. Scholars as diverse as Aodh de Blacam, Caerwyn Williams, and Declan Kiberd properly identify and stress the importance of Ceitinn’s stated aim: "I set forth to write the history of Ireland . . . because I deemed it was not fitting that a country so honourable as Ireland, and races so noble as those who have inhabited it, should go into oblivion, without mention or narration being left of them." In that, Ceitinn reveals himself as the successor of the bardic chroniclers and the precursor of that epic and record of a people on the verge of extension in Tomas O Criomhthain’s autobiography, An tOileanach.
