NIALL O DONAILL was one of many Donegal writers who emerged this century as a direct consequence of the Gaelic League's decision to found a literary competition, An tOireachtas, in 1897. The early years of An tOireachtas show many Donegal writers among the prize winners, most notably Peadar Mac Maire, to give him his pen name). It is undoubtedly true that this competition gave these emerging writers the chance of some recognition and that, more importantly, it instilled in them a sense of excitement towards the written word where previously the spoken word had held sway.
Born in Loch an Iuir in Donegal in 1908, O Donaill was educated in the local primary school and in Letterkenny. He won a scholarship to University College, Dublin in 1925; he studied Irish, English and History, though he never sat the final exams due to an accident. While at university he taught in Saint Brigid's summer college in Ranafast, where he met Father Lorcan Muireadhaigh, founder of the monthly magazine, An tUltach, published for the first time in 1924. O Muireadhaigh aimed to provide northern writers with a platform for their work and, as editor, included everything from folklore to songs to reviews to original short stories.
Folklore certainly found a ready audience amongst the magazine's readers, many of whom were from English speaking areas of Ulster and who found in folklore a tradition - the Ulster dialect and a window on the Donegal Gaeltacht - and it is no surprise that O Donaill, with his education and interest in literature, supplied material for An tUltach.
O Donaill's first (and only) collection of short stories, Braighean, Feille, was published in 1935; though O Donaill later admitted that he was "not very good at writing short stories" and regarded the genre as being the most demanding for any writer.
He spent a number of years working as a translator for An Gum. While there he translated, amongst other works, Jack London's Call of the Wild, Sir Walter Scott's The Talisman, H. Rider Haggard's Marie and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Master of Ballantrae.
O Donaill joined the Civil Service in the early 1930s and was transferred to the Department of Education in 1954, where he worked on the Irish English dictionary. This undertaking was successfully completed in 1977. The finished volume bears O Donaill's name and has such a reputation for excellence that it is shorthand amongst many Irish speakers, when unsure of a word, or phrase to say simply: "Cuir ceist ar O Donaill"/"Ask O Donaill".
THIS is a writer who never lost his belief in the value of the oral heritage of his native Gaeltacht; and it was this belief which set him to work on Seanchas na Feinne, Lore of the Fianna, first published by An Gum during 1942 and 1943. In the original slim volumes O Donaill compiled an authorative collection in Modern Irish of the adventures, battles, loves, intrigues and betrayals of Fionn, Oscar, Oisin, Goll, Diarmaid and Grainne and their companions from the Fianna Cycle - no mean feat, given the number of recensions in manuscript form (from the 12th century on) and in the oral tradition.
That these stories survived and flourished orally from the eighth century on shows the power which they held and continue to hold, on the imagination. O Donaill's Seanchas na Feinne brought them to a new audience, and the richness of his idiom is truly breath taking. His ear for the ebb and flow of Irish was precise - as indeed, it needed to be, for he had demanding contemporaries whose knowledge of the language was equal to his own and who could be unforgiving where they found fault.
It is to be greatly regretted that O Donaill did not live to see Seanchas na Feinne reissued, but it is nonetheless a cause for celebration that this great work is available in a single volume. We can be certain that there will be "aoibhneas ar dheadhaoine ndeireadh aimsire ag eisteacht leis na scealta sin"/"delight on good people listening to those stories".