Flann mac Lonáin

Flann mac Lonáin (died 896) was an Irish poet.

Flann mac Lonáin was a famed and at times controversial poet. He seems to have being born in the east Clare/west Tipperary region. Distinguished both in his lifetime and after, his compositions were studied and used as exemplars in medieval metrical tracts.

He died violently. The Annals of Ulster state that:

• Flann son of Lónán grandson of Guaire, was slain by the Déisi of Mumu.

while the Annals of Innisfallen notes;

• The slaying of Flann son of Lonán, king of the poets of Ireland, by the Uí Fhothaid Tíre.

while the Chronicon Scotorum more fulsomly records that;

• Flann son of Lónán, the Virgil of the Irish i.e. the chief poet of the Irish, was slain by the Uí Cuirrbuidh i.e. by the Uí Fothaid, at Loch dá Caoch in the Déisi of Mumu.

In his posthumously-published work, The Irish Tradition (1946), Robin Flower wrote at some length of him and the legends surrounding his life.

Flann is mentioned in the oldest surviving personal letter from Ireland, which dates from the mid 12th century and was addressed to Áed Ua Crimthainn, compiler of the Book of Leinster, by Find, Bishop of Kildare, who wrote: "Let the poem book of Mac Lonáin be brought to me so that we may study the meanings of the poems that are in it, et vale in Christo.^[1]

References

• Oxford Concise Companion to Irish Literature, Robert Welsh, 1996. ISBN 0-19-280080-9
• The Irish Tradition, Robin Flower, 1946.

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