Primary Sources
C2 Brian O duff’s Lament C2.40: 94
G Tumilin O’Counichan G.19: 40
K1 Taom-boileinn na Coinneamh / The Frenzy of the Meeting or Brian O’Duff’s Lament K1.32: 79
KK Taom-boileinn na Coinneamh [or] Cumh Brian O’ Duff / The Frenzy of the meeting / Index adds: or Brian O’ Duffs Lament KK.22: 39
Notes on Gaelic Titles
Cumha Brian O’ Duff Brian O duff’s Lament C2; Cumh Brian O’ Duff KK; Brian O’ Duffs Lament KK index. Lament for Brian O’ Duff. Angus MacKay has used the anglicised version of the Irish name. (So did Colin Campbell – but that was normal for him).
Taom-boileinn na Coinneamh Tumilin O’Counichan, an Irish tune G; Taom-boileinn na Coinneamh / The Frenzy of the meeting K1 and KK. The Frenzy of the Meeting. MacLeod of Gesto’s Irish reference may account for his spelling, though the same piece is recorded elsewhere as ‘Brian O’ Duff’s lament. It is also melodically related to the Irish jig known as ‘Brien Boru’s March’, so far traced back to 1842 but no further (A. Kuntz, The Fiddler’s Companion, www.ibiblio.org [1996-2008]). Seàn Donelly suggests that ‘Tumilun’ may be an example of a very rare Irish forename, ‘Toimilin’, possibly a diminutive of Tomas, found mainly among the Barretts of Connacht and the O’Dohertys of Inishowen from the fourteenth century onward. An eighteenth-century example of the name occurs in the last speech of ‘Shaen Crossagh O-Mullen’, executed as a tory in Derry on 18 April 1733, where he mentions that he was married to ‘the Daughter of Tumlin O-Mullen’. S. Donnelly, ‘A Scottish Gaelic Piping Term in a Bardic Poem to the MacDonnells of Antrim’, Ulster Folklife 52 (2008), p. 8.
Roderick Cannon (2009), rev. Barnaby Brown 2015
The full name of the march ‘Brian Boru’ is ‘Brian Boru’s March to the Battle of Clontarf’, which took place in the 11th century, but the name may be apocryphal. It has been observed that the name ‘The Frenzy of Meeting’ could be a reference to a battle.