Vellum

a result of the system rather than the writing.

But the vellum, however, is weird.

Vellum is the highest quality of parchment and thus something way too expensive for a trapper to own.

And you probably wouldn't have a painting done on it, even if you could find someone in a small town in Royal Island to do a painting.

So...

The thing that all these stories have in common, the Tonbo Kunya, the Quarrel of the Swineherds, and the Conception of Mongen, is that all of them are heavily, or all of them heavily involve livestock they involve farm animals domesticated livestock and we see this again and again we also see quite a few tales where agricultural products show up though those are maybe a little less exciting so we'll we'll come back to that a little later So just to give you an idea of what these stories involve, I'm going to actually read out to you Cecil O'Roughly's translation of the beginning of the second recension of the Taun.

If you'll recall from our episode about, or several episodes about early Irish writing, and in particular Words on Vellum, that episode about manuscript culture, And manuscripts and the stories in them are copied and recopied by scribes, so those scribes may change things, and you may get a story that evolves over the course of several centuries as it is copied and expanded

upon,

or things are... redacted or changed and so by recension we're talking about kind of a major variant of the story the tawn recension one is the earliest variant but it lacks the particular scene i'm about to talk about the tawn recension two seems to actually be kind of piecemeal parts of it are earlier parts of it are later and the whole kind of version that we have today seems to have been developed over the course of time from about the year 1000 to about the year 1200.

[dramatic music] Up in the chapel, fearful, angry monks sway and chant.

Fox, Vellum, Fox, Fox.

The seal must hold.

The bell must not ring.