Was Catherine Connolly ‘trolling’ Donald Trump by giving him an obscure medieval text at the Áras?

US president given new edition of Voyage of St Brendan, a book which has a centuries-long backstory President Donald Trump with President Catherine Connolly at Áras an Uachtaráin. Photograph: Tony Maxwell US president Donald Trump is not known as a big reader. He says he prefers to digest things in bullet points.So just why did President Catherine Connolly give him an obscure medieval text on his visit to Dublin?The book in question was Scriptores Latini Hiberniae Volume XV: Navigato Sancti Brendani, a new edition of the Voyage of St Brendan.A work six decades in the making, the book is being launched at a conference of medievalists in Dublin this week.READ MOREThe Voyage of St Brendan, or Navigatio Sancti Brendani, was written in Latin by an unknown Irish scholar and it has inconsistencies of grammar and vocabulary typical of an author not writing in his native language.The original Latin text from the 9th century was lost and the versions that were copied are all slightly different. There are 142 versions of the Voyage of St Brendan in libraries and universities around the world copied from the original. In the 1960s, Italian medievalist Giovanni Orlandi sought to reconcile all the different versions to create a definitive text. He travelled the world comparing and contrasting different editions.He died in 2007, and his work was taken up by another medievalist, Rossana Guglielmetti. She finished compiling the Latin text to make it definitive, and that definitive version has been subsequently translated into English by Matteo Salaroli.The lengths the scholars went to guarantee the accuracy of the Latin text show in the commentary and the footnotes, which are much longer than the actual translations of the Voyage of St Brendan.“The conjugation of active and passive forms is variable, especially in the case of deponent verbs” is a typical sentence in the commentary.Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies professor of Celtic Studies David Stifter with the new edition of the Voyage of St Brendan. The book is being launched at a Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies (Dias) conference on Thursday, and it might have remained an academic curio had Connolly not intervened.The President was asked to open the conference, but sent her apologies. Instead, she requested a copy of the book, which she then presented to Trump. “I only heard about it last Friday [the day before Trump’s arrival in Ireland] from our secretary that she had gone to the president’s office and gave them a copy of the book for Trump,” said David Stifter, senior professor in Celtic Studies at Dias. “My first reaction was: ‘Wow, are you serious?’” Why had Connolly presented this book in particular? The Áras said it “comes from an era when the Irish were a people of departure”, perhaps a reference to Trump’s crackdown on immigrants through the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Also, it was a reminder of Ireland’s contribution to medieval European culture, said the Áras.Stifter speculates that the president might have other motives to give Trump a copy of the book. It is a “popular belief” that St Brendan might have discovered America, he says, and one that Connolly might have been alluding to, although most scholars believe the Voyage of St Brendan is actually a work of fiction.St Brendan was a real person who lived in the 5th and 6th centuries and did sail to Wales and Iona, but there is no evidence that he reached as far west as North America, though the explorer Tim Severin famously demonstrated that it was theoretically possible when, in 1977, he sailed a boat similar to that St Brendan would have used across the Atlantic.A copy of the new edition of the Voyage of St Brendan was presented to US president Donald Trump by President Catherine Connolly last week. Stifter believes the book may be a “subtle form of trolling” as the island of whales in the Voyage of St Brendan is often taken as a reference to Greenland. The book was presented to Connolly before the White House announced an agreement with Denmark and Greenland this week, which, for now at least, guarantees Greenland’s sovereignty.Whatever the real reasons, Stifter said it was a “wonderful coincidence” that Trump had been presented with a copy of the book before its launch, giving it a profile nobody had considered. He hopes that it will bring the book, which is retailing at €45, to a much wider audience and perhaps get it into mainstream bookshops. “We are very proud of the book. It’s quite expensive publishing a book like this, so we would like to sell some copies.”IN THIS SECTION