For a long time, Greek sanctuaries were studied from a positivist perspective, that is, in terms of their spatial evolution and the typologies of their architecture and artefacts. At the sanctuary of Dodona, this perspective has also been applied to a great variety of structures and objects. The present paper offers new ways of looking at one of the most intriguing classes of objects found at the sanctuary, the lamellae on which were written the questions for and answers from the oracle. Consistent with the growing interest in the materiality of writing, we discuss the physical properties of the lamellae and the contexts in which they were used with respect to their adoption at the sanctuary during the Archaic period. We argue that the ease with which lead tablets can be inscribed, folded, and transported made this material more suitable for the context of the sanctuary than ostraca, another inexpensive medium often used for writing in ancient Greece.

Chapter 3 considers the Dindshenchas Érenn (‘Placelore of Ireland’), a collection of around 200 poems and 200 prose pieces about named places comprising medieval Ireland’s most explicitly topographical narratives. The Dindshenchas Érenn was formally brought together as a cohesive corpus and first attested in the Book of Leinster manuscript. This chapter considers the narrative topographies of the Dindshenchas Érenn, looks at the role of place-making poets as medieval Ireland’s geographers and tracks ideas about the use of verse as the appropriate literary form in which to write and formalize Ireland’s landscape. The poets suggest that the verbalized territories of the dindshenchas poems, simultaneously real and imagined, were to be contemplatively accessed, virtually inhabited and moved through in an appropriative act. This, furthermore, was an act of collective national imagining. The island-wide bardic curriculum demanded that by the eighth year of training poets were able to recite the entire topographic corpus on demand, and multiple dindshenchas texts advertise the poets’ ability to conjure lost sites and spaces with their words and visionary abilities. The Dindshenchas Érenn thus becomes a national landscape, a virtual Ireland created, performed and preserved by the poets and scribes of Ireland.

The introduction provides an overview of the analysis of the dialogue.

Chapter 1 identifies geography’s central role in the earliest texts produced by and about the Irish ca. 700–900. I begin with the first Holy Land pilgrimage account composed in Britain, Adomnán’s De locis sanctis, a foundational text for spatial writing. I consider how Adomnán applied this model to North Atlantic holy sites in Vita Sancti Columbae, and show how accounts of Holy Land pilgrimage inform Irish texts about voyages in the waters surrounding Ireland and Britain, the Western herimum in ociano. The islands of the North Atlantic (including Ireland) are often envisioned as otherworldly lands of milk and honey, whose nature is largely determined by their position limning civilization and the unknown watery regions beyond. A desire to investigate these places and be changed by them motivates the monastic Irish voyagers whose stories are told in the Navigatio Sancti Brendani, which circulated widely throughout Europe; the lay protagonists of the closely related vernacular Irish voyage texts (immrama) undergo parallel experiences as they travel these same geographies. Irish spatial narratives provided an early and influential model for composers in Ireland, Britain and Europe to write texts inviting imaginative travel to holy places from the Dead Sea to the Irish Sea.

The Introduction consists of a brief overview of the book and its structure, its driving questions and the critical contexts, and identifies foundational aspects of an Irish poetics of space. The Introduction describes the book’s organization—largely chronological—to show how Ireland’s spatial poetics developed over 500 years in response to specific historical circumstances. Three major issues are introduced, which are tracked across the book to illustrate ongoing thematic continuities and developments: (1) affective and transformative engagement with textual geographies; (2) national and postcolonial place-writing strategies; and (3) canonization and theorization of a spatial literary corpus. In addition, each chapter develops discrete aspects of writing place in conjunction with a critical literature on space (pilgrimage, actual and virtual, through otherworldly landscapes and seascapes; exile and dislocation; verbal mapping or cartography; movement as knowledge-generating, i.e. ‘practicing place’; alterity, place-writing and conquest).

Sound and hearing play a crucial role in the conceptualisation and perception of divine entities, cultic places, and ritual processes. Sound phenomena can evoke religious experiences, structure ritual communication and stimulate desired emotional responses, whilst exposure to certain resonance frequencies can affect the human body, thereby influencing one’s perceptions and states of consciousness. This essay analyses the Dodonean soundscape, exploring the potential affect of the various sonic experiences in relation to the process of consultation. In addition to the diverse sensory input from the natural environment, which in the case of Dodona is crucial, as it can be surmised from the traditional accounts of the oracular oak, special consideration is given to the chalkeion of Dodona, a remarkable sonic installation that offered one of the most unusual auditory experiences to the pilgrims. Based on the symbolic and sound properties of the chalkeion, it is possible to suggest that the soundscape at Dodona invited a form of ecstasy or meditation, with the potential to alter the focus of attention and consciousness, thus allowing for new forms of knowledge to become available.

Scholars have noted that many of the surviving tablets from Dodona pose agriculturally related questions of a general manner. My essay suggests this is because agricultural resources were religiously framed in the ancient Greek world. In this context, I argue that oracles functioned as sites where material practices of daily life could be negotiated with the gods in a ritual as well as communal context. Oracles, in other words, presented a way of communicating with the natural world. On the other hand, they were also places where the individual could present himself (or herself) in relation to this world: how he or she depended on its fruits for survival; but also how he (or she) could make or remake the resources it had to offer so that it would flourish. As I want to show, this particular interrelationship between agricultural labour and oracular consultation relied as much on the performative act of enquiry as it did on practical knowledge. In order to illustrate these interconnections, the essay draws on recent trends in environmental history and in resilience studies. It will reconsider the ancient evidence of the Zeus Oracle at Dodona in light of these approaches.

Chapter 2 traces the development of the poetics of space in Ireland’s heroic literature (ca. 900–1160) through a focus on the warrior Cú Chulainn. I situate narratives from Táin Bó Cúalnge alongside other Ulster Cycle texts to track a spatial hero’s construction. Cú Chulainn is initially named Sétanta—suggesting ‘path-finder’ or ‘journeyer’—and tales of his birth, boyhood deeds and defense of Ulster in the Táin emphasize his ability to navigate new environments and internalize storied maps of the territory. Cú Chulainn’s increasing mastery of placelore and the erotics of space are examined in Tochmarc Emire. A brief look at Mesca Ulad queries how Ulster’s spatially savvy hero is not ultimately immune to displacement: Cú Chulainn loses himself and the men of Ulster in hostile territories, and their frenzied ride transforms the landscape—their journey levels hills, clears trees and drains rivers—and generates a (mis)reading of the drunken, careening heroes as environmental features rather than humans, which also problematizes violence and heroic excess. The chapter concludes with Saint Patrick raising Cú Chulainn from the dead to tell his tale, an account that highlights the chapter’s key themes: spatial narrative, textuality and the redemptive function of storytelling.

This introduction to the volume explains the origin of these essays, which began as papers given at a workshop to support the development of the Virtual Reality Oracle, which created a virtual reality experience of visiting the ancient Greek oracle of Dodona. An ancient Greek oracular site comprised an encounter with ‘unknowing’: the sanctuary was a space to which visitors brought questions concerned with many different areas of their lives. In that respect, we also drew a parallel with the experience of those who ‘visit’, as researchers, an oracle about which little is certain. The essay then reflects on this process of research, to consider how in examining the way our historical subjects engage with the affordances of their environments, we, in turn, as historians, ourselves engage with the affordances of our historical evidence, using Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope.

Focusing on the third-person formulation of many of the texts on the question tablets, and drawing on psychological and narratological research, this essay explores the mind-set of those who came to consult Zeus, asking if these texts reveal a sense of the self as fragmented in the face of crisis – which may also suggest how processes of consultation at an oracle could have provided psychological relief to pilgrims. Using analytical approaches from cognitive linguistics, this essay examines these texts for what they may reveal in terms of a cognitive blending of Viewpoints – both mortal and divine – aiding self-integration and, thus, decision making. Finally, this essay argues that awe in the face of the divine may have been a key component of the experience of consultation, with significant impacts on our brain and body.