The range of Charlemagne material that survives from medieval Ireland can, on the face of it, look rather meagre. Irish interest in Charlemagne literature also seems to emerge quite late. While tales of Charlemagne and his vassals are written and read across much of Europe from the twelfth century onwards, such works only appear to gain a significant readership in Ireland in the latter half of the fifteenth century. Not only does Charlemagne material appear late in Ireland; it also seems rather limited in variety. Only two major texts, the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle (known as Gabháltais Shearluis Mhóir, i.e. the conquests of Charles the Great) and Fierabras (Sdair Fortibrais, i.e. the life of Fortibras), were translated into early modern Irish in this period. Latin texts of these works also survive in a fifteenth-century Irish codex, and it seems likely that the translation of Fierabras from French into Latin also took place in Ireland. This Latin Fierabras, in turn, furnished the source for the Irish translation.

Gabháltais Shearluis Mhóir and Sdair Fortibrais seem to have become two of the most popular Irish translations of foreign narrative, surviving in a relatively high number of manuscripts. Charlemagne also features, albeit less prominently, in other Irish-language texts of this period, such as Sdair na Lumbardach (‘The History of the Lombards’) and an Irish adaptation of the well-known romance, Octavian, which transfers the plot to a Carolingian setting. Library inventories offer some further, very limited, evidence of Charlemagne texts circulating in English and in French. This chapter will sketch the broad outlines of the circulation of Charlemagne narratives in Ireland, focusing primarily on the Latin and Irish texts of the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle and Fierabras. It will examine the surviving manuscript contexts for these works and consider who the early audiences of these texts might have been. An interesting feature of the transmission of these works in Ireland is that they tend to appear in manuscripts of largely religious material.

Engagement with Charlemagne narratives in Ireland offers some interesting points of comparison and contrast with treatment of similar texts elsewhere in the insular world. The wide circulation of the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle is well attested across Europe, and translations into all the other major insular vernaculars survive. Of course, in the Norse and Welsh-speaking regions, the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle was translated much earlier than it was in Ireland.

This chapter examines the ways in which two neglected works in the Middle English tradition, Horn Childe and John Lydgate's Gy de Warwyke, engage with conventions that might be more readily associated with medieval epic than with romance. Both of these works have been categorised as romances and belong to what modern scholars have designated the ‘Matter of England’; as such, they have significant investment in historical events and offer some parallels to the ‘Matter of France’. The latter body of narratives, of course, forms the main subject matter of the French vernacular epic mode, the chansons de geste. Horn Childe and Lydgate's Gy de Warwyke are both part of wider insular traditions that appear to go back to original works in Anglo-Norman. In each case, those Anglo-Norman works have affiliations with the chansons de geste, which have been acknowledged by a number of scholars. However, far less attention has been paid to the impact of epic elements on adaptations in Middle English. It seems to me that Horn Childe and Lydgate's Gy de Warwyke not only carry over epic conventions and values already embedded in their respective narrative traditions but actually heighten such elements and add further ones of their own invention. These two texts engage with the interface between romance and epic in active and, at certain moments, innovative ways.

Previous discussions of Horn Childe and Gy de Warwyke tend to place these works in dialogue with chronicle writing, rather than with epic. Matthew Holford's extensive analysis of Horn Childe concludes that in this work the ‘imperatives of historical writing are combined to an unusual degree with the conventions of romance’. Gy de Warwyke's most recent editor, Pamela Varvolden, adds a further category to the mix, observing that the text ‘mingles characteristics of the genres of history, romance, and saint's life’. This tendency to turn to ‘history’ (or, less frequently, hagiography) as the most obvious generic alterative to ‘romance’ reflects a more widespread convention in discussion of insular romance. The term ‘epic’ is rarely employed as a conceptual category in discussions of Middle English works. There seem to be two primary reasons for this. Firstly, ‘epic’ is, if possible, an even vaguer designation than ‘romance’. Secondly, the epic mode is very firmly associated with the pre-Conquest literary landscape.

A range of medieval texts associates King Arthur with the island of Sicily. The earliest, Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia Imperialia, recounts how a man followed a runaway horse into the side of Mount Etna and encountered Arthur there. A similar story is told a decade later in Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus Miraculorum. Sicily also takes on the role of Arthur’s final resting place in Floriant et Florete and is depicted as the enchanted realm of Arthur in Guillem de Torroella’s La Faula. Further brief references from medieval Italy and France seem to also reflect this tradition. To greater or lesser degrees, these texts present the very real and much-visited island of Sicily as proxy for Avalon and as an otherworld realm. On the face of it, Sicily is not an obvious location with which to associate Arthur; the Mediterranean world does not impinge on most of the influential narratives of the Matter of Britain. The precise origins of this tradition are difficult to discern, but it seems to have developed in tandem with a wider interest in Arthurian material in this part of the world. The story Gervase relates is one of a number of responses to the figure of Arthur that emerge in Italy and Sicily at a relatively early stage. Some of the earliest Arthurian imagery comes from the western Mediterranean in the form of twelfth-century artworks at the cathedrals of Otranto (then in the kingdom of Sicily) and Modena. When accounts of Arthur in Sicily are examined, two things become apparent. The first is how far the location, topography and history of Sicily might have suggested points of connection with well-established depictions of otherworld spaces. The second is that a number of these texts seem to engage with the Matter of Britain for political ends. The island of Sicily was a much-contested territory and it changed hands at several points throughout the Middle Ages. The figure of Arthur is used to authorize and critique the claims of a variety of political actors. This potent intersection of otherworld geography and political claims is central to British debates about Arthur’s return from Avalon in the period, but how such associations operated beyond Britain remains under-explored.

In the early 1630s, the Irish historian Geoffrey Keating addressed the question of the historicity or lack thereof of the pantheon of Gaelic heroes known as the Fian. In terms that recall similar debates over Arthur and his knights, he cites oral tradition, ancient documents and surviving monuments as evidence for the reality of these ancient heroes. However, he notes that, even if the individuals involved existed, not everything written about them should be taken as historically accurate:

Keating's literary allusions here have generally been passed over by scholars, but they merit some examination. Of the three texts cited, we only have firm evidence for the circulation of one, Sir Bevis of Hampton, in Ireland before this point. Yet Keating, writing in Irish for an Irish audience, holds these texts up as examples of narratives with which he clearly expects his readers to be familiar. In the case of ‘Huon of Burdex’, the form in which the title is given suggests Keating is thinking of the romance as an English text, rather than a French one, probably in the version translated by Lord Berners around 1515 and which went through numerous editions throughout the sixteenth century. Bevis of Hampton was translated into Irish from Middle English at the end of the fifteenth century, but once more the form that Keating gives for the title is so far removed from the form of the hero's name in that Irish translation – Bibus o Hamtuir – that it seems likely that he knew the romance in English.