O'Donovan, John

John O'Donovan (1806–1861), historian and topographer, was born at Atateemore in the Irish-speaking Slieverue district of south Kilkenny in July 1806. By the time that he reached late middle age, he had become one of the most prominent interpreters of ancient Irish language, literature, and history.

After moving to Dublin in 1823, he attended until 1827 a Latin school on Arran Quay—Saint Patrick's Seminary. In 1828, James Hardiman employed him to transcribe Irish and Anglo-Norman manuscripts; in that year he gave some lessons in Irish to Thomas Larcom of the Ordnance Survey, which had been established in 1824 to map the country. From the autumn of 1830 he was employed by the Ordnance Survey to determine the most appropriate English spellings of the names to be engraved on the Ordnance Survey maps; for this purpose he made extracts from topographical ancient manuscripts in the Royal Irish Academy and Trinity College and other early sources. In 1831 he met George Petrie, later head of the place-names and antiquities section of the Ordnance Survey, where Eugene O'Curry and his brother Anthony, James Clarence Mangan, Thomas O'Conor, and Patrick O'Keeffe later worked. Through Petrie's influence O'Donovan was able to publish his first articles in 1832 and 1833 in the Dublin Penny Journal, beginning with a translation of an eleventh-century poem ascribed to Alfred, king of Northumbria, who had been a student in Ireland in the seventh century. In these articles he demonstrated his ability to read and translate early medieval Irish and Latin texts. In March 1834, O'Donovan began field-work in County Down, meeting informants face-to-face to hear the local pronunciation of the names and ascertain their derivation form the Irish language, and writing regular reports to Larcom in Dublin. These reports later became known as the Ordnance Survey Letters. They exist for twenty-nine of the thirty-two counties of Ireland, the exceptions being Antrim, Tyrone, and Cork. He collected the place-names from Anglo-Norman and other late medieval sources, and from maps such as William Petty's seventeenth-century Down Survey. On the basis of these and the pronunciations he heard in the field, he chose or adapted anglicised spellings for the names that would appear on the maps.

When in 1842 the place-names and antiquities department of the Survey was closed, O'Donovan began to publish editions of early Irish texts for the Irish Archaeological Society and the Celtic Society with translations (see the list in Boyne 1987, pp. 136–139). His Grammar of the Irish Language appeared in 1845, and the first part of his magisterial edition of the Annals of the Four Masters (Annála Ríoghachta Éireann) was published in 1848. He was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1847, he was awarded their prestigious Cunningham Medal in 1848. In August 1849 he was appointed professor of the Irish language at Queen's University, Belfast. Trinity College conferred on him an honorary Ll.D. in 1850, and in 1856 Jakob Grimm initiated his election to membership of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences. O'Donovan died in Dublin on 9 December 1861 and was buried in Glasnevin cemetery, leaving his widow and five boys in poor circumstances.

SEE ALSO Annals of the Four Masters; Antiquarianism; Literature: Gaelic Literature in the Nineteenth Century; Ordnance Survey

Bibliography

Andrews, John H. A Paper Landscape. 1975.

Boyne, Patricia. John O'Donovan (1806–61): A Biography. 1987.

De Valera, Ruaidhrí. "Seán Ó Donnabháin agus a Lucht Cúnta." Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 79 (1949): 146–159.

Herity, Michael. "John O'Donovan's Early Life and Education." In Ordnance Survey Letters, Down, edited by Michael Herity. 2001.

Michael Herity