Two last texts, pitched at the poles of an incomprehension that is linguistic, artistic and epistemological and held in tense equipoise only by their shared subject, an Irish-speaker caught up in the havoc of a changing world, act out, in their own way, the paradox which, from the start, marks the experience of linguistic colonisation in Ireland. Some time in the 1580s, Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn addressed ‘D'fhior chogaid comhailtear síothcháin’, ‘By a man of war is peace kept’, to Brian na Murrtha O'Rourke, the lord of Breifne who challenged English rule in the north-west throughout the 1580s and who has made minor appearances throughout this work. The poet urges O'Rourke to unleash a maelstrom of destruction, driving the ‘fir Saxan’, ‘Saxon men’, from Ireland (Knott, Poems i, p. 108: 2.2). The poet conjures up images of apocalyptic violence: ‘muír chloch 'na gcuiltibh fiaidhmhíol’, the ‘stone castles’ of the Pale reduced to ‘lairs for savage beasts’; a famine-stricken mother eating ‘mír do chridhe a céidleanaibh’ (a bite of the heart of her first-born) (19.1; 20.4). Ó hUiginn stands the Elizabethans' taxonomy of ‘civil’ and ‘barbarian’ on its head: the English are ‘danair loma léirchrea-chaigh’ (rapacious, destructive barbarians) who pillage ‘Gaoidhil na ngníomh gcathardha’ (the Gaels of civil deeds) (32.4; 3.2).