Where is the Sun at Night? New Evidence from Laon, Médiathèque Suzanne Martinet, MS 422

The article explores early medieval cosmological narratives concerning the Sun’s night journey and its cosmic battle with a tide-making sea monster (sometimes called Leviathan), focussing on a text discovered by the author in the ninth-century manuscript Laon, Médiathèque Suzanne Martinet, MS 422: De cursu solis in nocte (DCSN). The origins and evolution of these narratives are discussed by highlighting their connections to a variety of texts, including biblical, apocryphal, patristic, classical, and computistical sources. In particular, the article examines the role played by the early medieval Irish literati in developing and disseminating these narratives, emphasising the erudite fusion of different materials and the creative interpretations characteristic of their scholarship. The article compares DCSN with other texts (both Latin and vernacular), such as Isidore’s Etymologiae and De natura rerum, the Old Irish In Tenga Bithnua, and the later cosmological tract known as the De mundi caelestis terrestrisque constitutione, as well as hitherto unnoticed and unpublished sources, revealing new thematic and textual parallels, and also addressing the allegorical significance of these cosmological tales.