Celtic languages & literatures
More general subjects:
Celts, Gaels, and Britons
Studies in Language and Literature from Antiquity to the Middle Ages in Honour of Patrick Sims-Williams
Celts Gaels and Britons offers a miscellany of essays exploring three closely connected areas within the fields of Celtic Studies in order to shed new light on the ancient and medieval Celtic languages and their literatures. Taking as its inspiration the scholarship of Professor Patrick Sims-Williams to whom this volume is dedicated the papers gathered together here explore the Continental Celtic languages texts from the Irish Sea world and the literature and linguistics of the British languages among them Welsh and Cornish. With essays from eighteen leading scholars in the field this in-depth volume serves not only as a monument to the rich and varied career of Sims-Williams but also offers a wealth of commentary and information to present significant primary research and reconsiderations of existing scholarship.
Crossing Borders in the Insular Middle Ages
This volume offers an in-depth exploration of the cultural connections between and across Britain Ireland and Iceland during the high and late Middle Ages. Drawing together new research from international scholars working in Celtic Studies Norse and English the contributions gathered together here establish the coherence of the medieval Insular world as an area for literary analysis and engage with a range of contemporary approaches to examine the ways and the degrees to which Insular literatures and cultures connect both with each other and with the wider European mainstream.
The articles in this collection discuss the Insular histories of some of the most widely read literary works and authors of the Middle Ages including Geoffrey of Monmouth and William Langland. They trace the legends of Troy and of Charlemagne as they travelled across linguistic and geographical borders give fresh attention to the multilingual manuscript collections of great households and families and explore the political implications of language choice in a linguistically plural society. In doing so they shed light on a complex network of literary and cultural connections and establish the Insular world not as a periphery but as a centre.
Norse-Gaelic Contacts in a Viking World
This multi-disciplinary volume draws on the combined expertise of specialists in the history and literature of medieval Ireland Iceland Norway and Scotland to shed new light on the interplay of Norse and Gaelic literary traditions. Through four detailed case-studies which examine the Norwegian Konungs skuggsjá the Icelandic Njáls saga and Landnámabók and the Gaelic text Baile Suthach Sith Emhna the volume explores the linguistic cultural and political contacts that existed between Norse and Gaelic speakers in the High Middle Ages and examines the impetus behind these texts including oral tradition transfer of written sources and authorial adaption and invention. Crucially these texts are not only examined as literary products of the thirteenth century but also as repositories of older historical traditions and the authors seek to explore these wider historical contexts as well as analyse how and why historical and literary material was transmitted. The volume contains English translations of key extracts and also provides a detailed discussion of sources and methodologies to ensure that this milestone of scholarship is accessible to both students and subject-specialists.
‘This is a brilliant and genuinely ground-breaking book representing a significant step forward in literary and historical analysis of the Norse-Gaelic interface’. (Professor Ralph O’Connor University of Aberdeen).
The Ever-New Tongue – In Tenga Bithnúa
The Text in the Book of Lismore
The Ever-New Tongue (In Tenga Bithnúa) is a medieval Irish account of the mysteries of the universe remarkable for its exotic background and for the fiery exuberance of its style. This translation based on the definitive edition of the text renders this extraordinary work available to a wider readership.
Composed in Ireland in the ninth or tenth century The Ever-New Tongue purports to reveal the mysteries of the creation of the cosmos and of the end of the world as related by the soul of the apostle Philip speaking in the language of the angels. Drawing on a multitude of sources both mainstream and heterodox it reflects the richness of early Irish learning as well as the vitality of its author’s imagination. Two apocryphal texts appear to have inspired its original composition: a lost Egyptian apocalyptic discourse and one of the segments of the Acts of Philip (a work otherwise unknown in Latin Christendom).
Based on the critical edition of The Ever-New Tongue in the Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum this book presents an English translation of the oldest (and most conservative) version of the text preserved in the Book of Lismore together with a fully updated introduction.
Landscape and Myth in North-Western Europe
This volume explores the intersection of landscape and myth in the context of northwestern Atlantic Europe. From the landscapes of literature to the landscape as a lived environment and from myths about supernatural beings to tales about the mythical roots of kingship the contributions gathered here each develop their own take on the meanings behind ‘landscape’ and ‘myth’ and thus provide a broad cross-section of how these widely discussed concepts might be understood.
Arising from papers delivered at the conference Landscape and Myth in North-Western Europe held in Munich in April 2016 the volume draws together a wide selection of material ranging from texts and toponyms to maps and archaeological data and it uses this diversity in method and material to explore the meaning of these terms in medieval Ireland Wales and Iceland. In doing so it provides a broadly inclusive and yet carefully focused discussion of the inescapable and productive intertwining of landscape and myth.
Islands in the West
Classical Myth and the Medieval Norse and Irish Geographical Imagination
This monograph traces the history of one of the most prominent types of geographical myths of the North-West Atlantic Ocean: transmarine otherworlds of blessedness and immortality. Taking the mythologization of the Viking Age discovery of North America in the earliest extant account of Vínland (‘Wine-Land’) and the Norse transmarine otherworlds of Hvítramannaland (‘The Land of White Men’) and the Ódáinsakr/Glæsisvellir (‘Field of the Not-Dead’/‘Shining Fields’) as its starting point the book explores the historical entanglements of these imaginative places in a wider European context. It follows how these Norse otherworld myths adopt adapt and transform concepts from early Irish vernacular tradition and Medieval Latin geographical literature and pursues their connection to the geographical mythology of classical antiquity. In doing so it shows how myths as far distant in time and space as Homer’s Elysian Plain and the transmarine otherworlds of the Norse are connected by a continuous history of creative processes of adaptation and reinterpretation. Furthermore viewing this material as a whole the question arises as to whether the Norse mythologization of the North Atlantic might not only have accompanied the Norse westward expansion that led to the discovery of North America but might even have been among the factors that induced it.
French in Medieval Ireland, Ireland in Medieval French
The Paradox of Two Worlds
This book is a ground-breaking study of the cultural and linguistic consequences of the English invasion of Ireland in 1169 and examines the ways in which the country is portrayed in French literature of the twelfth thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Works such as La geste des Engleis en Yrlande and The Walling of New Ross written in French in a multilingual Ireland are studied in their literary and historical contexts and the works of the Dominican friar Jofroi de Waterford (c. 1300) are shown to have been written in Ireland rather than Paris as has always been assumed.
After exploring how the dissemination and translation of early Latin texts of Irish origin concerning Ireland led to the country acquiring a reputation as a land of marvels this study argues that increasing knowledge of the real Ireland did little to stymie the mirabilia hibernica in French vernacular literature. On the contrary the image persisted to the extent of retrospectively associating central motifs and figures of Arthurian romance with Ireland. This book incorporates the results of original archival research and is characterized by close attention to linguistic details of expression and communication as well as historical codicological and literary contexts.
Conceptualizing the Enemy in Early Northwest Europe
Metaphors of Conflict and Alterity in Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, and Early Irish Poetry
Despite the prominence of conflicts in all mythological and heroic literature perceptions of these conflicts and their participants are shaped by different cultural influences. Socio-economic political and religious factors all influence how conflict is perceived and depicted in literary form. This volume provides the first comparative analysis to explore conceptions of conflict and otherness in the literary and cultural contexts of the early North Sea world by investigating the use of metaphor in Old English Old Norse and Early Irish poetry. Applying Conceptual Metaphor Theory together with literary and anthropological analysis the study examines metaphors of conflict and alterity in a range of (pseudo-)mythological heroic and occasional poetry including Beowulf Old Norse skaldic and eddic verse and poems from the celebrated ‘Ulster Cycle’. This unique approach not only sheds new light on a wide spectrum of metaphorical techniques but also draws important conclusions concerning the common cultural heritage behind these three poetic corpora.
Medieval Welsh Perceptions of the Orient
This book introduces a new theoretical framework for the examination of medieval Western European perceptions of the Orient. Through the application of the medieval concept of translatio studii et imperii it proposes the identification of three distinct conceptions of the Orient in medieval sources: Biblical Classical and Contemporary. Welsh textual material from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is used as a case-study to develop and illustrate this theory.
This study brings historical sources to bear on previously unexplained literary phenomena and it examines the evolution of texts and ideas in the process of transmission and translation. The sources analysed here include vernacular and Latin texts produced in Wales as well as material that has been translated into Welsh such as Imago mundi and legends about Charlemagne. It thus combines an important and much-needed account of the development of Welsh attitudes to the East with a unique analysis of Oriental references across an extensive literary corpus.
Vernacularity in England and Wales, c. 1300-1550
Studies of the vernacular in the period 1300-1550 have tended to focus exclusively upon language to the exception of the wider vernacular culture within which this was located. In a period when the status of English and ideas of Englishness were transforming in response to a variety of social political cultural and economic factors the changing nature and perception of the vernacular deserves to be explored comprehensively and in detail. Vernacularity in England and Wales examines the vernacular in and across literature art and architecture to reach a more inclusive understanding of the nature of late medieval vernacularity.
The essays in this collection draw upon a wide range of source material including buildings devotional and educational literature and parliamentary and civic records in order to expand and elaborate our idea of the vernacular. Each contributor addresses central ideas about the nature and identity of the vernacular and how we appraise it involving questions about nationhood popularity the commonalty and the conflict and conjunction of the vernacular with the non-vernacular. These notions of vernacularity are situated within studies of reading practices heresy translation gentry identity seditious speech and language politics. By considering the nature of vernacularity these essays explore whether it is possible to perceive a common theory of vernacular use and practice at this time.