ICCS XV Abstracts

Over the past decade a sustained programme of archaeological investigation (Glasgow University’s SERF project www.gla.ac.uk/serf ) has explored an area centred around the Pictish Royal site at Forteviot, Perthshire. This work has revealed a deep and complex sequence of prehistoric ritual monuments and cemeteries beginning in the Neolithic and continuing until the Iron Age. These archaeological investigations confirmed suspicions that there was a significant relationship between the Early Historic royal site, where Cinead mac Alpin died in 858, and the adjacent ancient monuments. The SERF excavations have revealed an intensive Pictish engagement with the earlier monuments including the excavations within the monuments, the burning of fires and burial of the dead. Our understanding of the Irish royal site of Tara has also been transformed in recent years through intensive studies initiated by the Discovery Programme and undertaken by Conor Newman and others. These too suggest an intimate connection between the ancient monuments and the early medieval users of the hill. This paper will explore the symmetries between the sites and pose questions about the nature of Celtic kingship. To what extent do the two sites’ archaeologies reveal shared ideologies of kingship? How significant were the historical links between Pictish and Irish dynasties? Why did their later patterns of use diverge?

The Pillar of Eliseg stands on a mound near the Cistercian Abbey of Valle Crucis, Powys, Wales. It was formerly a cross with a lengthy Latin inscription, a piece of propaganda in legal language, recording how it was set up by Concenn, the last early medieval ruler of Powys, to commemorate the success of his great-grandfather Eliseg against the English in the time of Offa. This monument, however, has a complex ‘biography’ beginning in the Bronze Age with the establishment of a kerbed cairn with cremations; its reinvention through the erection of the cross in the ninth century AD as a likely assembly and royal inauguration site of the rulers of Powys; its role in the monastic landscape of Valle Crucis; the destruction of the cross after the Reformation; its rediscovery by Welsh antiquaries, notably Edward Lhuyd, who transcribed the inscription; and the ‘dig’ in 1773 before the re-erection of the Pillar as part of the famous romantic landscape of the Vale of Llangollen. This paper will present the major results of Project Eliseg (Bangor and Chester Universities; Llangollen Museum) which carried out excavations on the site and has reconstructed this fascinating monument biography.

This paper, while accepting that one intended audience for the Ruthwell cross was an Anglian monastic community, argues that in addition it was aimed at the surrounding British population. This is inferred not just from its location, but, more importantly, from the choice of scenes represented on the north and south faces of the cross – in particular, those that are unusual or seem somewhat anomalous. I hope also to explore the possible context, vis-à-vis the British population, for the erection of this cross, insofar as the sketchy available evidence allows.

Is mórchnuasach é, Croidhe Cainnte Chiarraighe, de Ghaeilge Chorca Dhuibhne a thiomsaigh Seán Óg Ó Caomhánaigh (‘An Cóta’). Bhí sé seacht mbliana i mbun an tiomsaithe (1935-1942) agus tá naoi n-imleabhar is fiche, agus isteach is amach le dhá mhilliún focal, anois againn de thoradh a chuid oibre. Don Roinn Oideachais a bhailigh An Cóta an t-ábhar, agus cé go raibh sé i gceist go gcuirfí i gcló é, ní dhearnadh go dtí seo é. Agus an t-ábhar á leagan amach ag Seán Óg, fostaíodh Fiachra Éilgeach (Risteárd Ó Foghludha) chun eagarthóireacht a dhéanamh air. Maidir le hábhar an tsaothair tá an oiread sin réimsí éagsúla clúdaithe ann – lena n-áirítear seanfhocail, seanráite, cora cainte, mallachtaí, beannachtaí, eascainí, giotaí as an mBíobla, dánta, amhráin agus scéalta. Ina theannta sin, faighimid léargas ar an saol a bhí á chleachtadh ag muintir na háite, ar chúrsaí polaitíochta comhaimseartha agus ar chlaontaí agus ar mheon an Chaomhánaigh féin san iliomad samplaí agus tagairtí ann. Díreofar, sa pháipéar seo, ar mhodhanna oibre Sheáin Óig agus é i mbun ábhar CCC a bhailiú agus ar a mhodhanna agus an t-ábhar sin á leagan amach aige. Tagrófar, chomh maith don aighneas a d’fhás idir é féin agus an Roinn Oideachais le linn sheacht mbliana an tionscnaimh seo agus an chaoi nár cuireadh an deireadh ceart leis an scéal seo go fóill.

Lexicographer and Dictionary: Seán Óg Ó Caomhánaigh and Croidhe Cainnte Chiarraighe

Croidhe Cainnte Chiarraighe is a large collection of Corca Dhuibhne Irish collected by Seán Óg Ó Caomhánaigh (‘An Cóta’) over a period of 7 years from 1935-1942, 29 volumes and over 2 million words, the result of his efforts. ‘An Cóta’ collected the material for the Department of Education, and even though it was their intention to publish the work, to this day this has not happened. While Seán Óg was compiling the material, Fiachra Éilgeach (Risteárd Ó Foghludha) was employed by the Department to edit it. In terms of the content of the work, a significant number of categories of words are to be found, including, proverbs, old sayings, phrases, curses, blessings, curse words, excerpts from the Bible, poems, songs and stories. We are also given an insight into life in the area at the time, into contemporary politics and into the tendencies and thoughts of Seán Óg, himself, through the vast number of examples and references to these contained therein. This paper will consider Seán Óg’s methodology when both compiling and laying out the material for CCC. Reference will also be made to the tension that arose between Seán Óg and the Department of Education during the 7 years of this project and to the fact that this story has not yet been satisfactorily completed.

Téacs nár cuireadh in eagar ariamh a mbeidh mé ag caint faoi, atá le fáil i Leabharlann Naisiúnta na hÉireann, LS G 776. Aistriúchán i bpáirt den dán Sanscraite Bhagavad Gita, ‘Amhrán an Tiarna’, is ea é, agus is é Seosamh Ó Longáin, ball de mhuintir arbh scríobhaithe ó dhúchas iad, an scríobhaí ar scríobh agus d’aistrigh an téacs seo sa bhliain 1848. Sa chur i láthair seo, beidh mé ag caint faoin áit agus aimsir ina gcumadh an téacs seo, faoi phrosóid an téacs, agus faoina foinsí a d’fhéadfadh bheith ag Seosamh. I dteannta sin, beidh mé ag caoint faoi chomhthéacs polaitiúil agus intleachtúil an téacs. Bhíodh scoiláireacht na linne seo ar lorg cosúlachta agus coibhnis idir teangacha, litríocht agus cultúr na gCeilt agus na hIndia. Ag an am céanna, bhíodh polaitíocht réabhlóideach in Éirinn agus san India os comhair an tsaoil. Déanfaidh mé iarracht ar thaispeáint go raibh an t-údar ag súgradh leis an spéis scólaireachta sin, agus ag samhlú náisiúnachas agus réabhlóid i nÉirinn leo san India. I dteannta sin, taispeáinfidh mé go gcuireann an téacs seo faisnéis ar fáil faoi bheatha Uí Longáin, agus faoi shuimeanna ársaitheoirí agus bailitheoirí téacsanna na linne sin.

The Irish Bhagavad Gita

I will be discussing a formerly unedited text which is found in NLI MS G 776. It is a partial translation of the Sanskrit poem Bhagavad Gita, ‘the Lord’s song’. Seosamh Ó Longáin, a member of a hereditary family of scribes, translated and wrote the piece in 1848. In this presentation, I will be discussing the time and location where the text was composed, the prosodic features of the text, and the sources which Seosamh may have had. Moreover, I will be discussing the political and intellectual context of the text. Contemporary scholarship expressed an interest in finding connections between the languages, literatures,and cultures of the Celts and of India. At the same time, revolutionary political movements were occurring in both Ireland and India. I will attempt to demonstrate that the author was playing with this contemporary scholarly zeitgeist, and drawing connections between nationalism and revolution both in Ireland and in India. Additionally, I will show that this text provides information about the life of Ó Longáin, and about the interests of antiquarian collectors of texts at the time.

The Irish Language is witnessing a revival in Ulster. This revival is most visible in Belfast where An Cheathrú Ghaeltachta was founded to promote the Irish Language. While Irish was marginalized during the conflict in the North, Belfast, for example, had more Gaelscoileanna than any other city in Ireland except Dublin and Cork in 2013. In my paper, I argue that one of the most important aspects for this development is the release of the Irish republican prisoners following the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Following the introduction of internment in 1971, political prisoners immediately organized education classes in the internment camps and prisons. Irish classes were the first courses introduced by republican prisoners. Consequently, thousands of prisoners learned Irish. Following their release from prison, many decided to teach and promote the use of Irish. Based on recently published research and my own field-research in Ireland, I will present the first results of my on-going research on education and political prisoners in Irish and British prisons. In my paper I outline the impact political prisoners have in developing the Irish Language in the North of Ireland. In other words, I argue that the republican ex-prisoners are the driving force behind the Irish Language Revival in the North of Ireland.

At the mention of leprosy the classic medieval picture of an unfortunate leper instantly comes to mind.  It is not that straightforward however and the term leprosy was used for many different skin afflictions which we would recognise as scabies, psoriasis, eczema and other skin complaints.  Other illnesses, including the plague, were also referred to as leprosy and it was also used in a metaphorical sense.  The Dictionary of the Irish Language lists at least thirteen words for leprosy and this paper will examine these and their appearance in the Irish Annals.  It will be shown however that none of the terms used refer to the actual disease of leprosy, which is today called Hansen’s Disease, but refer instead to a variety of other diseases, which throws open to question the classic picture and concept of the medieval leper.

The Middle Irish life of St Findchú of Brigown is one of the more interesting saints’ lives. One of his most striking miracles is when he takes in the newborn child of a persecuted queen of Leinster and feeds it from his own, miraculously milk producing, breast. It is Findchú’s relationship with his young fosterling, and the ways in which this relationship sheds light on the Life’s author’s view of contemporary church reform, that I will investigate in this paper. The early Irish church had a strong tradition of taking in children, to be oblates or merely to attend monastic schools. However towards the end of the twelfth century the tradition child oblation was everywhere on the decline. Throughout Europe the irrevocable vow placed on a young child was giving way to the idea that a choice must be made at the age of discretion. The twelfth century also saw the introduction of the Cistercian order to Ireland. An order who had set themselves in opposition to oblation. I will read Findchú’s act of suckling a child alongside other episodes in his life as a response to the changing importance of oblation within monastic communities of the twelfth century. It is a nuanced reply to shifting social practice that we see in the rather outlandish myth of a lactating male saint.

Ann an cultar Gàidhealach anns na meadhan aoisean tràtha, bha amharas coitcheann ann a thaobh gliocas agus comhairle nam ban. Tha fianais ann bho theacsan litreachail agus laghail gun robh barail anns a’ chultar - co-dhiù am measg nam fear a sgrìobh na teacsan seo - nach robh boireannaich earbsach, agus nach robh e glic a bhith ag èisteachd ris an cuid chomhairle. Ach cha robh an suidheachadh buileach cho sìmplidh ri sin, oir tha boireannaich ann ann an cuid de sgeulachdan aig a bheil fios sònraichte. Bidh am pàipear seo a’ coimhead air an fhianais bho naomh-sheanchas, a’ cleachdadh Vita Sancti Columbae mar eisimpleir, agus a’ togail air rannsachadh ùr air na ceangalan eadar gnè agus comhairle ann an litreachas Gàidhealach tràtha. Bheir mi sùil air an dà sgeul anns a’ Vita anns a bheil mnathan a’ toirt comhairle do fir: tè a tha glic dha-rìribh, agus an tè eile a tha amaideach. Le bhith a’ tarraing creideamh agus litreachas ri chèile, cuidichidh am pàipear seo le rannsachadh air gnè anns na meadhan aoisean tràtha, a’ togail ar tuigse air eachdraidh shòisealta, chrabhach agus inntleachdail anns an linn seo.

In Gaelic culture in the early middle ages, there was a general suspicion of the wisdom and counsel of women. There is evidence from literary and legal texts that the culture – or at least the men who wrote these texts – had the opinion that women were not trustworthy, and that it was unwise to listen to their advice. But the situation is not quite so simple as that, for there are women in some tales who have access to special knowledge. Building on recent research which has been done on the links between gender and advice in early Gaelic literature, this paper will be looking at hagiography, taking the Vita Sancti Columbae as a sample. I will consider the two narratives in the Vita in which women give advice to men: one wise, the other foolish. Bringing together religion and literature, this paper will contribute to research on gender in the early middle ages, building our understanding of social, religous and intellectual history in this period.

From the warriors of the ‘Old North’ to the royal and gentry patrons of the high and later middle ages, the subjects of Welsh poetry are frequently depicted and praised as sword-wielding heroes. Swords are often metaphors or metonyms, representing a brave, effective warrior, or else so closely associated with their wielder that they share attributes with him: bright, blood-stained or notched blades reflect a man’s splendid appearance, military prowess or courage, and a sword might also be afforded human traits or even envisaged as a comrade-in-arms. More than any other weapon, swords symbolise a man’s status and identity as a warrior or soldier, though only in the later medieval period are they explicitly linked with knighthood. This paper highlights the important role of swords in the poetry and places them in context, drawing attention to differences and similarities between sword imagery and that relating to spears, shields and other weapons.

I analyse outsiders’ perspectives on Ireland and the Irish, mainly those from the Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian worlds. The Irish were frequently the subject of comment by scholars based in other parts of the mediaeval West; many remarks illuminate self-perceptions of outsiders themselves. For example, I show that Aldhelm’s revulsion at allegedly dissolute behaviour in Ireland revealed strong educational rivalry between England and Ireland, which is intriguing given that his own work was influenced by Hiberno-Latin style. At the Carolingian court, Irishmen were also central to intellectual contest, e.g. the success (resented by some) of John Scottus Eriugena, and Theodulf’s humiliation of Cadac-Andreas. These and other examples provoked fellow-scholars to reconsider their own roles in this multinational community. Norman views (from the gleeful invective of Warner of Rouen to the stern judgments of St Bernard) illustrate an amusingly backward island in need of serious reform. I shall analyse the motives behind outsiders’ perceptions of the Irish until c. 1200, and briefly show how remarks by Gerald of Wales were transformed into British imperial attitudes, e.g. in the work of Edmund Spenser. These studies will enable me to reconsider the widely-held assumption of Irish peripherality and ‘otherness’ in the broader intellectual landscape.

It has long been observed that the core narratives of the Christian tradition have had a wide range of diverse realisations in vernacular writings. Two texts that depict in native terms the death of Christ as well as the obligations this death placed on devoted Christians are the Old Irish Poems of Blathmac and the Old English Dream of the Rood. The authors of these texts both express their interpretation of Christ’s crucifixion and death by means of ideology, imagery, and language that are rooted in native tradition. The texts frequently display common motifs and images. This essay will explore and compare the ways in which both poets apply the tenets of their respective cultures to their simultaneously diverse accounts of the betrayal, courage and demise of Christ; it will also examine the manner in which these poets operate within the parameters of their own languages, from the specifics of vocabulary and terminology to complex conceits and imagery, in order to articulate their own experience of Christ’s passion and death.

The two long poems to the Virgin Mary by the poet Blathmac, dating appr. to the middle of the 8th century and edited by James Carney 1964, are currently the subject of research at Maynooth University. In the course of this research, the transmitted text of the poems will be subjected to detailed scrutiny which is eventually intended to result in a new edition. In this paper, I will discuss several problematic passages.

Attention was drawn previously to two different types of keening in ‘The Poems of Blathmac’: the ‘death’ keen and the ‘complaint’ keen (Lambkin 1985-6, 68). This paper proposes a re-framing of ‘keening’ in terms of ‘migration’ and explores further the relationship between post-mortem keening (in respect of the dead) and pre-mortem keening (in respect of the living in danger of death), with special reference to the retelling of the Gospel story in the Leabhar Breac of the slaughter of the innocents where four women lament the killing of their infant sons (Hollo 2005, 87-90). It is argued that a better understanding emerges of the ‘keen-centred’ spirituality promoted by Blathmac and his followers.

Children’s literature in any language represents a complex construction of childhood as it navigates the socio-cultural values of the adult world whilst also attempting to engage with real child readers. This paper will argue that creating childhoods in Celtic-language children’s literature is nuanced with even further intricacies as marginalization assigns children’s literature a practical role in the task of language revival and informs how notions of belonging are imagined and articulated. As a result, writing, producing and reading books for children and young people become performances of identity and of difference. This paper will focus on how notions of identity and belonging are constructed in Welsh literature for children and young people by demonstrating how these texts, positioned below the radar of mainstream literature, are loaded with pedagogical and ideological concerns regarding language, culture and identity.

This paper will analyse the critical rhetoric surrounding the Irish translations aimed at children in the early twentieth century, texts which played an important role in creating a corpus of children’s literature. Many of the controversies and fraught debates at the time about creating a literature in the minority-language context referred to child-readers, while reviews of texts aimed at children in journals and newspapers often focused on the ideological and pedagogical value of texts that were published. This paper intends to draw on these sources as well as on unpublished files from the government publisher, An Gúm, to examine the methodologies in use in creating texts for children in the early twentieth century, the (adult) reception of the books, and how the broader literary discourse treated the question of children’s literature.

Mac-Talla, published in Sydney, Nova Scotia from 1892-1904, is noted for being one of the longest running newspapers in the Gaelic language. The editor, Jonathan MacKinnon, was a long-time friend and correspondent of Alexander Maclean Sinclair who contributed over 80 items to the paper. MacKinnon confided in Maclean Sinclair about an exchange he had had with important local tradition bearer Alexander ‘the Ridge’ MacDonald in which MacDonald had complained to MacKinnon about altering a piece of poetry he had submitted to his paper. The interaction between these three men, as represented in Mac-Talla and in personal correspondence, illustrates the important networks, influences and counter-influences among the Gaelic community of nineteenth-century Canada and sheds light on the ironic composition and preservation of two satires against the much-loved Mac-Talla.

This paper will examine the various translations of Dante’s Divine Comedy into Irish. There are three, either complete or in part, of which we are aware; but by far the most important and artistic is the one by Monsignor Pádraig de Brún. He was an enthusiastic proponent of the necessity of translations from the classics into Irish and was embroiled in a lively dispute with Daniel Corkery regarding the nature of literature and the value of translation. This bruising encounter did not deter him from his work and he succeeded in turning many European classics, including The Odyssey and The Iliad into Irish, culminating in his translation of The Divine Comedy. This paper will treat of his unique method of translation and of how he managed to turn Dante’s terza rima into Irish. It will also briefly look at the other translations which have their own interest.

Dante ann an Gàidhlig na h-Èireann

San sgrùdadh seo thèid sùil a thoirt air na diofar thionndaidhean ann an Gàidhlig na h-Èireann den Divine Comedy aig Dante. Tha trì dhiubh ann, an dara cuid gu h-iomlan no gu ìre, fhad ’s as fhiosraich sinn; ach ’s e am fear as cudromaiche agus as ealanta buileach na rinn Monsignor Pádraig de Brún. Bha esan gu mòr airson ’s gun d’rachadh stuth clasaigeach a chur gu Gàidhlig na h-Èireann agus chaidh e an sàs ann an deasbad beothail le Dòmhnall MacCorcair mu ghnè an litreachais agus mu luach thionndaidhean. Cha do chuir an strì seo far an do shaothraich e agus an d‘rinn e ’n gnothach air iomadh saothair chlasaigeach Eòrpach, The Odyssey agus The Iliad nam measg, a chur gu Gàidhlig na h-Èireann, a’ tighinn gu ceann leis an dreach a chuir e air an Divine Comedy. San sgrùdadh seo bithear a’ sealltainn air a’ mhodh-tionndaidh fa leth a bh’ aige agus mar a shoirbhich leis terza rima Dante a chur ann an Gaeilge. Thèid sùil aithghearr a thoirt cuideachd air na tionndaidhean eile, a tha inntinneach annta fhèin.

While in verb-initial Old Irish, topicalisation was achieved via left dislocation and focalisation was achieved through clefting, the Continental Celtic languages achieved such pragmatic information structuring through movement into the left periphery of the clause (though the right edge of the clause could also be a target for such purpose). This paper commences with an inspection of relative clause syntax in Continental Celtic while outlining what we can tell about other movement mechanisms in the clause and then goes on to explore the architecture of the left periphery in these languages. This exploration provides some insight into the prehistoric development of verb-initial clausal configuration in Insular Celtic. Some comparative attention is also paid to the architecture of the left periphery in other Indo-European languages and it is found that Continental Celtic has a role to play in determining the degree of articulation to be reconstructed for the left periphery of proto-Indo-European itself.

The project EVALISA: The Evolution of Case, Alignment and Argument Structure in Indo-European aims to investigate non-nominative case marking of subjects, focusing on its development through the history of the Indo-European languages. In this paper, I will discuss the Old Irish data and some of the conclusions that can be drawn from it. Since Watkins’ influential 1976 article on reconstructing Indo-European Syntax, syntactical reconstruction has basically been a stranded endeavour, with five problems commonly being cited against it: the lack of, respectively, directionality in syntactic change; arbitrariness; simple form-meaning correspondences; continuous transmission of syntactic structures during acquisition; and cognate material. I will briefly present these arguments, and consider the claimed lack of syntactic cognate material in more detail. As a case study for syntactic reconstruction, I will discuss oblique subjects in Old Irish (i.e. structures where the syntactic subject of the sentence is not expressed with the nominative. Cf. constructions with conjugated prepositions, such as Wb. 1c12 Ni bo comitesti dó, ‘he should not be indulged’). Finally, I will compare the Old Irish material with Germanic, for which considerable material already exists, and discuss similarities, correspondences and differences.

As part of an ongoing research project concerned with using cross-linguistic data to help in explicating the syntax of wh-interrogative constructions in Early (Old and Middle) Irish, this talk focuses on a rather under-studied construction in Early Irish, namely, double-wh sentences. This sentence type consists at the least of an initial wh-word (cía, cid) followed by a form of the copula (which may be null) and then a second wh-word, as shown in (1).

(1) Imcomaircter dí cia bo can a cinel. ‘He asks her whence his race was.’ (RC 12:72).

This Irish structure may be readily compared with Romance structures, such as qu’est-ce que in French and Valle Camonica Lombard Ch’ e’-l chi che maja la patate? ‘Who is eating the potatoes?’ I will compare and contrast the syntax of the double-wh construction in Irish and Romance, addressing specifically the question of its cooccurance with a negative word and constraints on its usage in embedded vs. main clauses. Additionally, I will survey the somewhat sparse literature on this topic in Irish studies, and suggest that an in depth syntactic analysis of the construction may necessitate a reinterpretation of Irish interrogative clauses more generally.

In spite of what its title might suggest, from the outset the Dictionary of the Irish Language took into account sources of Scottish, as well as Irish, provenance. Citations from the Book of Deer, the Book of the Dean of Lismore and Foirm na n-Urrnuidheadh appeared in the original Dictionary, and further examples from Scottish sources were added in the revised electronic edition of 2013. The upper limit of DIL extends to around 1650. In the course of a new phase of revision, based on textual editions published since 1932, evidence from the Book of the Dean, Foirm na n-Urrnuidheadh and Adtimchiol an Chreidimh has been comprehensively incorporated into DIL for the first time. The use of material of known Scottish origin to augment a dictionary extracted mainly from Irish texts provides a unique opportunity to ponder differences in the language(s) of the two areas in the periods under consideration. This paper outlines some of the most significant additions made to DIL as a result of this undertaking and considers also how other electronic resources such as the Digital Archive of Scottish Gaelic (DASG) might be used to test the implications of eDIL’s Scottish strand.

The Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of the Irish Language has long since been the first port of call for those seeking to understand specific words as they occur in Old and Middle Irish, as well as Early Modern Irish and early Gaelic texts. The electronic edition of 2013 allows scholars to consult a more complete and authoritative version of the resource, as it incorporates numerous revisions suggested by research published in scholarly articles since 1932. Work on eDIL currently being undertaken will refine the electronic Dictionary further by revising its entries in the light of the substantial evidence provided by textual editions which have appeared since the same year (the date of the publication of the second fascicle of the original Dictionary). This augmented research tool will provide access to a greater degree of information about the broader lexicographical context, including specific semantic developments occurring through the thousand years or so captured by the electronic resource. This will enable scholars to use eDIL with greater confidence as a cultural-historical resource. With reference to particular historical concepts and terms, this paper will use new additions to eDIL to outline changing meanings and developing thought-processes and address ways in which the electronic Dictionary can be used to chronicle the history of a cultural world.

The revised electronic version of DIL offers the opportunity to interrogate systematically the Dictionary not only for Early Irish (Gaelic) words and word forms, but also for the English meanings and definitions provided. Moreover, the search function can be used to extract grammatical information which is regularly given with the entries. eDIL, therefore, is a tool which allows scholars to approach Early Irish ‘from the outside’ and to pose specific queries to the vast corpus it comprises. This paper will provide examples of the potentials and challenges of eDIL as a research tool for investigation in several linguistic areas, such as semantic fields and syntactic categories.

The advancement of Christianity across the West in the early medieval period was due largely to royal adoption of its central ideas and cultural artefacts. While secular rulers may not always have been fully engaged in contemporary theological arguments, they would understand how a new relic or church could help further royal power and, importantly, broadcast their political legitimacy to the wider community. In the highly-competitive political arena of early medieval Britain, possessing a sacred artefact or patronising a church gave a distinct edge over rival claimants. This was certainly the case for Pictish dynasts, such as the brothers Bridei and Nechtan mac Der-Ilei. By adopting and exploiting Christian material culture Pictish kings gained political advantage and re-shaped the physical landscape and communal identity. This paper discusses how these kings employed Christian artefacts, architecture and church patronage to exert their authority and expand territorial power.

My post graduate degree included the creation of a gazetteer detailing a specific kind of Pictish site known as nemeton/nemeta. A nemeton was, usually, a clearing within a grove in which local communities gathered for celebrations and to hear judgments pronounced. The place name appears across the pan-Celtic world from Ireland to Turkey. The gazetteer entries include geographical, historical, archaeological and onomastic evidence for each of the sites identified. The evidence on all levels demonstrated that in the vast majority of cases the pre-Christian nemeton sites of Pictland were concluded in the Early Medieval period with chapels. So where to from here? I’ve delivered papers on aspects of the nemeta at a number of conferences in Celtic Studies and I’ve begun work several times with publishers to turn the gazetteer into publishable form. Originally envisioning a guidebook I’ve come to the conclusion that something digital and interactive, to be used on a smart phone or tablet, is a better way of getting the information out there. This paper will explore the different options available - liaising with website builders and app designers to come up with the most efficient way to have the information available in accessible form.

This paper examines whether the davoch, a unit of land organization in Scotland that appeared in the Central Middle Ages, may have originated in the earlier Pictish period. This paper focuses on Pictish Class I symbol stones and archaeological sites from the later medieval parish of Inverallan in Moray, and builds upon these previous works of scholarship: Alasdair Ross’ doctoral dissertation and publications in which he mapped davochs within parish boundaries of the Moray diocese and identified potentially early medieval trends in their distribution, including around power centres, and Iain Fraser and Stratford Halliday’s research on the relationship between Pictish stones, prehistoric sites, and parish boundaries in Aberdeenshire. Utilizing Ross’ maps, RCAHMS site records, and the National Library of Scotland’s Ordnance Survey maps, this paper pinpoints new evidence that in the Inverallan parish, Pictish stones with identical symbol pairs correspond to individual davochs that may have been tied to a central power centre containing several hill forts. These results contribute to knowledge of why Pictish stones were erected and how the symbols related to each other in the historically powerful but still mysterious northern kingdom of Fortiu, and provide a template for study of symbol stones in other Pictish areas.

Popular interpretations of Celtic cultures found in public belief can be seen as a sampling of information of different origin. Although science is one part of the picture, mass media is more influental in creating public opinion and disseminating information. Specifically television may create lasting impressions and combine scientific research, popular interpretations and subjective beliefs leading to new illustrations of Celtic cultures. For this reason, television broadcasts can be seen as an independent category of popular Celtic reception. Characteristically for mass media reception these Celtic representations in television seem fleeting, snap-shot like pieces of knowledge. They become abstract visualisations used in different contexts to communicate the contents of the broadcasts. Other forms of popular Celtic reception, such as music, literature or movies act as additional recognition markers. Celtic visualistations and their combination with pop cultural forms of Celtic reception will be centrepieces of this lecture which is based on findings of my master thesis project analysing broadcasts of the Austrian public broadcasting corporation ORF acting according to the public service remit which includes the communication of science and education.

This paper discusses the ways, using the template of Eun Bheag Chanaidh in which the traditional Gaelic Arts, particularly Song, can combine with the non-Traditional trends in Scottish National Theatre, directly or indirectly influencing ‘alternative public conceptions of Scottishness’ in the Arts. American Margaret Fay Shaw, born Pittsburgh 1903, travelled through the Hebrides in the 1920’s and 30’s manually transcribing hundreds of Gaelic songs and visually documenting a disappearing way of life in the Hebrides. Together with her husband John Lorne Campbell they made nearly 30,000 recordings of songs and stories, now housed in the Canna Archive in Canna House where work continues to make the material accessible online. The NTS, together with Gaelic Associate Artist Fiona J. Mackenzie, worked on a devised piece of non-traditional multimedia theatre telling this story with an underlying message of the importance of preservation and development of our national archive resources. Original archive material and videography was melded with contemporary arrangements by a live band on stage. It toured throughout the Highlands in Sept 2013 to sell out audiences. The paper will be illustrated with selected sung, examples of the ‘unseen’ songs collected by Shaw.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/10288840/A-Little-Bird-Blown-Off-Course-South-Uist-review.html

The virulent critical response to the work of Marjory Kennedy-Fraser, a non-Gaelic-speaking Edinburgh lady who was bold enough to collect, arrange, perform and publish concert versions of Scottish Gaelic songs in the early 20th century, raises issues that become more pressing with the passing of time. With the gradual disappearance of the social context that gave vitality and purpose to the singing culture of Scottish (and indeed Irish) Gaeldom, the remaining artifacts – the songs themselves – have been taken up and ‘re-purposed’ by Gaels and non-Gaels alike. Drawing illustrations from the worlds of Scottish Gaelic and Irish traditional song, this paper will examine how ‘traditional’ has become ‘trad’ through a process of decontextualization and appropriation that signals the successful assimilation of Gaeldom by the dominant culture which we all – Gaels and non-Gaels alike – now inhabit.

This paper will outline my work on the Cult of Saints in Wales project, which is to edit a large and diverse collection of Welsh poetry composed for saints between c.1400 and c.1700. The poetry encompasses a wide variety of genres and styles which belong to both the golden age of the cywydd and to a period of gradual decline in the bardic system, both before and after the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the Protestant Reformation. The poets addressed saints from every part of Wales, and their work provides a fascinating picture of their cults’ ever changing importance, both in public and personal contexts.

The Middle Welsh version of the life of St Andrew the Apostle or Buchedd Sant Andreas Apostol has survived in a single copy, in the late sixteenth-century Peniarth MS 225. The scribe, Thomas Wiliems, acknowledges that this relatively short version of the life of St Andrew is incomplete. However, he gives no information about his source, and whether it was translated into Welsh from an English or Latin text. I will examine the text and scrutinize its language and context to see what light can be shed on its source, while questioning why no other versions have survived. St Andrew’s legend was evidently known in medieval Wales as suggested in the poetry of the period, however some significant details, such as the saint’s martyrdom, have been omitted from this Welsh prose version. An earlier, more complete version of his life, must have been known during the medieval period.

Bonedd y Saint is a collection of pedigrees of saints from medieval Wales. It is extant in over 60 manuscripts ranging from the late 13th to the end of the 18th century. It is one of the most important hagiographical sources to survive from medieval Wales, yet its background, date and place of origin have never been thoroughly investigated. In this paper, which draws on a new edition of Bonedd y Saint currently in preparation, I shall examine these questions afresh. There will be a particular focus on the geographical interests of the anonymous author of Bonedd y Saint.

Looking at Old and Middle Irish poetry, the reader or listener will encounter them in many places: chevilles, ‘a meaningless or redundant word or phrase inserted to round off a sentence or complete a verse’, to quote the definition as it is found in the Oxford English Dictionary. A more precise description has been given by Daniel F. Melia in his article ‘“Empty Figures” in Irish Syllabic Poetry’ where he defines chevilles as ‘short phrases filling out part of a line, usually the end, and fulfilling metrical and prosodic requirements, but frequently having little meaning’. This paper aims to revisit Melia’s article on this poetic and metrical element in Irish poetry and will present a collection of chevilles from Old and Middle Irish poetry. It will be discussed whether certain formulaic expressions are found more frequently than others and how and when chevilles are employed within the structure of the verse, especially regarding rhyme.

Labels in their closeness to definitions are sometimes a blindfold that only close description can lift. When philologists characterize words or phrases within a poem as ‘filler,’ they relegate them to insignificance, and sequester them as alien material, used to ‘make meter’. Cheville has a foundational role in the editorial tradition of Old Irish, and still appears early in introductory grammars: ‘This is a so-called cheville, or a phrase that is more or less meaningless in the context of the sentence, but which is needed in a poem to achieve rhyme and the necessary number of syllables’ (Stifter 2006:71-2). Used continuously in scholarship since the mid-nineteenth century, this term groups together and sets aside certain asyndetic phrases found in the third line of quatrains such as those by the 8th century Blathmac mac con Brettan together with those in later medieval poetry. What does the choice of cheville, rather than ‘interjection’ or ‘parenthetical’ or ‘aside,’ indicate about the early scholarly reception of these texts? And what might this syntactically alienable material and its usual place within the quatrain indicate about the intentions of the poets? Were chevilles promissory notes, or invitations to improvements?

In an article published in 1996, Proinsias MacCana identified and described a number of narrative openers and progress markers commonly found in early Irish prose texts. Since the publication of his article on this topic, very little research has been conducted on the structure and potential function of narrative openers. Using MacCana’s article as a departure point, I will explore the possibility that narrative openers contain useful information both for the audience, and the scholar interested in literary analysis. Narrative openers could perhaps be used to identify possible textual interpolations; it might also be possible for specific openers to change in both usage and structure over time, which might contribute to our ability to date early Irish texts.

Pliny the Elder was born into the Roman colonization of northern Italy in the artificially created Roman province of Gallia transpadana in 23 A.D. He had a traditional Roman education in Rome, served in the Roman army and was also part of Rome’s imperial administration. As such, his view of the world around him was primarily romanocentric. Pliny the Elder was posted to several areas of the Roman empire, other than his native northern Italy, where he came into contact with native Celtic populations. It is clear that Pliny the Elder knew who Celts were when he saw and dealt with them, but because the Naturalis historia is an encyclopedia much more than it is descriptive prose, as previous Helleno-Roman authors had composed before him, it is far from clear who many of the people he mentioned actually were. This paper continues the present researcher’s inquiry into what may be learned from the names of Celtic peoples and any patterns that emerge in naming and naming conventions concerning Celtic peoples in the Naturalis historia of Pliny the Elder, as well as whether these names provide the researcher with further information concerning ancient Celtic society and culture.

The interaction between southern Scotland and the Roman world has been the subject of many a paper in the past two centuries. In recent years, it has been acknowledged how context is a deciding, and somewhat missing, factor in many existing analyses. The nature of the native populations and their different approaches to the cultural practices of their new neighbours are necessary to understand the interaction between natives and Romans, and the subsequent changes which threw the native groups on the path to kingship. This paper presents some of the results from an on-going analysis of the landscape patterns and material culture of South-West Scotland, largely based on RCAHMS records and published excavation reports. In particular it will focus on the potential for differing attitudes to the Roman world, as preserved in the archaeological record of the region, with particular attention to: settlement morphology, distribution and location; and to the evidence for contact and trade preserved in the material culture assemblages from the excavated sites of the region. Attention will be drawn to three case study areas in Dumfriesshire, Kirkcudbrightshire, Wigtownshire and Ayrshire, which will be compared to each other and to the wider context of the British Isles.

Interest in the social and historical context of the Táin has focussed on the fourth to fifth centuries (prehistoric background) or the eighth to ninth centuries (monastic provenance). Including in my approach the eleventh- and twelfth-century additions to Recension I and the interpolations by H, I shall present examples of allusions to contemporary matters from the Old Irish period to the twelfth century.

The socially dysfunctional aspects of Cú Chulainn as he is portrayed in Táin Bó Cúailnge have increasingly come to the fore in recent scholarship, and his shapeshifting battle-rage has become emblematic of the violent excess he is said to represent. The present paper takes as its starting-point a series of influential studies by Kim McCone in which Irish authors’ ambivalence regarding Cú Chulainn is linked to clerical hostility towards the institution of the fían. McCone has proposed that beneath the extant narratives about Cú Chulainn’s heroic initiation, especially in the ‘boyhood deeds’ section of Táin Bó Cúailnge, lies a ‘partially submerged tradition’ in which he underwent a youthful phase as a member of a fían before rejoining settled society. Focusing on the first recension of the Táin, my paper will suggest a different interpretation by examining how the various allusions to fénnidecht in Cú Chulainn’s career have been woven together in the extant narrative.

It is astonishing but perhaps no coincidence that one of the most renowned characters in early Irish literature, Cú Chulainn, stands out physically because he lacks a beard. Despite his highly esteemed status amongst his own people, the problematic issue of his beardless face can lead to Cú Chulainn’s identity as an adult male – and hence as an honourable opponent - being questioned by his Connacht adversaries. Since this aspect of the hero has never been addressed in its own right, this paper will examine on what narrative levels (description and/or spoken discourse amongst other characters), at which points in the texts and for what possible aim(s) this ‘flaw’ is pointed out in TBC I and II. By contextualising Cú Chulainn’s beardlessness with that of other Irish heroes such as King Conaire, the importance the growth of facial hair held for literary characters can be shown and it can be examined what role this motif played in constructing and/or deconstructing a particular character. Through such close readings, basic questions about the discoursive construction of heroic identities in medieval Irish texts will be raised in relation to TBC I and II.

In 1971 David Greene and Proinsias Mac Cana reignited the debate about the ‘authenticity’ of the Gododdin and similar poems. How valid were the arguments for and against? After forty years are we any further on?

The Book of Aneirin has been the object of intensive investigation for almost a century, and many have sought to interpret its contents by consulting various external evidence: other literary sources from Wales have been scanned, and historical sources concerning Britons and Anglo-Saxons in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages have been taken into account. However, in the quest for a better understanding of the Book of Aneirin, not enough attention has been paid to the fact that the Book of Aneirin essentially contains heroic poetry and that heroic poetry is subject to its own laws, which are quite different from the laws that govern, say, annals and chronicles. In my paper I will discuss other European traditions of heroic poetry from Ireland and Scotland, Iceland and Scandinavia, the South Slavic area, and Ancient Greece. I hope to show that these traditions, which are partly oral traditions or bear traces of oral traditions, can throw new light on the Book of Aneirin and the curious structure of the text(s) contained in it.

Derbynnir yn gyffredinol y nodweddir llenyddiaeth Gymraeg y Canol Oesoedd gan ddiffyg cerddi cryf eu naratif. Serch hynny, ymddengys nad yw sawl cerdd gynnar am frwydrau, ac yn enwedig Gweith Argoet Llwyfein, yn cadw at y patrwm hwn. Yn y papur yma, gwnaf ddefnydd o’r model am astudio naratif a ddatblygir gan ‘Language in the Inner City’ William Labov er mwyn ymchwilio union natur naratif yn y cyfryw gerddi, ac yn gwrthgyferbynnu hyn â’r cerddi brwydr cryf eu naratif a geir yn Hen Saesneg, megis ‘The Finnsburg Fragment’ a Brwydr Brunanburh. Canolbwyntiaf ar ddialog, defnydd adferfau a chysyllteiriau amserol, a phwysigrwydd tymp a modd. Ym mob un o’r nodweddion hyn, fe geir gwahaniaethau sylweddol rhwng y cerddi Cymraeg a’r rhai Saesneg, ond ni sylwir arnynt yn aml iawn pan edrychwn ar y ddwy lenyddiaeth ar eu pennau’u hunain. Yn groes i’r ddadl na cheir naratif o gwbl mewn llenyddiaeth Gymraeg Canol, dadleuaf fod gan farddoniaeth gynnar Gymraeg ei harddull naratifol ei hun a geir mewn llawer o’r cerddi Cymraeg sy’n adrodd straeon. Trwy gyferbynnu y cerddi hyn yn gynhyrchiol, fel y gwnaeth Sarah Higley â’r farddoniaeth elegeiog, hoffwn amlygu’r nodweddion naratif neilltuol a geir yn y ddau draddodiad barddonol.

Narrative in Early Welsh and Old English Battle Poetry: A Study in Contrasts

Medieval Welsh literature is known for its lack of strongly narrative poems. Despite this, certain early battle poems, most especially Gweith Argoet Llwyfein (‘The Battle of Argoet Llwyfein’), appear to break this pattern. In this paper, I make use of the narrative model developed in Labov’s ‘Language in the Inner City’ to investigate the nature of narrative in such poems, and bring this into productive contrast with the powerful narrative current found in Old English poems on similar subjects, such as ‘The Finnsburg Fragment’ and ‘The Battle of Brunanburh’. I focus in particular on dialogue, the use of temporal adverbs and other temporal markers, and the importance of tense and mood. In all of these areas, there are significant differences between the Welsh and Old English material, but these features often go unnoticed when we view the literatures in isolation. Far from lacking narrative entirely, I argue that early Welsh poetry has its own distinct narrative style, which occurs throughout Welsh poems which relate stories. By productively contrasting the poems, as Sarah Higley has done with the elegiac poetry, I aim to highlight more clearly the peculiar narrative features of the respective poetic traditions.

Medieval Irish genealogies are the most extensive in Europe, and more developed, and better organised than the whole Old Testament corpus of genealogy (on which they are modelled). Thus, they are a superb laboratory. In their classic presentation they are tied to the Leabhar Gabhála, a scholastic unifying myth that binds all the dynasties and aristocratic lineages of early medieval Ireland into a single, if status-variable, web of kinship. I propose to look how all this was before the Leabhar Gabhála myth took hold, and try to see how origins and genealogy were managed.

Welsh genealogical texts preserved in late medieval manuscripts are most often viewed with a mild suspicion by modern scholars, who recognise the evidential value of such texts but who nevertheless usually remain restrained from discussing the precise circumstances of their medieval origins. However, a sufficiently large number of high quality witnesses to the text sometimes known as ‘Hanesyn Hen’ genealogies survive to enable something to be said not only about the state of the putative ‘original’ thirteenth-century text, but also about the particular vision of Welsh history presented therein. The evidence suggests that the ‘Hanesyn Hen’ corpus of genealogies was composed during the reign of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth in Gwynedd, possibly in the years either side of 1220. The formulation of the text presents a more nuanced view of Welsh history than the stereotyped format of such a genealogical text might initially suggest. The past is ‘periodised’ into epochs associated with such well-known figures as Arthur, Maelgwn Gwynedd and Rhodri Mawr. Moreover, the history of Gwynedd has been reshaped so as to accord with an emerging historical orthodoxy dimly visible in other contemporary texts, such as Breuddwyd Macsen and Pedair Cainc y Mabinogi.

This paper will explore the significance of Heilsgeschichte (‘salvation history’) as an organising principle behind the selection and juxtaposition of historical material in medieval Irish manuscripts. A range of manuscripts, including Lebor na hUidre, Rawlinson B502, and the Book of Ballymote, will be discussed. The relationship of salvation history to other medieval historical schemes – particularly that of the ‘ages of the world’ – will be assessed. This paper aims to shed light on how historical-theological interpretation had an impact on the arrangement of information in medieval Irish manuscripts, and how this in turn has implications for the way that we read and understand those manuscripts.

Recent onomastic investigations (cf. Anreiter 2001) pointed to linguistic similarities between the eastern Alpine and Pannonian cultural blocks, yet without analysing the language material in a more general setting. The present investigation takes up these details and discusses them in the context of onomastic evidence from the neighboring areas, including eastern Slavonia, which was a well-known Celtic stronghold during pre-Roman and early Roman times (cf. Majnarić Pandžić 2005), but underwent cultural overlayering since the third and fourth centuries AD, attested by recent excavations. These recent excavations point to a high level of religious and astronomical practices centered around Cibalae in Pannonia Secunda, which did not share the Roman identity. Could they have been remnants of the Celtic population? If so, of which affiliation? In an attempt to approach these questions critically, the paper examines closely the onomastic evidence in the context of the archaeological data, relying on Sims-Williams (2006) and Falileyev (2010, 2012), but adding details and evidence on the distribution pattern of Celtic onomastics. This enables identification of the eastern Slavonian developments and sheds light on the Pannonian linguistic type.

This article will look at the name ’Picti, traditionally regarded as deriving from Roman soldiers’ folklore interpreted as Latin picti ’the painteds’ seemingly as a garbled form from a local native language (probably P-Celtic), and seeks to offer a different interpretation from within Celtic.

Poland’s accession to the EU in 2004 resulted in estimated 800,000 Polish workers emigrating to the United Kingdom (Longhi, Rokicka 2012). With over 18,000 residents, Poles represent the most numerous non-UK born group living in an officially bilingual Wales (Migration Observatory, 2014), in particular in Llanelli (Carmarthenshire), Wrexham (Clwyd) and Cardiff (Glamorgan). While some migrants in Wales open up to the local Welsh community by organizing events which emphasize their Polish identity, such as celebrating Polish Independence Day, Polish parties, Sunday dinners or by promoting Polish music (Wróbel 2014), a small minority attempt to assimilate to the minority Welsh language community in Wales, either by enrolling in Welsh for Adults classes or picking by up the language from their Welsh friends and family, thus beginning the journey toward becoming ‘new’ speakers of Welsh. The paper will focus on how adult Poles are engaging with the acquisition of Welsh, the obstacles they face in the process of language learning and their beliefs concerning the opportunities that the knowledge of the Welsh language and its culture may provide them. This research examines especially the ideologies of language such users of Welsh hold, and how these ideologies influence their use and engagement with the language.

A ‘heritage language’ is a language which was learned in the home but never developed to full proficiency. It may be considered both an incompletely acquired first language and a first language which has suffered attrition in the adult language system. The pressure to prioritize another, community-dominant language is often responsible for the speaker’s non-native proficiency in this first language. In Celtic linguistics, these speakers are frequently referred to as ‘semi-speakers’. Understanding the consequences of this atypical acquisition process is valuable for more than just scientific interest; there are obvious implications for the language classroom as well. Heritage speakers of Welsh grow up dominant in English, but with a poorly understood foundation in Welsh that leads to an adult Welsh proficiency which is neither fully native nor similar to that of an L2 learner. When those adult heritage speakers are found in the language classroom, a familiarity with the patterns which are recurrent in heritage Welsh may make a difference to eventual learning outcomes. This paper will present the findings of a long-term project which built a corpus of heritage Welsh narrative samples, with a particular focus on verb forms and their complements as they diverge from native speaker norms.

Wales, as many of the Celtic nations, finds its native, minority language co-existing with the English language. One result of this language contact is that many Welsh speakers choose to code switch, that is to use their two languages in the same utterance or conversation. Authors who are part of this bilingual society may choose to include this element in their texts. The study of code switching in literature has to date mostly focused on Spanish-English code switching. However, Welsh literature has much to offer this area of research, although this is a very new field of interest. My current research combines aspects of more traditional literary criticism with the more quantitative methods used in linguistics. By analysing the code switching in the texts, I reveal some patterns or tendencies of usage, and find some common themes between the texts which might be linked to code switching. This paper will focus on one case study, Ffawd Cywilydd a Chelwyddau (2006) by Llwyd Owen, a novel whose language is much discussed and debated by literary critics and readers in Wales. I will discuss the role of the author, the characters, the society and the reader in code switching in literature.

In the absence of extra-community norming via Gaelic literacy or regular exposure to dialects closer to more ‘standard’ forms of Gaelic, the Gaelic spoken in the latter half of the 20th century by the former fisherfolk of East Sutherland showed considerable geographical distinctiveness, rampant individual variation, and a good many changes in progress on all levels, phonological, lexical, grammatical, and syntactic. Some such changes arose from language contact, some from structural compromise processes, some from structural decay, some from analogical processes. One rather striking analogical process in East Sutherland Gaelic involved initial mutation in nasalization: among younger Embo speakers especially, there was increasing carry-over to verbs in the initial sibilant /š-/ of a mutational process originally restricted to nouns in that initial consonant. A good many other initial consonants already showed identical mutational results across both nouns and verbs in environments that called for nasalization. This was true in particular of the affricates /č-/ and /čh-/. In nominal nasalization after the definite article, initial /š-/ showed the very same manifestation that /č-/ and /čh-/ did, all three appearing as the voiced unaspirated affricate /ǰ-/. This symmetry in nominal nasalization seems to have prompted the emergence of a symmetry of nasalization to /ǰ-/ in verbal environments, too. This was contrary to the traditional pattern of retention of initial /š-/ in such contexts, still largely though not uniformly preserved by older speakers. While this development may be aberrant from the point of view of written-language norms, its appearance is analogically reasonable for speakers whose experience of Gaelic is almost entirely aural. The noun-to-verb transfer consequently represents a well-motivated extension of local mutational patterns.

Scottish Gaelic is well known for its conservative features, especially in terms of lexis and phonology. This paper discusses three conjunctions (mura ‘if not’, mus ‘before’, gar an ‘although not’) and their variants, whose history and significance have yet to be properly considered and assessed. By tracing the origins of mura and gar an (and possibly mus) to Old Gaelic, the conservative nature of Scottish Gaelic conjunction morphology is established.

This paper will examine the evidence for inter-dialectal lexical variation in the Scottish Gaelic material collected in the middle of the last century under the auspices of the Linguistic Survey of Scotland and published under the editorship of Cathair Ó Dochartaigh as the Survey of the Gaelic Dialects of Scotland (SGDS). The focus of SGDS is overwhelmingly phonological and morphophonological. Indeed such is the extent of this focus that doubt has previously been cast on the role of SGDS as a source of evidence for inter-dialectal lexical variation at all. By examining a number of examples from the published material, I aim to outline a methodology for the extraction of robust lexical information from the published data. I will demonstrate that an examination of Gaelic lexis in SGDS can yield important results and can also give a unique insight into fieldworker practices not readily available from other sources.

From the 1800s onwards an English-based orthographic system, an Litriú Gallda, appeared in cluster like fashion in certain parts of Ireland. From a sociological point of view, these particular scribal clusters are of great interest as they represent a clearly identifiable cohort of L1 speakers who are formally illiterate in their own language (or at best unable to write their own language) but productive and competent in L2 as demonstrated by their use of this orthography. To explain and accommodate its nonconformity within the wider literary tradition of the post-classical period this paper will focus specifically on the scribal cluster of East Galway and the Hession family of scribes. This paper will explain the genesis of this orthography and the motivations of its inventors, (as far as it is possible), and discuss the significance of this spelling. It is remarkable that although a significant number of similar yet neglected manuscripts survive their use has been limited to a small number of works. These manuscripts are of enormous importance to our understanding of literature (in its widest sense) as they demonstrate a fundamental change to the parameters within which literacy and the creation of literature functioned.

Thomas Stephens’s Literature of the Kymry (1849), the first modern, critical history of medieval Welsh literature, was well received by a wide audience, sparking his extensive correspondence with Celticists and antiquaries from Britain, Ireland, Germany, and France. Stephens thus participated in the wider transnational social networks of public and private knowledge transfer, through which, for instance, Irish antiquaries took part in Welsh scholarly discussions, such as the contention over cromlechau within the Cambrian Archaeological Association. Welshmen like Stephens, on the other hand, involved themselves in the Royal Irish Academy’s debate over round towers. In this, both the private and the public exchanges often presented foreign and domestic intellectual traditions as displaying particular ‘national’ characteristics tied to differing views of history, language, or Celticity. The outsider often presented himself as bringing a fresh approach and perspective arising from the difference in nationality. Stephens’s case is particularly interesting, as he was often contrasted with other Welsh writers, particularly John Williams (ab Ithel), and identified with a more ‘continental’ or ‘German’ scholarly approach. His voluminous public and private correspondence affords a matchless commentary on the construction, projection, and perception of ‘Welsh’, ‘Irish’ and ‘German’ scholarly identities within a transnational, European, discourse.

Fe fydd y papur hwn yn ystyried i ba raddau yr ymatebodd cenedlaetholdeb Cymreig yn yr 19eg ganrif i’r grymoedd economaidd, gan gynnwys diwydiannu, mudo, a thrafnidiaeth, a yrrodd cynhyrchu papurau newydd a chylchgronau. Roedd bodolaeth dosbarth canol Saesneg ei iaith yn nhrefi a dinasoedd Cymru, a rhwydwaith trafnidiaeth oedd yn cysylltu’r de a’r gogledd yn agos â Lloegr, yn golygu bod marchnad lewyrchus ar gyfer papurau lleol a Phrydeinig yn y Saesneg. Ond roedd pwysau economaidd y cyfnod yn golygu bod rhaid i gyhoeddwyr papurau Cymraeg anelu at gynulleidfa genedlaethol fel bod eu cyhoeddiadau yn ddichonadwy. Fe fydd y papur hwn hefyd yn dangos bod rhwygiadau daearyddol ac enwadol, a oedd wedi eu gwaethygu gan rwydwaith trafnidiaeth a oedd yn ymateb i bwysau’r chwyldro diwydiannol, yn golygu na ymddangosodd y papur dyddiol Cymraeg y mae damcaniaethwyr cyfoes yn awgrymu y gallai fod wedi hybu datblygiad cenedlaetholdeb Cymreig. Fe fydd y papur hwn hefyd yn dadlau bod ffynonellau cynradd o’r cyfnod yn cydnabod bod argaeledd deunydd printiedig Saesneg o safon, a phrinder deunydd Cymraeg, wedi llesteirio twf ymdeimlad o Gymreigrwydd yn ystod yr 19eg ganrif. Gallai’r astudiaeth hon fod o werth i’r rheini sydd o’r farn na chafodd ffactorau economaidd ddylanwad mawr ar ddatblygiad cenedlaetholdeb Cymreig.

The Welsh newspaper and nationalism in the 19th century

This paper will consider the extent to which Welsh nationalism in the 19th century responded to the economic forces, such as the growth of industry, migration, and transport, that drove the sale of newspapers and magazines. The existence of an English speaking middle class in the towns and cities in Wales, and east-west transport links developed during the industrial revolution, meant that there was a flourishing market for English language local and British papers. The economic pressures of the time meant that Welsh printers needed to appeal to a national Welsh audience in order for their publications to be viable. This paper will demonstrate that the geographical and denominational divides, exacerbated by a transport network created to deal with the pressures of the industrial revolution, meant that the daily national newspaper that theorist suggest would have led to the development of a strong Welsh national identity never materialised. This paper will also argue that primary sources at the time suggest an awareness that the ready availability of cheap British printed material, and the scarcity of Welsh material, inhibited the growth of a Welsh national identity during the 19th century. This research could serve as a rejoinder to recent scholarship that deemphasizes the influence of socio-economic factors on the lack of development of Welsh nationalism during this period.

Stained glass in churches usually depicts biblical scenes and images of saints. So what is King Arthur doing in a window in Llandaff Cathedral, or Bendigeidfran in a rural church in Powys? The subjects for windows were often chosen by patrons when they gave windows in memory of deceased family members, and from the late nineteenth century these windows increasingly depicted local saints. In some instances patrons demonstrated their interest in the early history of Wales by choosing saints with local or Welsh national connections. These nationalist impulses were usually tempered in First World War memorials in which depictions of George far outnumber those of David. Nevertheless the choice of scenes from the lives of the Welsh saints for stained glass was sometimes in the service of religious, as well as well as secular, politics, as Anglican and Roman Catholic patrons sought to establish their claim on the Christian origins of Wales.

Arthur’s presence in the early (10th-11th century) Welsh Saints’ Lives is an aspect of Arthurian literature which is often overlooked. His portrayals in these texts are mixed, ranging from his cartoonish villainy in the Life of Padarn, where he is a tyrant to be triumphed over, to his martial welcoming of Illtud, where the splendour of his court gives glory to the saint. In my paper, I will examine these appearances in the Lives as pieces of literature within the genre of the Welsh Vitae. I will attempt to demonstrate what place Arthur has in the genre’s wider understanding of secular power: in what ways Arthur’s treatment plays into the over-arching treatment of secular authority figures, and in what ways it deviates. Where relevant, I will draw comparisons with Arthur’s characterization in contemporaneous pieces of Arthurian literature. I will argue that Arthur’s reputation as an especially powerful and important lord had a unique influence on the way he was utilized by the authors of the Lives.

The whereabouts of Mount Badon, where the Britons in about 500 made ‘great slaughter’ of the English, has mystified scholars for over a thousand years, despite its later associations with King Arthur. Yet Kenneth Jackson showed that the place was surely in southern England, and perhaps Wiltshire. Emendation of ‘Badonicus’ in the text of Gildas and Bede to ‘Bradonicus’ would vindicate Jackson by locating the siege or battle at the hillfort of Ringsbury, overlooking the forest of Braydon and situated eight miles south-east of Cirencester. If so, Braydon would be the ‘B[r]adon’ of history, and perhaps the one genuine Arthurian site in Britain.

Forbhais Druim Damghaire or ‘The siege of Knocklong’ – a propaganda text from Munster dated to the 12th century. It describes an unsuccessful military campaign undertaken by Cormac mac Airt against the men of Munster and their king Fiacha Muillethan to obtain tribute. It can tell us nothing about the pre-Christian or ‘dark period’ of Irish history, which the author tried to describe, but it is full of fascinating accounts of the 12th century way of life, including medieval Irish warfare. Here we find evidence about military units, descriptions of bizarre weapons (for example, a curved sword and two hard five-forked spears), methods of military defence (starry shields surrounding the company), ‘special diet’ during the siege (drinking cattle’s blood) etc. Few of these accounts are no more than the holdings from antic or eastern sources, others were taken from the 12th century Ireland.

It has long been noted that there are remarkable similarities between Irish literary motifs of insular (‘happy’) otherworlds – most prominently, the ‘Land of Women’ – and motifs in Old Norse, Greek and Roman literature. Scholars such as Bugge, Herrmann, Much or Ellis have particularly emphasised Norse parallels to the Irish concepts in question. The parallels that have been argued to exist between these otherworld concepts in Irish and Norse literature include elements such as a location of the otherworld beyond the sea, its association with apples/fruit groves, the promise of immortality or at least a supernatural extension of life, and the presence of strong, supernatural female figures with marked erotic connotations. A detailed, systematic study of these and similar parallels between otherworld concepts in Irish and other European literatures is, however, still a desideratum. The paper presents the questions, methodological approaches and some preliminary results of the Marie Curie project ‘Islands in the West’, which is currently being carried out at the Institute for Scandinavian Studies in Munich and which aims to explore the literary, historical and mythological paths of reception that may link otherworld concepts such as the ‘Land of Women’ to a wider European context.

Of the remaining voyage tales, no one displays so much sun symbolism as Immram Curaig Ua Corra (‘The Voyage of Uí Chorra’). From the frame story of three sons born to serve the Devil, to their voyage to sea, to their return home, references to the sun seem to bind together these very different parts of the the text. In this paper I wish to explore why ancient symbolism could have been relevant to 12th-century authors, and how they might have redefined it.

In 1906, two Celtic scholars, Sir John Rhys and John Strachan, prescribed an abridged version of Agallamh na Seanórach, based on the text found in the fifteenth-century Book of Lismore, for students sitting for intermediate examinations (senior grade), seemingly unaware of the difficulty such a text would pose for learners of modern Irish. Nevertheless, Standish Hayes O’Grady’s edition of the same text (in Silva Gadelica) was studied by and read out aloud to IRA prisoners interned in the Curragh prison camp, Co Kildare during the Second World War. One of the prisoners, the renowned writer, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, has described Silva Gadelica as the ‘Bible of the camp’ and O’Grady’s edition of the Agallamh as the favourite text of the prisoners. This paper will examine the significance of the Agallamh for the identity formation of these learners of Irish and the influence the reading aloud of this and other texts from Silva Gadelica may have had on the language of passages of Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s seminal novel Cré na Cille as well as discuss the insights into Irish tradition Ó Cadhain gained from his experience and the experience of his fellow prisoners in the enclosed confines of the Curragh camp.

Myth is an often-contested term, the study of which has drawn interest from a number of disciplines including Celtic Studies. My current PhD research focuses on the previously unconsidered field of myth in insurgency warfare, taking as my case studies Ireland in the periods 1916-1923 and 1969-1998. Scholars have previously examined the deployment of legendary narratives (and their mythic resonances) for other-than-literary uses; this paper builds on such scholarship by looking at such deployment specifically in support of campaigns of political violence. The paper will argue that certain tales which survive from early mediaeval Ireland are dynamic tools that have been used by Irish political actors, such as Patrick Pearse, to articulate and illustrate their views of armed conflict within the physical-force republican tradition. Furthermore, this paper will discuss the idea that, in addition to the repurposing of these traditional myths, these actors have created new myths to complement the older narratives and show a continuity of spirit from ancient to modern Ireland. Thus, it will be argued, the republican movement can be seen to have established a sophisticated and self-referencing system of mythology that has been deployed in support of its armed struggle in Ireland during these periods.

Scholarly interpretations of Longes mac n-Uislenn, the 9th C. Ulster-Cycle tale ostensibly describing the departure from Conchobor’s custody of his concubine Deirdriu alongside the three Sons of Uisliu, have tended to proceed from the assumption of the pre-eminence of Deirdriu’s character within the narrative. This paper will evaluate a variety of past critical approaches, by scholars as diverse as Máire Herbert, Maria Tymoczko, Caomhín Mac Giolla Léith and Elva Johnston, which have advanced or concurred with this assumption, and will suggest that its accuracy is not necessarily supported by close textual analysis of the tale itself. Developing the Structuralism-inspired contention taken first by B. K. Martin (1985-6), that the narrative of Longes mac n-Uislenn is dependent for its success upon the contributions of a number of protagonists and their respective actions, or lack thereof, within the tale, this paper will explore its composition overall and provide a detailed reassessment of several of its key episodes.

At key turning points in her life, Deirdre operates as satirist and fénnid, challenging Conchobor and calling into question his judgment and capacity as king. Closer examination of these categories and their associated imagery illuminates Deirdre’s complex narrative role. One persistent characteristic of her identity is the union of opposites: Deirdre appears repeatedly as both victim and aggressor, both prey and predator. Employing direct imagery as well as the ‘virtual’ imagery evoked within a cloud of cultural associations, the tale is best read both forwards (for plot) and backwards (for interpretation of imagery and events). This analysis compares and contrasts aspects of animal imagery, the function of satire, and implicit references to age-grade customs in relation to the central tension between Deirdre and Conchobor. Specific examples include a riddling element in Celtic marriage ritual and the association of fíanas (as a way of life for young men preceding marriage and trebad, ‘settlement on land’) with wolf-imagery. Attention is also given to the symbiotic relationship between ravens (and other corvids) and wolves in the natural world as an external field of reference for the tale’s audience.

Mortal-Otherworld encounters are common in medieval Irish literature, and tales of a hero’s liaison with a ‘fairy mistress’ have been much discussed. However, in cases where the relationship between an Otherworld female and mortal man is focalized through the perspective of the woman herself, the meaning of the encounter is destabilized. Fand in Serglige Con Culainn and Derbforgaill in Aided Derbforgaill are examples of such women who provide the other side of the story about mortal-Otherworld romances. While both of these female figures are initially powerful, appearing first to the hero whom they both desire (Cú Chulainn) in the shape of birds, things go terribly wrong. Fand obtains her hero’s love for a time, but ultimately loses him when his determined wife Emer intervenes. Wounded by the hero’s arrow, Derbforgaill must first accept another man as her spouse, and ultimately, in one of the most shocking episodes in medieval Irish literature, must suffer violent mutilation at the hands of the jealous Ulster women. The eloquent laments of Fand and Derbforgaill articulate a female perspective on the perils of such mortal-Otherworld relationships. The Otherworld woman’s emotional speech shifts the ground of interpretation and suggests more complex social and cultural implications.

Dafydd ap Gwilym uses berw in a wide range of contexts, from its primary sense with reference to turbulent water, to figurative usages with both positive and negative force referring to speech and poetic composition. This paper will consider the relationship between these senses and some significant ambiguities in the poetry.

The medieval Welsh poems ‘Cân yr Henwr’ and ‘Claf Abercuawg’, both narrated by an elderly, socially isolated character, lament the loss of youth and virility though the interweaving of gnomic and nature imagery with the overarching narrative. The genre of these poems has been subject to much debate over the past thirty years, however the topic has yet to be approached from a perspective which highlights medieval conceptions of aging masculinity. The poems are overwhelmingly concerned with the denotation of the passage of time through physical markers, although their depictions take the form of a juxtaposition of past and present as opposed to a straightforward linear movement. Nonetheless, the effect achieved is a sense of inevitable forward motion, an unstoppable progression in nature and in the body towards physical degeneration. The loss of virility in the body (attendant upon the narrators’ aging and illness) serves as microcosm to the wider decay of the natural world. By foregrounding the poems’ concern with the physical loss of masculinity and virility in old age, it is possible to read them as a partial iteration of the Christian contemptus mundi theme.

In the cynfeirdd corpus as a whole there are a little over 400 individual occurrences of colour terms, of which more than a quarter are gwyn, an eighth are glas, and a further eighth are rhudd. The remaining terms, in smaller proportions, are can, coch, du, gell, gwinau, gwrwm, gwyrdd, llwyd, and melyn; and the much rarer terms blawr, cethin, ehöeg, ellëig, gawr, grai, gwelw, and porffor, some of which occur only a couple of times. The most interesting patterns of colour term usage are in the Gododdin and the saga poetry, where the bulk of referents are horses and features of the landscape (broadly understood to include water, sky, and weather). Within these two semantic fields there is a cluster of especially elusive, shifting, ambiguous terms that hover at the interface of white and the ‘cool’ colours grey, blue, and green. This paper will consider the polysemy of can, glas, gwyn, and gwyrdd in the heroic poetry, while also examining what the rare word blawr might have to do with Old French bloi. It is a small study in historical colour semantics and the philosophy of perception.

The development of a continuous vernacular history of the Welsh is a notable achievement of thirteenth- to fourteenth-century Welsh historical writing. The basic form of this Welsh Historical Continuum contained Welsh translations of Dares Phrygius, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s British History, and Brut y Tywysogion. The paper will give an overview of the stages of this process, focussing on some significant manuscripts and their social and political environment: Exeter Cathedral 3514 – in some ways a Latin precursor of the vernacular continuum, a product of the Cistercian abbey of Whitland. BL, Cotton Cleopatra B. v – the earliest vernacular manuscript which points to the existence of the Continuum, probably a product of the Cistercian abbey of Valle Crucis. NLW 3035B (Mostyn 116) –a complete manuscript of one version of the Continuum, indicating that it was current in North Wales by around 1350. NLW Peniarth 19 – a version of the Continuum which ends with an additional work relating to English kings, indicating changes in the historical outlook of the Welsh elites in the late fourteenth century. Jesus College Oxford 141 – a low-quality, informal manuscript in the hand of Gutun Owain, suggestive of the pervasive influence of this history on the learned elite in the fifteenth century and the changed circumstances of manuscript production. The framework offered by these manuscripts will enable a discussion of the development of the Welsh Historical Continuum, its growing influence as a canonical narrative of the Welsh past and changes in its political and social significance.

This paper will take a closer look at Dublin, Trinity College MS 515 (E 5 12), a Welsh product perhaps of the late thirteenth century. The manuscript is best known as one of the witnesses of the ‘First Variant’ recension of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, but this manuscript is also one of the earlier instances of the formulation of the ‘Welsh historical continuum’: it pairs Geoffrey’s story with Pseudo-Dares’ De Excidio Troiae Historia and some later historical material and king-lists, providing a roughly continuous history of the Britons from the Trojan past to the period of the Edwardian conquest of Wales. As well as discussing the manuscript contents and their situation within a broader spectrum of history-writing in the period, the paper will also consider some of the features of the codex as a history book, with reference to some marginal notes and glossing, and what they may tell us about the topics which interested the book’s early readers.

This paper will explore how people in the different cultures of Britain and Ireland interacted and exchanged ideas about the past in the eleventh to early thirteenth centuries, as seen through the additions to twelfth-century northern English manuscripts from the ‘Nennian recension’ of the Welsh Historia Brittonum, Historia Brittonum’s eleventh-century Gaelic adaptation Lebor Bretnach, and the use of Historia Brittonum in the important collection of Scottish materials in the Poppleton manuscript. The texts accompanying Historia Brittonum and Lebor Bretnach and their use in compilations will be considered, providing evidence for cultural interaction and perceptions of the past.

The aim of this paper is to investigate a number of folktales relating to Lewis place-names containing personal names, as they are recounted in the Ordnance Survey Names Books, in order to explore the context and transmission of these names from both a practical and theoretical perspective. The term folklore is used in a wide sense here and includes a variety of stories recounting how a place has come to receive its name or any notable stories relating to it. Some of these are hagiotoponyms such as Tobar Ùisdean; others relate to specific events that have given rise to the name in question, an example being Geodha Bean Mhurchaidh for which we are told that ‘The name is derived from a woman having been drowned in the creek’. It is hoped that this study will provide a greater understanding of the function of personal names as place-name elements. This particularly includes looking at the motivations for naming from a name-semantic viewpoint. The geographic area concerned is primarily Lewis but brief references will be made to material from Orkney and Dumfriesshire.

I have previously investigated the frequency distribution and proposed explanations of usage of given names of Celtic origin in countries where the predominant first language is English. [See Lazar-Meyn 2003, 2004 and 2006]. In the second decade of the 21st century CE given names of Celtic origin continue to be in common use in North America and Australia as well as in the British Isles. In particular, Liam, Isla and Aidan have risen to extreme popularity. However, girls’ names of Celtic origin do not appear to be in the same degree of favour as boys’ names. This paper will review 21st-century Celtic given name frequency and naming trends in Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland, Wales and the United States and regions thereof, as documented in statistical and popular websites, news articles, the increasing number of dedicated baby naming books and mass-produced personalised memorabilia such as bicycle licence plates and fizzy drink bottles. Known predisposing factors such as the influence of living and fictional namesakes and desirable phonological patterns will be identified, as will be factors that have led to decreased usage of recently popular given names such as Caitlin, Jennifer and Kevin.

In Airec Menman Uraird Mac Coisse the poet Mac Coisse tells a story to Domhnall uí Neill, to inform him in a concealed manner that the poet was harmed by the king’s relatives. The tale he tells is full of fancy names, not only to show off the poet’s prowess, but also to illustrate the role of the character. ‘Greedy, son of Possessions’ cannot possibly be very friendly, while ‘Pot, son of Crude Smith’ is extremely poor. In this paper, I will discuss the personal names in Airec Menman Uraird Mac Coisse and what they can tell us about the tale, the historical background and early Irish society as a whole.

This paper will trace in outline the hidden ideologies influencing academic work on Manx from the beginning of systematic scientific study of the language by John Rhŷs in the nineteenth century to the present day, in particular ideas about the perceived corrupt, impoverished or decayed nature of Manx, summed up in O’Rahilly’s infamous pronouncement that ‘Manx hardly deserved to live. When a language surrenders itself to foreign idiom…the penalty is death’; but also opposing, defensive tendencies to emphasize the robustness and Gaelicity of Manx. The main focus of the paper will be an examination of how these issues have affected the development of scholarship on Manx, and how Manx studies might consequently develop in the future, but consideration will also be given to the influence of scholarship on non-academic and revivalist activity in the language and vice versa, as well as the ways in which scholarship on Manx and its subconscious ideological underpinnings have impacted on wider Celtic studies. I will draw on my own work on seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Manx, especially the noun gender system and verbal noun constructions, as well as my own and others’ research on the development and ideologies of the revival movement.

Despite the status of Irish as the first official language in Ireland under Article 8 of the constitution, and current policies such as the Official Languages Act of 2003 which state that Irish and Irish speakers are entitled the same rights and privileges as English and English speakers, Irish is still in a marginalised position within the public and private sectors. Official policies have been criticised as simply lip service, or what Joshua Fishman, a language revitalisation scholar who was hired by the Irish government as a policy consultant, termed ‘a master plan to do nothing’. The establishment of various Irish-language media platforms has caused a shift in the linguistic political landscape, giving Irish a foundation on which it may re-establish itself as a relevant, modern language. This paper will examine two aspects of minority language media: how it may productively aid linguistic revitalisation, allowing for a constant linguistic exposure and socioeconomic rationale to learn the language, and how it may serve as a vehicle for the promotion of minority rights.

The Breton language is no longer as much transmitted within families and is no longer used in public spaces as it was before. Nowadays, more than half of Breton-speaking people is over sixty-five years old. This sometimes leads to the institutionalization of persons and of their social uses. In such cases, the lesser used language appears and people behaviors, for example denying speaking a language, reveals sociolinguistic features of common public situations. Prejudices about the language at different times of history arise again. In Wales, some training careers take Welsh language into account and language policies do exist for healthcare. Linguistic practices of both countries and their use in healthcare services, but also the sociolinguistic similarities, the different languages policies, seem conducive to the realization of a comparison. This paper will examine what representation people speaking Breton as a mother-tongue have of their language and what it implies in health services and care situations. Do language policies influence people’s representation of their language and to what extent does it change practices? Observations in retirement houses in Brittany, as well as structured interviews of professionals and specialists are the main data sources.

This presentation is based on a new comprehensive description of the pronunciation of the remaining Gaelic heartland situated around Gaoth Dobhair in north-western Donegal. Despite being the strongest area of Irish Gaelic in the north of Ireland, the phonetic aspect of the Gaelic of Gaoth Dobhair – along with its immediate hinterland of Rann na Feairste and Cloch Chionnfhaola – has not yet been the subject of a published holistic treatment. The published descriptions of Torr (Sommerfelt 1922) and Tory (Hamilton 1974) are wide-ranging but, crucially, show a number of features that distinguish themselves from the Gaelic of Gaoth Dobhair. Like Sommerfelt (1922), the description given by Ó Searcaigh (1925) is no longer relevant in the case of a number of phonetic aspects of a dialect which has seen numerous changes over the last hundred and fifty years. Explanations for the dynamics of phonetic change are proffered such as the emergence of [j] as the commonest realisation of slender r which constitutes the shibboleth of Gaoth Dobhair Gaelic. Recent modern developments are also discussed as well as the practical transcriptional issues involved when deciding between phonetic and phonemic symbolisation and variant pronunciations.

It has been repeatedly pointed out that English phonetics was influencing quite a number of Irish speakers, even when Irish was their native language (cf. Lenoach 2012). The influence is believed to be especially common in the case of Irish palatal consonants as English has no equivalent to the grammatical function of palatalisation present in Irish (cf. Ó Béarra 2007). Besides, urban varieties (including Dublin Irish) are said to be more prone to such influence due to the constant contact of the two languages. No attempt, however, has been made to describe broad and slender consonants use in Dublin Irish so far. This paper presents the results of the field study conducted by the author in the autumn of 2014 in Dublin and addresses mainly the issue of broad and slender consonants’ distribution in the speech of bilinguals with English as their first language, or L1. All informants are young Dubliners sufficiently fluent in Irish, i.e. able to use it orally and in writing as well as produce short monologues on common subjects without resorting to English. Both their Irish and English data were collected to ensure that L1 influence (or lack thereof) could be properly traced.

Today, there is much concern in and around traditional Irish-speaking communities that English is influencing Irish, especially in younger generations. These concerns are reflected in news articles (Gleeson 2015, Healy 2015) and academia alike (Ó Béarra 2008). Given that all Irish speakers are also speakers of English, and given the complex attitudes towards the languages (McCloskey 2008), these Gaeltachts provide an interesting case study of language contact. In this study, I investigated whether and how Irish is changing in this context of language contact by conducting a cross-generational study of native Connemara Irish speakers. I focused specifically on the phonetic realization of the palatalization contrast, a key feature of Irish that is typologically rare and not present in English. While I did find some potential weakening of the palatalization contrast in coronal consonants, for the most part, this study shows that the palatalization contrast is not changing across generations. I also found a pattern of /u/ fronting in younger speakers that was not present in older speakers. It appears from this study that while some relatively minor changes are occurring across generations, essential patterns of Irish remain well in tact.

When Johann Caspar Zeuss published Grammatica Celtica in 1853, he could be said to have had at least three immediate forerunners: the English physician and anthropologist James Cowles Prichard (1786–1848) with his book The Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations (1831), the Swiss linguist Adolphe Pictet (1799–1875) with his essay ‘De l’affinité des langues celtiques avec le sanscrit’ (1836), and the German founding father of Comparative Philology Franz Bopp (1791–1867) with his treatise ‘Über die celtischen Sprachen vom Gesichtspunkt der vergleichenden Sprachforschung’ (1838). However, as Prichard had died as early as 1848 and Bopp had moved on to studying other branches of Indo-European, it was only Adolphe Pictet who continued his Celtic researches in the wake of Zeuss’ seminal work, publishing articles in scholarly periodicals and corresponding with fellow scholars in Ireland, Britain, France and Germany. For the last sixteen years of his life, Pictet corresponded with a young Irish scholar who was then just beginning to make his name in Celtic Philology: Whitley Stokes. This paper deals with the twenty-six letters and two postcards from Stokes to Pictet which are still extant among the papers of Adolphe Pictet in the Library of Geneva.

Athlone Public Library holds a collection of letters sent by Kuno Meyer to Douglas Hyde in the early years of the 20th century, as part of the Irish Language Movement’s campaign to have Irish included as a subject in the curriculum of the schools and universities. The letters – not previously seen – shed new light on the roles, respectively, of Hyde and Meyer, and others, in that campaign.

As pre- and nineteenth-century antiquarian societies and their publications regularly imply, every European nation has a ‘golden era’; a period in that country’s past which is a source of pride, which has been deemed essential to the creation of that nation in the populace’s mind, and which is the focus of historical research. Many European nations chose this period during the nineteenth-century. It is the work done by antiquarians at this time, through translations and editions of texts, which fixed the idea of a ‘golden era’ both into national historiographies and into the minds of the people. Paying particular attention to Irish antiquarian works produced during the nineteenth-century, this paper looks at why the medieval period was chosen, how they went about studying it, why this period was so important to them, especially as there was little to no interest in any other period in Ireland’s past, and what they were trying to achieve by studying it. By means of contrast, nineteenth-century Irish medievalist activities will be set in the context of a broader European framework, looking at how other European nations used their medieval past and, in particular, why this period was so popular.

One of the most well-known clashes between an Irish saint and a secular figure is the conflict between Saint Rúadán of Lorrha and King Diarmait mac Cerbhaill of Tara over the disposition of a runaway murderer, Áed Guaire. Scholars like Tomás Ó Cathasaigh and Lester Little have discussed this episode’s climactic corporate curse laid upon Tara by Rúadán and Ireland’s saints, a curse elsewhere blamed for the fall of the kingship of Tara and for Diarmait’s death and decapitation. This impressive maledictory display, however, is constructed of numerous layers that rest upon the foundation of Ireland’s early vernacular law. The dispute begins over the question of sanctuary, a protection Rúadán grants to the fleeing killer and Diarmait violates in order to retrieve and prosecute him. But sanctuary and its transgression are only one aspect of the legal complexities of this tale. This paper analyzes in-depth the various elements from Ireland’s vernacular law that underpin and explain the events described in the narrative. In the process, the argument and its resolution make plain the proper relationship between king and saint in legal terms, firmly ensconcing the saint as law enforcer at the head of an idealized vision of medieval Irish society.

One major difficultly surrounding the study of medieval Christianity in the Irish Sea region is the scarce amount of evidence from non-Irish sources. Recently scholars have begun to draw upon the wealth of data locked up in place-names and saints dedications as a way to track the spread of saints cults across the region and model population movement.  The Isle of Man is geographically central in the Irish Sea region, yet despite its centrality has been overlooked by all but a small number of scholars. In this presentation, I contextualize various saints dedications on Man in the wider Irish Sea region, namely those of St. Cuthbert, St. Cairpre, St. Christopher, St. Abbán, and St. Machutus. I draw mainly upon toponymic evidence, plotting Manx hagiotoponyms in relation to those found in Scotland, Ireland, and Northern England. In doing so, I make use of the newly launched Saints in Scottish Place-Names database. This project is mainly aimed at data gathering. I provide only tentative explanations of the distributions found, drawing no concrete conclusion. Instead, I present original research in the form of distribution maps and suggest areas for further research.

One module of the large research project ‘Monastic Ireland AD 1100-1500: landscape and settlement’ is examining the apparent transformation from pre-Norman monasticism to the monasticism of international religious orders. The paper will concentrate on Devenish, Co. Fermanagh, Iniscleraun, Co. Longford, Inis Celtra, Co. Clare, Kilmacduagh, Co. Galway and Ferns, Co. Wexford. With the exception of Inis Celtra, the monasteries studied were transformed to varying degrees and at various dates into Augustinian foundations. Ferns, Co. Wexford was granted a charter c. 1160 by Diarmait Mac Murchada, king of Leinster, but none of the others were granted charters. Certain trends are emerging in relation to these monasteries which are beginning to clarify the nature of pre-Norman monasticism in Ireland and the extent of transformation with the intrusion of the Augustinians. The most significant issues include the continuity of existing power structures, especially the control of hereditary families and local lords, the foundations’ sources of wealth in their ownership and acquisition of estates, their relations with local bishops and the papacy, the veneration of local saints as a means of retaining popular devotion, and the singular landscape of island monasteries.

As a physical feature prominent in mythology, literature and history, the river Boyne was charged with a rich bank of cultural traditions that medieval authors could draw on. This paper will discuss medieval Irish literary sources that manifest some of these traditions. The textual history and relationships of these sources will be considered, as will aspects of the place of the Boyne in the traditional geography and hydrography of medieval Ireland.

While the narrativisation of place name lore is also known from other medieval literatures, medieval Irish literature is to the best of my knowledge the only one which actually gives a name to these legends: dindshenchas. But apart from the name, the dindshenchas still remains somewhat elusive. It has attracted little critical attention in Celtic studies, let alone in comparative studies, perhaps due to its difficult editorial situation. But despite this rather unfortunate situation, this may not be how the dindsenchas was seen in medieval Ireland. Not only is much manuscript space devoted to its transmission, recitation of place name lore is also mentioned in the metrical dindshenchas of Carmun as one of the attractions of the fair of Carmun in Leinster. In my paper I will address the discrepancy between modern reception and medieval attempts and outline some reasons for the obvious medieval popularity of the dindshenchas. What was it that made the dindshenchas so attractive for the medieval Irish audiences and scribes?

Any scholar of Ireland’s literary history has likely encountered more than a few academic assertions, as well as anecdotal accounts, of the tremendous feats of memorisation and remembering performed by the bearers of Ireland’s secular learning, whether medieval filid or modern folk storyteller. But what can we really say of the importance of memory within the secular learned culture of medieval Ireland specifically? How did memory interact with the culture of the written text and to what extent was it the force necessary to legitimise authority and a sense of heritage within the tradition. This paper will draw together evidence that demonstrates the processes of memory in action; it will assess how memory is portrayed in medieval texts, both explicitly and implicitly, and the purpose it serves in both the local narrative and larger literary process. This is intended as a preliminary stage in a broader study on the place of memory in the creation and transmission in medieval Irish heroic literature and the conclusions drawn aim to help further increase our understanding of the scholarly processes and scribal mentality behind this formidable body of vernacular literature surviving from medieval Ireland.

Variation in Breton morphology and syntax is less well known than regular phonetic and lexical dialect reflexes. Certain morphemes of the central, innovative NE-SW dialects appear to have spread robustly during the 20th century. Verbal syntax is described using a matrix with three constructions (1) simple verb; (2) auxiliary constructions (perfect tenses, copula, existential); (3) double syntactic/lexical verb (e.g. progressive), each in bare presentation (a) predicate, or lead-in presentations (b) subject, (c) object, adverb, etc., each in affirmative and negative and with pronominal and lexical subjects. Much verbal syntactic variation can be explained by the obsolescence in some areas of certain frames in the matrix, e.g. reluctance to use the RA do construction with lexical subjects, or even, reportedly in parts of Gwened, with verb-included pronominal subjects. Finally, a number of specific constructions are examined which are known to have variants, e.g. me meus xwant mond / DA vond ‘I want to go’, but whose geographical distribution is unclear. With the end of traditional native Breton speech now in sight, it is becoming a matter of urgency to investigate and document such variation.

Talmy Givón coined the by now well-known aphorism ‘today’s morphology is yesterday’s syntax’, which captures the fact that, over time, a relatively fixed word order (syntax) can lead to one word becoming clitic to, and eventually even a fixed suffix or prefix of, a second word (morphology). The Celtic languages exemplify this development very clearly (cf. the conjugated prepositions, e.g. *do-te > OIr. duit, MW ytt ‘to you’). While the developments of the individual clitics are understood rather well, it is less well known that there were successive waves of cliticization in the Celtic languages. That is, a first round (leading to the infixed and suffixed pronouns, possessive pronouns, and conjugated prepositions) was followed by a second (and in some cases a third) round, leading to several layers of clitics present all at the same time. This paper examines these rounds of cliticization in the early Celtic languages. While the focus here is on early Welsh and Irish, data from Southwest British and Continental Celtic also figure in the presentation. The goal of the paper is to synthesize the data from the different languages in order to allow some conclusions about the development and function of the various elements involved.

Categories of mental and physical experience are expressed in a variety of experiential constructions in Irish. These constructions consist of an experiencer who undergoes an experience due to some stimulus. The experience forms the predicate of the clause and takes an experiencer and possibly stimulus argument forming an experiential predication. Such constructions are often differentiated by the experiencer behaving as an agent or patient or being in an oblique case and/or marked by a preposition (Haspelmath 2001: 60). Irish is unusual in that it favours oblique constructions (Bossong 1999:4-8; Haspelmath 2001:61). This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of experiential predication in Irish (O’Neill in progress). The paper sketches the various experiential constructions and the experiential categorisations inherent in the constructions. We show that the constructions may be formally categorised according to their predicate (verb, noun, adjective) and argument (noun with/without a preposition or clause) structure, and that the constructions are associated with different categories of mental (cognition, conation, emotion) and physical (sensation, perception) experience. We pay special attention to emotion constructions and their alternations as well as the representation of such constructions.

References:

Bossong, Georg (1999) ‘Le Marquage de l’Expérient dans les Langues d’Europe’, in Feuillet, Jack (ed.). Actance et Valence. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 259-294.

Haspelmath, Martin (2001) ‘Non-canonical Marking of Core Arguments in European Languages’, in Aikhenvald, Alexandra & Robert Dixon (eds.). Non-canonical Marking of Subjects and Objects. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 53-83.

O’Neill, Gareth (in progress) Experiential Predication in Irish.

Medieval Irish heroes are well-known for having typical heroic biographies and character traits. Some of these are liminal births, facing dangers in early childhood, growing up outside society (e.g Ó Cathasaigh 1977) and frayed relations with society as a whole. They may indeed be dangers to the societies that they protect (Cú Chulainn and Finn). Some of these characters, or typical features attributed to them, can also be found in the characteristics of heroes in American Comics, such as the Irish Wolfhound, the Morrigan, or the Banshee. While clear inspiration has been taken from the early Irish predecessors, the American characters deviate in significant details from the Irish originals. This paper determines which features have been taken on board in select Irish heroes in American Comics from the DC and Marvel Universe. It analyses the retentions and deviations from the characteristics attributed to early Irish superheroes and identifies possible reasons for these deviations.

Reference: Ó Cathasaigh, T. 1977. The Heroic Biography of Cormac Mac Airt. Dublin: DIAS.

The heroic biography pattern is a well-recognized narrative type in medieval Irish literature and has been discussed primarily in the context of stories about the lives of warriors and kings. Where features of the heroic biography pattern are present in stories about women, this may be acknowledged in passing as imitation of the male pattern, though possibly adapted in order to accommodate the different female life experience. However, the various ways in which elements of this pattern are transformed to suit stories about the lives of women have received little attention. In this paper I examine more fully the narrative strategies present in the ‘heroic’ biographies of women. I analyze the biographies of four women in particular: Étaín, Mess Búachalla, Deirdre, and Saint Brigit. From extraordinary births to exiles and eventual homecomings, each of these lives follows a course parallel to, yet distinct from, the standard formulation of the heroic biography pattern. I consider the ways in which the biography pattern is shaped in each case not only by gender, but also by the specific roles of these women as wife, mother, consort, and saint.

Many Irish myths involve journeys, the classic example being Táin Bó Cualnge, which includes an itinerary that turns out not to replicate the list of places actually visited. While places mentioned in these journeys are often familiar, many are not. Such a journey is described in Scéla Mucce meic Dá Thó, in which Ailill and Medb flee Mac Dá Thó’s hostel chased by his hound Ailbe. This paper considers several questions raised by the route described for Ailill and Medb’s flight, including whether the places can be identified today and whether the path makes sense geographically. It also considers what we are told about a number of places listed that were considered significant enough to be mentioned in the dindshenchas, although the people associated with them are otherwise of little importance. And finally, in cases where the identification of places along the described route by Hogan in his Onomasticon Goedelicum do not seem plausible, alternative locations are suggested.

The narrative of the rediscovery of the Mabinogion in the nineteenth century assumes that these texts languished in obscurity during the early modern period, unknown to Welsh Renaissance scholars and antiquarians, and playing no part in the debates which exercised them (namely the revitalisation of the Welsh language, the translation of the Bible, and the defence of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae). In fact, many Welsh scholars of the period, such as John Davies of Mallwyd, John Prise of Brecon, and Siôn Dafydd Rhys, were familiar with these texts, but used them sparingly if at all in their work. Instead, they characterised the texts of the Mabinogion as fabulous romances, and dismissed them as false. This dismissal was part of a repositioning of medieval romance as non-threatening entertainment for children and the masses during the sixteenth century. It was also due to the obvious clash between the stories collected in these texts and Geoffrey’s Historia. This text provides a narrative which fills the British past entirely, leaving no room for the events of the Mabinogion. The dedication of early modern Welsh scholars to the truth of Geoffrey’s Historia meant that they were bound to consider the Mabinogion as false.

The purpose of the paper is to analyse the socio-cultural background of the Victorian Wales in which the Middle Welsh prose tales of the so-called Mabinogion have been connected with the Welsh folk tradition. In this regard, Thomas Stephens’s Literature of the Kymry (1849) proves to be a turning point, not only in attributing the Mabinogion to the national character of ‘a free, merry, and witty people’, but also in evaluating the significance of those popular traditions in contrast to the esoteric poetry of the courtly bards. The paper discusses the intention of Stephens’ reading of the Mabinogion in terms of the problem of popular education in Wales raised by the infamous Treachery of the Blue Books in 1847, then considers the role of these prose tales assumed in O. M. Edwards’s devotion to establishing the national literature for the Welsh people, or the gwerin.

When Lady Charlotte Guest’s three-volume translation of The Mabinogion was published in 1849, it was the first time that these eleven medieval Welsh prose tales were made available to an English-speaking readership. While scholars have focused on the fact that Guest was of English birth, this paper will argue that defining Guest’s identity as purely English may not be an accurate representation of her own sense of belonging to an imagined community. Indeed, her complex relationship to, and identification with, England and Wales shows how ambiguous national identities are, and that one can identify with more than one ‘imagined community’. This is of particular interest since her translation was part of a revivalist trend whereby interest in medieval vernacular literatures – and folklore – soared among the British literati in part owing to the idea that the essence of a nation could be found in its (albeit romanticised) past: this idea can be defined as romantic nationalism. This paper will explore Lady Charlotte Guest’s scholarly work on the translation of The Mabinogion and her relationship with Wales in order to demonstrate that her Mabinogion should not be regarded as cultural appropriation, but rather as the result of a Welsh romantic nationalist endeavour.

The paper is not so much on symbols of power as modern and politically motivated concepts but rather on the origins of both symbolic artefacts and concepts of power as related to mythology, cosmology and history of Irish (or generally Gaelic) traditional society. Prehistoric monuments and artefacts usually associated with kingship, such as inauguration stones, mounds and earthworks, are often reinterpreted when new ‘national’ or provincial dynasties come to power (5th-9th centuries). In some cases discussed in the paper (De Ṡíl Chonairi Móir, Lebor Gabála Érenn etc.) both literary and political elites reproduced tangible simulacra skilfully reconstructing their ‘authentic’ past.

Horse harness appears in the Irish archaeological record from the Late Iron Age, in itself an indication of social changes. The Irish Y-piece has been classified as a unique development in Irish Iron Age horse harness. As its function has not been understood, it has been relegated to ritual or ceremonial purposes. However, recent research indicates that the Y-piece was a functional piece of tack, with regular repairs visible on specimens. Its origin may not be Irish, as there are several analogues throughout Europe. The Irish pieces however, are made of solid cast bronze, with little flexibility unlike their European counterparts, and many are influenced by much earlier La Tene ‘pastillage’ art-styles. Therefore while the art-styles of the metalwork indicate Celtic European influences, they are interpreted in a uniquely Irish way. These factors would suggest that multicultural interactions were occurring within Ireland of the late Iron Age, leading to questions as to defining what exactly can be classified as Celtic within the artefactual records of the Irish Iron Age

Irish medieval tales, which form the earliest vernacular literature in Europe, describe the Iron Age in great detail and offer tantalising glimpses into an otherwise enigmatic period. In recent decades, however, scholarship has focused on the medieval context in which the tales were written, in part because of apparent discrepancies between literary descriptions and archaeological discovery. For example, whereas Navan Fort was once thought to be a royal site, the seat of King Conchobar mac Neasa at Emain Macha, archaeologists revealed a site used for ceremonies, not occupation. This paper re-examines the medieval descriptions of Iron Age Royal Houses such as Emain Macha and shows that it is, in fact, possible to reconcile them with the archaeological evidence. To begin with, it is found that some of the descriptions of royal palaces in the Ulster Cycle of tales concur with what we know from the Iron Age. Moreover, it becomes apparent that some tales describe the ritual killing of a king and his subjects and/or the burning of a ceremonial structure. In short, there are more connections between the tales and the Iron Age than generally appreciated.

George Campbell Hay’s unfinished long poem Mochtàr is Dùghall examines the Arab culture of North Africa during the 19th and 20th centuries, from the perspective of a Gael serving in the army of the British Empire in the 1940s. The poem remains understudied despite being readily accessible. The encounter the poem encapsulates, between a colonised culture and a minoritised one, raises fundamental issues as to the relevance of postcolonial approaches to Gaelic literature. This paper will examine Mochtàr is Dùghall using the work of Edward Said, especially his seminal 1978 work Orientalism. I will argue that Hay highlights one of the weaknesses in Said’s thesis, namely the lack of scope he provides for encounters between European and Oriental cultures that do not rely on an unfavourable comparison between the two. Nevertheless Said’s work provides a useful framework for comparing Hay’s approach to other European writers and analysing how the poet handles the coming together of these two contrasting cultures.

Chunnacas ath-bheothachadh litreachais shaoibhir agus brosnachail ann am meadhan an 20mh linn a bha inntinneach an dà chuid air a shon fhèin agus cuideachd air sgàth ’s gun robh e a’ gabhail àite gu co-aimsireach ri ath-bheothachadh ann an litreachas(an) eile na h-Alba. Mar thoradh air seo, bha nàdar de chonaltradh agus co-chòrdadh eadar an dà ath-bheothachadh, ged a bha iad a’ tachairt ann an cànanan eadar-dhealaichte. Thòisich cuid de na sgrìobhadairean Gàidhlig air an obair fhèin eadar-theangachadh, agus cuid eile air obair chàich eadar-theangachadh. Mus robh na 1980an air tighinn gu crìch, bha cliù agus ainm nan sgrìobhadairean Gàidhlig an crochadh gu ìre (bheag no mòr) air beachdan sgoilearan is sgrìobhadairean aig nach robh a’ Ghàidhlig fhèin. Tha feadhainn air sgrìobhadh gu càineil mu dheidhinn seo. Tha an fheadhainn seo amharasach mun t-seòrsa tuigse as urrainn a bhith aig leughadairean às aonais Gàidhlig is iad a’ feuchainn ri beachdachadh air ciall, susbaint is buaidh an litreachais. Sa phàipear seo, tha mise a’ dol le seo gu ìre, ach cuideachd a’ sealltainn nach eil an dol-a-mach seo fhathast a’ faighinn gu cnag na cùise, agus ’s e sin gu bheil feum ann air dòighean breithneachaidh a tha mothachail air modhan ùr-nòsach a thathar gan cleachdadh le sgoilearan nan litreachasan eile (ag obair àite sam bith san t-saoghal) ach a tha cuideachd a’ coimhead air an litreachas le lèirsinn a tha Gàidhealach ann an dòigh air choreigin: chan ann a-mhàin gu bheil an neach-breithneachaidh a’ tuigsinn a’ chànain fhèin agus eòlach air a’ chultar, ach gu bheil am breithneachadh a’ tachairt air sgàth mathas an litreachais fhèin, agus gu bheilear ga sgrìobhadh le spèis don dualchas sa bheil an litreachas na phàirt.

How Gaelic literature is read

The middle of the 20th century witnessed a rich and inspiring literary renaissance which was interesting both in its own right and also because it took place contemporaneously with a renaissance in the other literature(s) of Scotland. As a result, there was an element of dialogue and accommodation between the two renaissances, although they were happening in different languages. Some of the Gaelic writers began translating their own work, and others translated their peers’ work. Before the end of the 1980s, the reputations and status of Gaelic writers depended to (a small or large) extent on the opinions of scholars and writers who had no Gaelic themselves. Some have written critically about this situation. These critics have expressed suspicion about the nature of the appreciation that readers with no Gaelic can have as they try to investigate the meaning, content and impact of the literature. In this paper, I accept the tenor of this criticism, but also demonstrate that it does not quite reach the heart of the matter, namely that there is a need for a new critical method which takes cognisance of the modern techniques of scholars of other literatures (working anywhere in the world) but which is also studying the literature with a vision that is in some way Gàidhealach: not merely in that the critic should understand the language itself and be familiar with the culture, but that the criticism should be undertaken for the sake of enhancing the literature, and that it should be written with sensitivity towards the cultural tradition that contextualises the literature.

Ann an 2011, chaidh dà fhèin-eachdraidh fhoillseachadh, Steall à Iomadh Lòn le Seonaidh Ailig Mac a’ Phearsain agus Mo Là Gu Seo le Tòmas M. MacCalmain (ged a sgrìobhadh fèin-eachdraidh MhicCalmain mu 40 bliadhna ron àm-fhoillseachaidh). Coltach ri ùghdairean fhèin-eachdraidhean Ghàidhlig eile, thogadh an dà ùghdar seo ann an coimhearsnachdan air Ghàidhealtachd aig àm anns an robh a’ chànan agus dualchas na Gàidhlig fhathast làidir, ach eu-coltach ri cuid a dh’ùghdairean eile dhen ghnè-sgrìobhaidh seo, thug an dà ùghdar seo a-mach dreuchdan nach robh ceangailte ri obair na croite no beatha na mara, agus bha iad cuideachd an-sàs ann an diofar dhòighean ann an saoghal leasachadh na Gàidhlig an latha aca-fhèin. Anns a’ phàipear seo, thèid structar, modh-sgrìobhaidh, cainnt agus cuspairean an dà leabhair a sgrùdadh, cho math ri amasan nan ùghdar agus mar a tha pearsantachd nan ùghdar ga taisbeanadh, gus an dà fhèin-eachdraidh seo a shuidheachadh ann an dualchas fhèin-eachdraidhean Ghàidhlig. Mu dheireadh, thèid luach nam fèin-eachdraidhean seo mar shluagh-sgrìobhainn agus mar litreachas a mheasadh.

Steall à Iomadh Lòn, Mo Là Gu Seo, and the Gaelic Autobiography

In 2011, two autobiographies were published, Steall à Iomadh Lòn by John Alick MacPherson and Mo Là Gu Seo by Thomas M. Murchison (although Murchison’s autobiography had been written about 40 years earlier). Like the authors of other Gaelic autobiographies, these two authors were raised in Gaelic-speaking communities at a time at which the language and Gaelic tradition was still strong, although unlike some other authors of this genre, these two authors were engaged in professions which were not connected to crofting or the sea, and they were involved in a variety of ways in the world of contemporary Gaelic development. In this paper, the structure, style, language and subject-matter of the two books will be examined, as well as the aims of the authors and the way in which the identity of the authors is presented, in order to situate these two autobiographies in the Gaelic autobiographical tradition. Finally, the value of these autobiographies, both as ethnography and as literature, will be considered.

This paper will look at a category of Celtic place-name in Scotland which consists of a preposition + noun (either appellative or proper noun). An especially early, and relatively high-status, group consists of names which contain the preposition from which Gaelic air and Welsh ar derive. This includes Urquhart, recorded in Vita Columbae as Airchartdan, a place-name which occurs five times in Scotland, from Easter Ross to Fife; and Arecluta, the alleged birthplace of Gildas. It is probably also to be found in the hitherto unexplained Erroll (parish and territory in Perthshire), Airlie (parish and territory in Angus), Airntully north of Perth and Arntilly, Aberdeenshire, with early forms Erbentuly, Erbentoly. Other prepositions found in such toponymic constructions are Gaelic fo ‘below’ and Gaelic for ‘on, above’. The paper will look at similar formations furth of Scotland and suggest that there is a distinctive non-Gaelic dimension to many of these names.

The paper will assess the place-name evidence for medieval and modern Welsh-speaking in the English county of Shropshire. It will consider the distribution in time and in space, and will discuss whether Welsh-speaking in the county is likely to have been continuous from the post-Roman centuries, or whether a later medieval reflux is implied, as is generally supposed.

The Gaelic term Bealtaine for Mayday or its season appears in a number of Irish place-names, mainly townland names in the north of Ireland (and a few which are now obsolete). The paper will compare the topography of the sites so-called with what is known of traditions marking the season (the beginning of summer), and consider the various attempts to explain the origin of the term.

This paper discusses aspects of the linguistic analysis of the Irish and English competence of 7–12 year-old bilinguals, as presented in Analysis of Bilingual Competence (2014) by Péterváry, Ó Curnáin, Ó Giollagáin and Sheahan, funded and published by An Chomhairle um Oideachas Gaeltachta agus Gaelscolaíochta (COGG). The pupils’ bilingual competence is significantly English-dominant. This corresponds with the occurrence of pupils’ own descriptions of difficulties expressing themselves twice as often when speaking Irish than when speaking English. Features are analysed along the important continuum from Traditional to Post-traditional Irish. Lingusitic features of Post-traditional Irish, are analysed from the perspectives of language contact and incomplete acquisition in unidirectional minority bilingualism. These include vocabulary, semantics, syntax, morphology, initial mutations, phonology and pragmatics, as well as aspects of fluency and disfluency. In contrast, only a small number of features in the pupils’ English evince influence from Irish. Linguistic categories and overall competence show correlations with the sociological features of age, gender, level of television-viewing, academic ability, and proportion of Irish speakers in school. Given that the vast majority of bilinguals worldwide are imbalanced, it can be hypothesised that where minority-language speakers cannot but be fully competent in the majority language, they cannot but be incompletely competent in the minority language.

This paper discusses the methodology and results of quantifying and comparing the competence in Irish and English of 7–12 year-old bilinguals (born 1997–2003) reared speaking exclusively Irish by native Irish-speaking parents in the Conamara Gaeltacht (Category A), Co. Galway. These children represent the population of young Irish speakers from the densest and largest Gaeltacht area in Ireland where Irish is still socially dominant in the older age groups. All Gaeltacht areas are, however, experiencing a ‘tipping point’ crisis of social use and acquisition of Irish in younger generations. The analysis is based on the speech of 50 pupils in both of their languages (engaged in narration and language tests) recorded in 2010. The findings of this survey, the first comparative bilingual study of its kind on the Gaelic language in Ireland or Scotland, have been published in Péterváry, Ó Curnáin, Ó Giollagáin and Sheahan (2014) Analysis of Bilingual Competence, funded and published by An Chomhairle um Oideachas Gaeltachta agus Gaelscolaíochta (COGG). The results indicate reduced functionality and disadvantage in Irish (i.e. competence in English significantly surpasses competence in Irish). The analysis provides valuable insights into the complexities of the contemporary minority language condition.

This paper discusses the sociolinguistic implications arising from the linguistic analysis of the Irish and English competence of 7–12 year-old bilinguals, as presented in Analysis of Bilingual Competence (2014) by Péterváry et al. This comparative study indicates a bilingual advantage for the language not spoken in the homes of these young speakers and thus depicts a linguistic disadvantage for Irish. The paper offers an analysis outlining the impact of the reduced acquisition of Irish, as compared with more complete acquisition in English, on the social functionality of Irish in a minority-speaking community. The results of this and other studies indicate how the social prevalence of Irish in the community and the functionality of Irish in the social networks of the young interact with the language acquisition processes. It is contended that this competitive bilingual context results in a sociolinguistic interaction by which the minority language is subordinated to both the social functionality of the majority language (English) and linguistic primacy of English as an effective tool of educational development. The paper will discuss strategies by which minority-speaking communities might consider addressing this minority-language disadvantage in the central realms of familial acquisition, peer-group social practice and educational policy.

Here I investigate a pattern of allomorphy found in Modern Irish known as the dependent/independent alternation (bhí~raibh) from the perspective of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993, a.o.). I conclude, following Oda (2010) and Acquaviva (2014) that the conditioning element for this allomorphy is a complementizer, which heads a CP projection, the highest position in the clause. Assuming a standard Phase-based approach to Spell-Out (Chomsky 2001, 2008) in which C is a phase head, this is problematic because C and the verb should never be in the same Spell-Out domain, therefore, this allomorphy is predicted to be impossible (Embick 2010). I account for these data first, building off McCloskey (1996), by claiming that C and V are in the same Spell-Out domain in Irish. This is derived by a Lowering process of C to the verb in the morphology (Embick & Noyer 2001). Second, I propose that the domain for morphological processes such as Lowering is not the phase, but rather, the entire Extended Projection (Grimshaw 2000). Consequences for this proposal in the broader domain of Phase theory are then considered, and I show that making these particular assumptions has positive consequences for Phase theory at large.

I have researched the autonomous (impersonal) verb form in Irish language, focusing on the function equivalent to the passive voice in other languages. In this paper, contrasting a novel translated in Irish from French and its original version, I have researched which construction will appear in French text, corresponding to the autonomous form in Irish. I would like to reveal to which degree this form is used for the passive voice in French. As a result, the most frequent translation from French was the construction with a subject on, which is used for an unspecified subject (agent). Secondly, I have seen active sentences in the original version. The autonomous form translated from passive sentences in French has been found in the third position, some of which are accompanied with prepositional phrases which are to be considered as an agent in a certain point. It is pointed out that it cannot be used with preposition ag ‘at’ to denote an agent of the impersonal form in Irish, but other preposition may be used for the inanimate agent. Finally, I have studied the usage of other prepositions from newspapers in Irish.

This paper examines Breton indirect impersonal verbs (Hewitt, 2002), e.g. soñjal ‘to think’, krediñ ‘to believe’. They may be found with a third singular ‘dummy’ subject, the logical subject being a complement to the preposition da ‘to’.

(1) soñjal a ra din ‘I think’; lit. ‘It thinks to me.’

Data were elicited from two generations of Breton speakers: older speakers aged 70+, and a younger generation comprising adults aged 20-35, and children in Breton-medium education. Older speakers use these verbs impersonally in two-thirds of utterances, otherwise conjugating the verb like any other, as in (2). This pattern is consistent across all speakers.

(2) krediñ a ran ‘I believe’

Although the young adults use the verbs impersonally in 70% of utterances, individuals prefer one pattern over another, thus some speakers do not use these verbs impersonally. The children add to this picture: only 4% of utterances are impersonal. For some speakers, the impersonal nature of these verbs is disappearing, and they are being conjugated as ‘normal’ verbs. This is characteristic of the levelling of morphological features often observed in situations of minority language revival and wide-spread bilingualism, and is one area where morphosyntactic change may be taking place in Breton.

Eighteenth-century Welsh culture was deeply influenced and enriched by translation, mainly from English. This complex process affected both Welsh identity and the Welsh language. Combining Reinart Koselleck’s theory of ‘conceptual history’ and Michael Cronin’s postulation of the translator’s dilemma to either become ‘grave diggers’ of a language ‘by accepting borrowings on a large scale’ or maintain ‘the standards of linguistic purity at the risk of being misunderstood’, this paper surveys the development of the political concept of ‘revolution’ and efforts to coin a working Welsh expression for it in the eighteenth century. The concept assumed importance in England and Wales in 1688, its meaning evolved throughout the eighteenth century, and its use and translation climaxed in the decade following the French Revolution of 1789. Closely reading the first privately financed political translation into Welsh of 1716, the translations appearing in the wake of the American Revolution from 1775, and the political translations of the 1790s, the development of a field of Welsh terms for ‘revolution’ – from unadapted borrowings to coinage using native linguistic resources – is examined. The connections between the creation of this political vocabulary, the development of Welsh political identity, and the appearance of new literary genres in the Welsh language are also considered. 

Germany, in the middle of the 19th century: ‘Celtomaniacs’ and ‘Teutomaniacs’ were fighting an intellectual war with nothing less at stake than the emerging Germanic soul. ‘Celtomaniacs’, such as Franz Josef Mone, firmly believed that Celtic languages, and by extension Celtic culture as well, were the precursor of all that was German at that time, i.e. German language and culture were completely derived from the older and, by extension, superior Celts. The ‘Teutomaniacs’, on the other hand, were strongly against this view and favoured their own, completely Germanic origin of language. In 1853, in the middle of this struggle, Zeuß published his Grammatica Celtica, but despite the evidence that Celtic and Germanic are separate branches of Indo-European, some ‘Celtomaniacs’ persisted. One among them was Wilhelm Obermüller, whose only recently discovered vita shows a long personal struggle with the establishment, anti-fascism activism and eventual escape to France, return to Germany, and final escape to Vienna. This talk will illustrate his influence on and perception of contemporary as well as modern German Celticism and examine two of his major works: The German-Celtic, Historio-Geographical Dictionary and his translation of the Gaelic Annals by Roger O’Connor.

Today the term ‘Celtic’ is more and more differently used in the fields of archaeology, ancient history, liguistics etc. Before the institutionalisation of those disciplines during the 19th century, professionals and laymen (Celtomaniacs in particular) collected and cross-referenced anything that was Celtic-related. Christian Keferstein, born 1784 in Halle (Germany), was one of those Celtomaniacs. Coming from a wealthy background he involved himself in the studies of geology and travelled around Europe, where he became fascinated with the relics of ancient history. Between 1846 and 1851 he wrote a more than 1000 pages long trilogy about Celtic relics in Germany, where he tried to prove that the Celts were the Origin of Europe. In his conviction he goes as far as to doubt the authenticity of Tacitus’ Germania since Germanic people – according to his point of view – weren’t evolved yet. This paper aims to present the forgotten work of Christian Keferstein and wants to analyse some aspects of the possible motivation of his Celtomanian perception.

The Lebor Bretnach, an early Middle Irish translation of the ninth-century Latin Historia Brittonum (attributed to ‘Nennius’), is much more than a vernacular duplication of a Latin text. Extant manuscripts of the Lebor Bretnach - which range from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries - demonstrate significant alterations to the Historia Brittonum in both form and content via the rearranging, omission, and addition of material. While such variations have of course been studied, scholarship on the Lebor Bretnach has tended to focus on either its value as a source for reconstructing an earlier Latin version of the Historia Brittonum or its importance as a source of evidence for the history of the Picts (the focus of the greater portion of the Lebor Bretnach’s additional material). While not denying the value of such approaches, this paper will not focus on reconstruction (either of the Historia Brittonum’s manuscript tradition or of Pictish history). Rather, it will approach the Lebor Bretnach as a literary object in its own right, one whose transformation of the origin legends present in the Historia Brittonum creates a very different portrait of the island of Britain in the time leading up to the Anglo-Saxon period.

This understudied text, recently edited by the author, is the only extant example of the writing of Gerald of Wales to be translated into Middle Welsh. Extant in 5 manuscripts, in at least 2 distinct versions, this text describes the exhumation of the bones of Arthur and Guinevere at Glastonbury, long considered to be a propagandistic act by Henry II to discourage the morale of the Welsh. This paper will first discuss the text’s manuscript context, considering questions of adaptation and manipulation of source material through comparison with the Latin text. It will demonstrate how exactly the Welsh translators blended material from Gerald of Wales’ Speculum Ecclesie with additional passages from his De principis instructione, and discuss the effect of Latin exempla on Welsh prose style. It will argue that the version of the text in Cotton Vitellius C.ix, distinct from the earlier version in Llanstephan MS 4, is the result of reworking an existing Welsh translation with a later version of Gerald’s text. ‘Am diwedd Arthur’ is thus an excellent example of scribal and translation practice in the Middle Ages, as well as evidence for the reception of Gerald of Wales into the Welsh language from an early period.

The Dingestow Brut, one of the earliest Welsh translations of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, is on the whole a faithful, smooth rendition of Geoffrey’s Latin. Because of this faithfulness, however, the Dingestow Brut has attracted little scholarly attention – it lacks those startling moments of originality that so often characterize medieval translations. Yet this paper demonstrates that the translator of the Dingestow Brut does on occasion allow his biases to move his pen. Taken cumulatively, his small alterations form a pattern: the translator consistently heightens the wickedness of the Saxons and stresses the Christianity of the British. He even polices ethnic boundaries between the Welsh and the Saxons more carefully than his source. The translator, for example, slyly adds the words ysgymun ‘excommunicated’, ‘abhorrent’, ‘evil’, and paganiaid ‘pagans’ to several descriptions of the English, and he explicitly describes those Welshman killed by Saxon treachery as merthyri ‘martyrs’. Overall, I argue that the Dingestow translator participates in the long tradition of the Welsh and English using religious discourse to discredit and vilify one another, and that this ‘faithful’ translation has an agenda of its own.

Within the classicising mindset of many Late Antique Gallo-Roman writers, we witness examples of the learned minority appropriating the right to represent the alleged historical memories of the majority’s pagan past. Distrust towards demotic morality and civilizational aptitude – never very far from being uttered aloud by the Imperial elites – are explicitly commented upon in the fifth-century Gallic play Querolus. Ausonius’ confidence within his textual universe in constructing the personal memories of his slave girl Bissula and the Gallic pagi alike can be compared to the received Lucanic topoi of dark Celtic groves, and the development of these stock scenes in the episcopal gesta of the Merovingian Gaul. The vicarious creation of memories for the silent majority by the learned minority (with its mixture of Christian identity and a thorough knowledge of the classics) is not limited to narrative genres. An intriguing paratextual space for the construction of demotic religiosities is framed by the already-mentioned ecclesiastical writings and the scholia to Lucan and Juvenal, all pointing to creative re-imagining of the divinities worshipped by Gallic vulgus (implied to be changeless in an almost colonialist sense). The Gallic cult of Diana as a literary artefact is a particular case in point.

Christian communities have from the earliest times sought to define their collective religious identities through various commemorative practices. In early medieval Ireland, an important aspect of this process was the narrative, ritual, and liturgical remembrance of Christian martyrs, whose acts and passions set an idealised example of meaningful suffering for the faithful to admire and imitate. The purpose of this paper is to consider some of the ways in which this understanding of martyrdom as an essential feature of Christian self-identification is reflected in the Old Irish poem of Blathmac son of Cú Brettán, and especially in his portrayal of the fates of the apostles and the righteous in the second part of the composition (stanzas 245-258). Particular attention will be paid to the theological importance of the themes of suffering and vindication in Christian salvation history, as well as to their devotional significance in Blathmac’s poem as a whole.

History does not exist if there is no one to tell it. It is only through remembering and retelling (either orally or in writing) that it comes into being. The Irish (pseudo)historical works of the Middle Ages can be understood as attempts to shape the collective memory of the Irish nation by moulding the (either real or invented) memories of seminal events into a narrative which explains who the Irish are and where do they come from. This paper explores Gilla Cóemáin’s understanding of history in his historical poems written in the second half of the 11th century which aim at perpetuating the memory of past rulers and events to future generations. I will furthermore focus especially in the way in which the coming of Christianity with the arrival of Patrick is presented as a decisive moment which divides Irish history into two and colours the interpretation of the pagan past.

This presentation endeavours to examine whether certain groups of Britons may not have continued to speak vernacular Latin in the sub-Roman period for much longer than hitherto believed. Special attention will be devoted to south-eastern Wales: it will be argued that an early form of British Romance may have emerged in the area, and may have survived into the Early Middle Ages. A final comment will also consider the possible influence which said community may have exerted on a number of usages in educated Medieval British Latin.

The Anglo-Saxon ethnic terms Wealh and Bryt seem to have been used interchangeably and indiscriminately by Anglo-Saxon scribes in the written language to indicate Britons living somewhere in Britain. Peculiarly, whereas both terms could be used to denote Britons, they also differed in meaning: Wealh could also be used to indicate a slave or a foreigner in general. This discrepancy poses two unanswered questions: 1) Why did Bryt not have as many possible meanings as Wealh? 2) Did this semantic difference affect the use of Wealh in relation to Bryt and vice versa? I know of no discussion or subsequent answer regarding these two questions. I therefore examined the use of both terms in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Anglo-Saxon charters, laws, wills and letters, and the preliminary results indicate that the terms may not have been used interchangeably after all. I am currently analysing the presence of Wealh and Bryt in the etymologies of English place-names in order to shed more light on both their meaning(s) and use in Anglo-Saxon society. For this paper I intend to present and discuss my findings from the latter research in light of my earlier results.

English place-names in medieval Cornwall show that the Cornish-speaking (western) half of the county was a bilingual community from the tenth century. The paper will examine the kinds of place-names which occur and their implications for the Cornish-speaking community. I will compare the onomastic evidence with that of the Cornish texts to see how those also reflect the linguistic conditions.

Middle Welsh nouns have reached a high degree of case syncretism, and only singular and plural forms can be distinguished on a morphological level. With a relatively free word order regarding the distribution of subjects and objects in positive declarative main clauses, there seems to be no fixed word order to compensate for this lack of case suffixes. As a result, a clause with the pattern N-p-V-N is structurally ambiguous, and both nouns can either represent the role of subject or direct object. A previous study of Pwyll Pendeuic Dyuet (Harlos/Poppe/Widmer, Indogermanische Forschungen 119, 2014) has shown that despite this morphosyntactic framework, proper ambiguous clauses never occur in this text. All positive declarative main clauses are disambiguated by a lack of object-verb agreement in number, the position of the arguments on the accessibility hierarchy or their relative position on the animacy hierarchy. In this paper, I will test these findings against the evidence of Middle Welsh historiographical texts, to see if a genre with less dialogue, and hence supposedly more instances of agreement in number between objects and verbs, produces a higher amount of ambiguous clauses. In a further step, I will discuss the roles of the referential values of accessibility and animacy for the identification of arguments in structurally underspecified clauses in comparison to the findings in Pwyll Pendeuic Dyuet.

The rules for the marking of arguments on Middle Welsh verbal nouns are well understood (Manning, Lingua 74, 1995); what has not been explored in any detail are the pragmatic and stylistic conditions and effects of leaving such arguments unexpressed, for example the ‘subject’ in gwedy clybot dy uot yn kyuanhedu y wlat (PKM 64.11 ‘having heard that you were living in the land’). In this clause, the reference to the experiencer appears to have been deliberately left vague. On the basis of a collection of relevant examples from the Pedeir Keinc and Brut y Brenhinedd respectively, I will discuss how such phrases are processed and how their interpretation depends on co-text and context.

A recent study (Harlos/Poppe/Widmer, Indogermanische Forschungen 119, 2014) has shown that the semantics features of referents have a hitherto underestimated impact on the syntax of Middle Welsh clauses. It has also been suggested that the semantics of the verb plays an important role in successfully identifying syntactic roles. Taking up the methods and the findings of this investigation on Middle Welsh, I will present the results of a corpus-based study that aims at elucidating the impact of verbal semantics and referential properties in Middle Breton prose texts. The main focus of the analysis lies on the role the accessibility and the animacy of referents’ play, and on how referential properties interact with verb semantics in decoding the meaning of a given clause.

William Herbert (c. 1423–1469) was the leading supporter in Wales of Edward IV, the Yorkist king who ruled from 1461–1483. With his Welsh family background and his court at Raglan, William was a favourite of Welsh poets who sang his praises as a key political and military player in the Wars of the Roses. This paper examines some of the sixteen Welsh poems composed to William, placing them in the context of Marcher society, English political poetry, and Welsh hopes for the English crown.

A large number of Welsh speakers lived in Tudor London, more, perhaps, than in any of the towns in Wales. The Welsh gentry found patronage at court, while others found employment in the city and all were exposed to the effects of reform and to the humanist books and ideas which helped to support it. Many of the earliest Welsh printed books, including those by William Salesbury, contain prefaces, translations and introductions in English alongside texts in Welsh and Latin. A few sixteenth-century books, such as those by John Penry of Brecknock, address a metropolitan audience and are written largely in English. These texts are all early examples of Welsh writing in English and this paper will re-theorise the production and circulation of early printed Welsh books in London as part of a Welsh diaspora for whom the production and consumption of literary texts in both Welsh and English was increasingly common.

This paper will demonstrate evidence of hitherto ignored code-switching of words and idioms derived from Welsh in C15th manuscripts from the Welsh borders. It will question whether these switches provide evidence of greater contact between Welsh and Engish languages in this area than has been supposed, and also whether these contact phenomenon contribute significantly to the lexical and grammatical changes which occur during the transition from Middle English to Early Modern English.

The Faddan More Psalter, an eighth-century Irish manuscript, was discovered in a Tipperary bog, and portions of its text have retain a high degree of legibility. Archaeological discussion of the find has focused on the closeness of this find to Birr and on the restoration of this remarkable artefact. This paper provides a palaeographical context for the psalter and examines centres in which it may have originated.

In 2014 I presented a series of four related papers on the Book of Kells which examined the script. These dealt with the letters A, M and the ET-ligature and letters with extended curved-concave elaborations. This paper subjects the initial letters to a similar analysis and begins with a brief review of the earlier papers. The illustrations for this summary provides a direct link with the analysis of the initials in the manuscript. The constant predilection for variation evident in the script is also found in the initials as is the same ‘calligraphic imagination’. This and other evidence such as the occurrence of ‘clusters’ similar to those in the script, suggests that the initials are also the work of the proposed single scribe of the text. This is followed by the presentation of further supporting evidence including the relationship of text to initials, relationships between initials, diminuendo, justification of text, layout of pages and patterns of ink use. The script and initials in Kells have not previously been the subject of a detailed examination. This paper draws on part of my doctoral research which includes a comprehensive analysis of all the scribal features in the manuscript including the initials.

Insular art encompasses Early Medieval decorated objects produced across all of the islands of Britain and Ireland and as a term it is certainly less ethnically biased and driven by historical evidence than the terminology previously used – Hiberno-Saxon art. However, Insular art as so broadly defined also leads to a blurring or disguising of what might still be important regional distinctions. This paper will take a broad-brush approach comparing the use of different types of ornament on Early Medieval sculpture in Britain and Ireland and looking for regional distinctions. It will also explore how certain terminology has been used (Celtic art, Hiberno-Saxon art, Insular art etc) and has shaped this field of study since the nineteenth century.

References to the poet’s life and career crop up throughout the poetry Donnchadh Bàn Mac an t-Saoir (1724-1812) composed during his long lifetime. In the range of verse composed between his justification for his behaviour at the Battle of Falkirk in ‘Òran do Bhlàr na h-Eaglaise Brice’ in 1746 and the dignified reminiscence of ‘Cead Deireannach nam Beann’ in 1802 we see the poet as chronicler of nature, lover, panegyrist, commentator on community events, satirist, and political observer. In the various genres he turns to, Donnchadh Bàn presents different aspects of his poetic skill and reveals different information about his own situation, attitudes, and intentions. The paper investigates whether the biographical detail that is present in the poetry can be considered evidence that Donnchadh Bàn was, in fact, engaged in the conscious construction of a public persona that still informs our views of the poet today.

Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin (ob. 1838) completed the most famous extant diary in the Irish language, subject of the speaker’s ongoing researches. His Cín Lae (1827-35) presents the microcosm of an Irish town before the Great Famine. Because of its specific focus, one might conclude the text is inward-looking. However, Amhlaoibh is quite au fait with the external world. This paper examines how Scotland impacted on him and his output. The talk shows his awareness of the country and its people, together with its current affairs. More particularly, it demonstrates the traces that Scottish languages and literature left on his compositions and investigates these for the light they shed on the Kilkenny resident’s writing project overall.

Diarmaid Ó Crualaoi (? 1828-1901) was an illiterate tailor who in Muskerry of the nineteenth century composed humorous songs which are still sung in the area with pleasure. His son, Pádraig (? 1861-1949), also a tailor, learned to read and write Irish Gaelic and his compositions were directed more towards Gaelic League competitions and the publications of the Gaelic revival. This paper offers some new biographical details and an analysis of their work.

Tá an eilimint buaile ‘cattle-fold, summer-pasture’ le sonrú in c. 400 logainm i mBunachar Logainmneacha na hÉireann (www.logainm.ie). Is ródhócha go bhfuil iliomad samplaí eile de bhuaile i mionainmneacha nach bhfuil san áireamh in logainm.ie. Déantar scagadh sa bpáipéar seo ar bhunús an fhocail, ar an gciall atá leis i logainmneacha, agus ar shuíomh agus ar dháileadh logainmneacha ina bhfuil an eilimint seo. Cuirtear an anailís seo i láthair le cabhair léarscáileanna dáileacháin nua atá bunaithe ar fhaisnéis ó logainm.ie. Déantar rangú ar logainmneacha ina luaitear buaile de réir struchtúir freisin (mar eilimint aonair, comhfhocal, buaile + ainmfhocal , ainmfhocal + buaile, buaile + aidiacht cháilithe, buaile + sloinne, buaile + ainm pearsanta etc.). Dírítear ar roinnt samplaí i gceantar ard, agus, i suíomh ísealchríche, agus déantar iarracht an rangú teoiriciúil a mhol Flanagan agus Flanagan a thástáil: ‘theoretically it would be possible to divide sites into the two classes: the established farm where the cattle were kept in the winter and the location ... where they would be pastured for the summer.’ (1994, 33–34).

Flanagan, D. & Flanagan, L. (1994) Irish Place Names. Baile Átha Cliath: Gill & Macmillan.

The element buaile in Irish placenames

The element buaile ‘cattle-fold, summer-pasture’ is found in c.400 placenames in the Placenames Database of Ireland (www.logainm.ie). It is very likely that a great number of other examples of buaile occur in minor placenames which are not included in logainm.ie. The origins of the word, its meaning in placenames, and the situation and distribution of placenames which include this element are examined in this paper. This analysis is presented with the aid of new distribution maps, based on data from logainm.ie. Placenames which include buaile are categorised by structure (as a single element, compound, buaile + noun, noun + buaile, buaile + qualifying adjective, buaile + surname, buaile + personal name etc.). Examples from an upland area and a lowland area will be considered in detail, and an attempt will be made to test the theoretical categorisation proposed by Flanagan and Flanagan: ‘theoretically it would be possible to divide sites into the two classes: the established farm where the cattle were kept in the winter and the location ... where they would be pastured for the summer.’ (1994, 33–34).

Flanagan, D. & Flanagan, L. (1994) Irish Place Names. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan.

This paper will present an introductory study of the lexical field ‘moor, marshy ground’ in Irish, as it is evidenced in the general vocabulary of the language and in place-names. As such, it will complement previous analyses of the principal lexemes in the Irish language which are used to refer to land and water expanse, as well as border areas such as coast and shore where they interact horizontally. Although the main focus of this paper will be on the earlier stages of the language, it will extend its range down to the modern period, as it traces the primary and metaphorical applications and interrelationships of words such as cuirrech, enach, féith, fráech, grellach, móin, ríasc, sescann / seiscenn, slíab, tonn and turloch.

The Old Irish terms for ‘border’ (like crích ‘boundary, end’, cimas ‘edge, border’) regularly show their semantic development from the basic meaning of edge, end, limit (cf. MW loanword ffin ‘boundary, limit’) towards a ‘borderland, adjacent territory’ and then to a general meaning of a ‘(certain) territory, district, land’. The same shift can be clearly seen in Baltic and Slavonic as well: thus OIr. crích, cf. Lith. kreikti ‘to strew’, kraikas ‘underlay’, also Lat. circus, possibly comes from the same root (*krei- ‘to separate?’) as Rus. storona ‘side’ and strana ‘land’, originally the same word. It can be also mentioned for Oir. leth ‘half, side, region‘ (cf. Lith. pusė ‘half’ and Toch. AB poși ‘side’ of the different etymology) and Lith. kraštas, krantas both meaning ‘boundary, shore, land’, from *ker(t)- ‘to hack, to cut’; cf also Rus. krajъ ‘edge, land’. The association of a border with a bank or shore is evident from the use of OIr. imlech, bruach, or (cf W goror, possibly from Lat. ora ‘coast’) and airer, oirear ‘coast, border region’, possibly from air-tír. The common Baltic *galas ’end, region’ (cf Ptolemy’s Galindoi and Latv. Zemgale) can be found in OIr. at-bail ‘dies’.

The Gaelophone Macleods of Lewis were dispossessed by King James VI in 1598. The island of Lewis was subject to a number of attempts at colonisation by newcomers over the next forty years. The Fife Adventurers, a group of merchants and nobles from Scotophone Fife, established a plantation on Lewis in 1598. This had failed by 1602, was revived in 1605, but the native Macleods had driven the Fife men out by 1607. They were followed on the island by the neighbouring Mackenzie clan who succeeded, in 1610, where the Fife men had failed. The Mackenzies invited Dutch merchants to the area, 1628-30, but then had to fend off determined English attempts at plantation in the 1630s. This paper will focus on some issues of language and identity that arose between the various contesting groups set against this background of unrest and instability, 1598-1638. Some attention will be given to the evidence for language use at the interface between the different speech communities, Gaelic, Scots and English. Different ethnic labels were used by the groups for each other. How were these identities perceived? Did this contribute to the success or failure of their respective ventures?

Bha buaidh shònraichte aig Cogaidhean Ar-a-mach nam Frangach agus Cogaidhean Napoleon (1793-1815) air a’ choimhearsnachd ann an Gàidhealtachd na h-Alba. Shabaid na mìltean de Ghàidheil ann an rèisimeidean armailt Bhreatainn aig an àm, fhad ’s a bha an teaghlaichean agus luchd-dùthcha a’ dèiligeadh ri coimhearsnachd as aonais mòran daoine òga agus a bha fo chunnart ionnsaigh bho na Frangaich. Mar bu dual dhaibh, fhreagair bàird ris an t-suidheachadh a bha man coinneamh nan dàin agus dh’fhàgadh pailteas bhàrdachd mar theisteanas air bliadhnaichean 1793-1815. A dh’aindeoin ’s gum b’ e an cogadh agus seirbheis nan Gàidheal san arm aon dha na prìomh chuspairean a bh’ aig bàird Ghàidhealach aig an àm, chan eil mòran aithne air a’ bhàrdachd seo an-diugh. Bheir am pàipear seo sùil air taghadh dhen bhàrdachd seo gus sealltainn cho fad is farsaing a bha buaidh nan cogaidhean an aghaidh nam Frangach air a’ choimhearsnachd sa Ghàidhealtachd. Bheirear sùil air bàrdachd bho dhiofar sheallaidhean, nam measg saighdearan, mnathan, pàrantan agus bàird baile/sgìre. Bithear cuideachd a’ coimhead air mar a chaidh traidisean bàrdachd na Gàidhlig a chleachdadh le bàird a rèir an t-suidheachaidh ùir, leithid dàin molaidh airson Diùc Wellington agus aoir air Napoleon Bonaparte.

Perspectives from Gaelic Poetry on the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815) had a significant impact on Gaelic society in Scotland. Thousands of Gaels served in the British military at the time, while their families faced life in a community without many of its young men and that was under the threat of invasion from France. As was their custom, Gaelic poets responded to events in their poetry and left a body of work which bears testimony to the years between 1793 and 1815 in Gaelic Scotland. Although the wars against the French and the service of the Gaels in the military constituted a major subject in Gaelic poetry of the period, this poetry is relatively little-known today.

This paper will look at a selection of this poetry in order to show the extent of the influence of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars on the Gaelic community in Scotland. Poetry composed from a variety of perspectives will be considered, including soldiers, women, parents and village poets. The paper will also consider the manner in which the Gaelic poetic tradition was adapted by poets in this new context, such as in panegyrics to the Duke of Wellington and satires on Napoleon Bonaparte.

The Poor Law (Scotland) Act of 1845 created a formal structure for the provision of poor relief overseen by a Board of Supervision based in Edinburgh and administered through parochial boards and the inspectors of poor whom they employed. These inspectors, and their ability to communicate effectively with the most vulnerable in society, were central to the success of the new administrative system of poor relief. This paper will examine some of the ways in which the language barrier between non-Gaelic speakers and those with limited fluency, if any, in English manifested itself at all levels in the new administrative chain. It will consider how this impacted on those whom the new law was designed to assist, and provide insight into the wider picture of communications between Gaelic-speakers and officialdom in the nineteenth-century Highlands.

This paper discusses vowel length in Modern Welsh as the result of a joint project of specialists in Welsh, Irish and phonological studies. As in other areas of Welsh linguistics, existing phonological descriptions are often founded on inadequate or inaccurate data, or are contradictory (cf. Awbery 1984, Jones 1984, Schrijver and Geiriadur yr Academi). However, given the high number of learners, adequate language descriptions are critical for Welsh. The research is based on latest methods in the area of phonology. It draws its data from recent and statistically relevant recordings of native speakers subjected to rigorous acoustic analysis. A corpus of monosyllabic words commonly in use was established and sorted according to phonological environment. The recording results reveal that vowel length in Welsh monosyllables is contrastive only in limited environments, primarily before /l n r/. Even here, however, phonetic length is often predictable on the basis of semantic or historical information. This casts doubt on the general phonemicity of vowel length in monosyllables and has implications for Welsh orthography. The investigation also suggests a new categorisation of Welsh consonants and reveals insight into the nature of native vocabulary.

Middle Welsh shows a remarkable usage of lenition: the first consonant of a constituent may be lenited when following an inflected verb. This type of lenition is called postverbal lenition. Postverbal lenition may be triggered by specific verbal endings, and it may be triggered based on whether whatever follows the verb is a subject, object or adverb, etc. However, postverbal lenition triggered by verbal endings and lenition triggered by the syntactic function of the lenited word are inconsistently applied. Moreover, no compelling account of its development throughout the Middle Welsh period exists. In my thesis, I have attempted to fill this gap in knowledge by charting how postverbal lenition is conditioned in several texts held to be representative of the Middle Welsh period. In this thesis, I have refuted the hypothesis that postverbal lenition could serve as the morphological basis for object lenition. Moreover, I have found that lenition of the nominal predicate is found in earlier Middle Welsh than object lenition. Finally, I have found that lenition caused by specific verbal endings is not applied to voiceless stops in early Middle Welsh.

In recent years deixis as a general cognitive notion has been carefully investigated in depth in many of the world’s languages and some reference works are in preparations. To the best of my knowledge this area of the Celtic languages has not been paid much attention and a serious analysis of the way spatial deixis is expressed is still lacking. The aim of the present paper is to analyse the expression of the spatial deixis employed in Middle Welsh. The text that will be scrutinised is the Pedeir keinc y Mabinogi, but examples taken from Modern Welsh and Old Irish will also be compared.

Bibliographical reference: Luna Filipović, Kasia M. Jaszczolt, Katarzyna Jaszczolt. 2012. Space and Time in Languages and Cultures: Linguistic Diversity. 2 volumes. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, Benjamins

Welsh translational literature has until recently been underestimated in comparison to native poetry and prose texts, both from the philological as well as from the linguistic point of view. However, such texts constitute a substantial and diverse part of the corpus of Middle Welsh prose. The relationship of the original text and the translation is quite different from what we are used to in the case of modern translations, acceptability for the recipients being one of the most important goals and ‘textual models of their own native traditions’ serving as a yardstick for translators (Reck, Poppe 2007: 124). Taking frequently used physical quality adjectives as a case study, I will explore whether the language of translational texts differs in fact from that of native texts. These adjectives normally are highly polysemous, and while some of their meanings could be considered universal, others could be results of language contact through translation (so called loan translations or calques). The paper is concerned with both methodological issues of recognizing such phenomena as well as the analysis of data found in Middle Welsh translations from Latin and French.

Poppe, Erich; Reck, Regine (2007) ‘A French romance in Wales: Ystorya Bown o Hamtwn: processes of medieval translations, Part I’. Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 55, 122–80.

This paper will examine the expression of reflexivity, reciprocity and middle voice in the Brittonic languages, with a special focus on Welsh. Much typological research has been carried out on these grammatical categories. Not only are they connected by interrelated semantic properties, they are also represented, in many languages, by identical markers. Most European languages display markers that encompass more than one such category, based on the so-called PIE ‘reflexive pronoun’ *s(w)e, cp. e.g. German sich, French se, Italian si. Welsh, Breton and Cornish employ a different strategy. Here reflexives and reciprocals are characterized by the verbal prefix Welsh ym-, Breton em-, Cornish om-. While in Cornish and Breton the prefix developed into the only marker of reflexivity and reciprocity, Welsh behaved differently. It developed a second strategy to express reflexivity, the complex intensifier ei hun, which over time replaced the prefix in this function. It is commonly assumed that the prefix originates from the Proto-Celtic preposition *ambi- ‘about, at two sides’. This presposition originally indicates reciprocity, and then develops into a reflexive marker. The present paper will test this hypothesis as well as the possibility, that the prefix also was a marker of middle situation types.

In the Brythonic languages a group of verbs exists that are compounded with forms of the verb ‘to be’ to indicate specific tenses and/or persons, or even all conjugations of the verb in question. For example, MW gwybot, MC gothfos and MB gouzvout ‘to know’ use compound verb forms with ‘to be’ in all tenses except the present and imperfect indicative. Even though some compound verbs with ‘to be’ existed in Old Irish, this phenomenon has been far more productive in the Brythonic branch, making it one of its most characteristic features.

A well-known Brythonic compound formation is the periphrastic perfect (and pluperfect) found in the irregular verbs MW mynet ‘to go’, dyuot ‘to come’ and gwneuthur ‘to do, make’. There is also an older formation, however, that may go back to a similar compounding: MW pret. 1sg. euthum ‘I went’, 2sg. aethost ‘you went’ etc. The latter’s interpretation as a compound with ‘to be’ was already suggested by Morris-Jones (1913), but has apparently not been accepted by anyone, probably due to the phonological difficulties associated with it. This paper will re-visit Morris-Jones’ interpretation and propose a solution to the phonological difficulties by exploring the history of the present of ‘to be’ in Brythonic and Goidelic. This solution will be shown to reach further than obscure MW pret. 1sg. -um and 2sg. -ost.

The list of threefold qualifications for various professions in Bretha Nemed Toísech, a version of which is included in some manuscripts of the Triads of Ireland, names three enigmatic artifacts as the things which confer status on a blacksmith. What were these objects? The question evidently teased medieval Irish minds: there exist several brief tracts, ranging from the Middle Irish to the Early Modern Irish period, which undertake to provide detailed descriptions of them and to account for their origins. This paper will provide a survey of this body of material – attempting to interpret its content, to establish the interrelationships of the texts, and to ascertain whether the doctrines which they contain reflect inherited tradition or later embellishment.

It has been more than eighty years since Myles Dillon published his edition and translation of a collection of legal narratives in ‘Stories from the Law-Tracts’, Ériu 11 (1932), 42-65. These narratives expound in plain prose the incidents alluded to in the highly rhetorical canonical text of the two Bretha Nemed tracts, and presumably serve as a companion to be read along with the canonical text in the law schools. This collection is highly intriguing in that none of the stories seems to have parallel elsewhere in early Irish literature. However, Dillon did not include the Bretha Nemed passages to which these narratives refer but isolated these narratives from their contexts, and thus left their legal significances obscure. Pitifully, no scholarly attention has been paid to these stories ever since. This paper will firstly revisit the manuscript context of this interesting body of stories and the clues their language and content may afford, so as to find out the compositional concern of their author. Secondly, it will discuss their relationship to early Irish literature. Thirdly, it will try to reintegrate them into their legal contexts and examine their relevance to the canonical passages they refer to.

The fragmentary early Irish legal text, Anfuigell ‘Wrong Judgment’, exists in seven main sources as identified in Liam Breatnach’s A Companion to the Corpus Iuris Hibernici (164–165). Although little of the actual tract itself is attested, the fragments contain a wealth of commentary treating a wide range of legal topics, including legal remedies concerning injuries sustained at wakes and funerals, illnesses contracted at wakes, stampeding cattle, entering land after having sold it, plundering in revenge for having been plundered, taking back loans before they are due, bringing in outsiders for conducting a raid, and deceiving widows. Some of these topics are not discussed in other legal texts, and as such they are of great value to scholars. Anfuigell has yet to be edited or translated. At present, I am in the process of preparing an edition and translation of this little-known legal text and will present preliminary findings on the range of topics dealt with in the text and its manuscript tradition.

Since the late 19th century, when the Oxford English Dictionary began to be written, the volume of Celtic scholarship has greatly increased, and recent technological developments have improved access both to primary sources and secondary material. In addition, the ongoing revision of the OED is published online; it is therefore free of the spatial constraints of the printed page and is able to include a wider variety of Celtic-language material and discuss it in more depth than the original editors. This paper will examine the effect these developments have had on the presentation of items with Celtic connections in the revised edition of the OED, and what light they cast on lexical contact between English and Celtic languages. To do so, it will look back at the beginnings, using a diverse selection of recently-revised examples from the earliest part of the alphabet (originally published in 1884), for example the greatly expanded entry for Albanian (with reference to Scotland), the more detailed discussion of the development of abthane n., the treatment of the Irish vocative particle in borrowed phrases such as acushla, and the use of after in Irish English.

In the 17th century, the preservation of the language and its extension were some of the primary motivations of Irish-language lexicographers. Mícheál Ó Cléirigh, his fellow Franciscans and others aimed to enable the population in linguistic terms with aids such as dictionaries. The language’s use in the modern day may not have been as easily facilitated without the wide availability of lexicographical material, and without those who compiled it. This paper will conduct a cursory examination of each of the principal bilingual Irish language lexicographers of 20th-century Irish-language lexicography. In doing so, some of their approaches and the merits of their dictionaries will be examined and their potential influence on the dictionary-users of the time identified. The story of these lexicographers show a pattern of evolution and development in interest, language function and State influence in that time. Edward Fournier d’Albe, Timothy O’Neill Lane, Lambert McKenna, an tAthair Pádraig Ó Duinnín, Tomás de Bhaldraithe and Niall Ó Dónaill form the group of principal lexicographers to be discussed. A timeline of motivational support structures for Irish language lexicography from revival times to the end of the century will be assessed

The historical periods of the Irish language can be generally classified as follows: Old Irish (c.600-900), Middle Irish (c.900-1200), Early Modern Irish (c.1200-1650) and Modern Irish (c.1650- present). The last ten to fifteen years have seen the rise in the number and variety of digital resources supporting the study of historical Irish texts, e.g. CELT [1] and RIA Online Archive [2]. In this paper, we will provide an inventory of the resources available. Special attention will be paid to two lexicographical projects: the electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language [3] and Foclóir na Nua-Ghaeilge [4]. The electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language (eDIL), covering the period 600-1650, is available online and was most recently revised in 2013. Foclóir na Nua-Ghaeilge (FNG), a project of the Royal Irish Academy, aims at producing a historical dictionary of Irish covering the period 1600-2000. Currently texts for the period 1600 to 1926 are being lemmatized. In this paper we will also report on a study currently being undertaken which looks at the possibilities of interconnecting eDIL and FNG, focussing initially on verbs. Challenges from a computational point of view, as well as benefits for historical textual and linguistic research, will be discussed.

[1] http://www.ucc.ie/celt/

[2] http://research.dho.ie/fng/index.php

[3] http://edil.qub.ac.uk/about.php

[4] http://www.ria.ie/research/focloir-na-nua-ghaeilge.aspx

This paper will explore the textual transmission of the medieval Welsh text ‘Trioedd Ynys Prydain’ (TYP), and its importance as a source for the attitudes of the Welsh literati towards both native and foreign literary traditions. Its aim will be to emphasise the importance of considering the different series of TYP individually, each with their own particular selection of triads, rather than merged together into a single text as they are in Bromwich’s edition. Using the figure of Arthur as a case study, the principal early series (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) will be examined for signs of reordering and grouping of material, and for literary influences which are incorporated into the text (such as Historia Regum Britanniae or continental romance). This will indicate the processes by which new series were created and shaped by the interests of each redactor, thus illuminating the nature of the text and how it developed over the course of its transmission. Therefore, this paper seeks to highlight the value of TYP (often overlooked) as a text which spans the entire medieval period, updating itself over time and giving us a rare insight into how the medieval Welsh were responding to new literary trends.

Despite scholarly recognition of humorous elements in Culhwch ac Olwen, the topic has been the focus of few concentrated studies. Joan Radner’s 1988 article ‘Interpreting Irony in Medieval Celtic Narrative’, remains the most thorough examination of the subject to date, although several of her key points prove untenable under close scrutiny. The few subsequent works on the tale’s humour have neither addressed these faults nor have they filled the gaps overlooked in Radner’s study. This paper considers the issue of humour in Culhwch ac Olwen, its role in the tale and in medieval Welsh prose literature more generally. By means of a clear theoretical framework the paper examines the social, political, and literary ‘norms’ of twelfth-century Wales in order to unearth inversions and incongruities, the humour, embedded within the text. I argue that, in straddling the line between the highly rhetorical Welsh poetic tradition and the relatively straightforward Welsh narrative tradition, Culhwch ac Olwen can be read as a satirical pastiche of both modes of expression. By closely examining the narrative, language, and socio-historical context of Culhwch ac Olwen, this paper aims to elucidate the neglected topic of humour in this tale.

Táin Bó Fraích is rich in references to musical activities, and remarkably ornate instruments and their richly attired players appear in a number of episodes in the text. The sounds of strings, wind and the human voice are repeatedly deployed to produce an altered state of consciousness in the audience depicted at key points in the narrative. Furthermore, a considerable degree of detail is provided about performers’ backgrounds, including their familial relationships with the hero and connections to the síd. While much has been written about potential wider readings of Táin Bó Fraích (Dumville 1990, Meek 1984), scholarship has largely avoided the issue of the literary and metaphorical role of music in the text and has either examined it as evidence for performance practice (O’Dwyer 2004), or has sought to explain the detailed description of the cruitire as an interpolation with a legal parallel (Ní Chatháin 2000). This paper will examine the manner in which music is deployed as a literary device in Táin Bó Fraích and the impact this has upon the narrative, discussing methodologies for examining ‘hyper-real’ depictions as performance practice and how a literary and metaphorical approach to musical activities can inform our reading of this text.

Téann préamhacha an scéil apacrafúil seo siar go Leabhar Esdras an Bhíobla. Tá an leagan Gaeilge is sinne le fáil sa Leabhar Laighneach agus téann a phréamhacha siar go dtí an naóú haois, dar leis an bhfear eagair, Kuno Meyer. Is mór idir an leagan sin, áfach, agus insint Dhomhnaill Uí Cholmáin in Parlaiment na mBan. Is díol spéise é an leagan déanach ó thaobh na teanga de - mar léiriú ar chanúint bheo na linne; ó thaobh struchtúir agus stile de - mar léiriú ar oiliúint an údair sa diagacht agus sa chaiticéis. Ach, thar aon ní eile, féachfaidh an páipéar seo le tábhacht an téacs seo ó thaobh na staire de: mar léiriú ar dhíospóireacht bheo na linne faoi dhualgas an duine i leith na dílseachta don rí cóir; agus déanfar iarracht a dhéanamh amach cén aidhm go díreach a bhí ag an údar leis an dteagasc sin sa tréimhse chíor thuathalach staire sin ag deireadh an 17ú haois.

Poets of the postclassical era in Ireland were nothing if not inventive, and their dedication to one particular genre of the age (trí rainn agus amhráin) is particularly impressive. This fact is somewhat remarkable for, being constrained in length, the form itself is a somewhat unusual one within the Gaelic literary canon. Nonetheless, as this brief survey serves to show, the genre in question was called on by our poets to express their feelings, often profound, on everything from natural beauty to bitter censure, as well as love, lust and religion – always, of necessity, briefly packaged, yet often spiced with exceptional wit and humour.

Is iomaí saothar acadúil atá scríofa faoi fhilíocht agus phrós Sheáin Uí Ríordáin (1916-1977), ag déanamh anailíse ar mhórán gnéithe éagsúla dá shaothair. Is beag atá scríofa faoina bhailiúchán leabhar áfach, atá i seilbh leabharlann Choláiste na hOllscoile, Corcaigh. Tá réimse leathan ábhar sa chnuasach, idir litríocht agus leabhair thagartha, a thugann léargas iontach dúinn ar na saothair a d’fhéadfadh a bheith ina bhfoinsí múnlaithe agus spreagtha ag an Ríordánach. Ina theannta sin, bhí nótaí scríofa aige ar imeall leathanach áirithe a thugann tuiscint nua dúinn ar na coincheapa agus na smaointe ar chuir sé spéis iontu agus a chuaigh i bhfeidhm ar a chuid machnaimh féin. Sa pháipéar seo, tabharfar achoimre ghairid ar chnuasach an Ríordánaigh agus ansin, déanfar anailís ar thábhacht na saothar fealsúnachta atá le fáil ann agus ar an léargas nua a thugann siad dúinn ar shaothar an fhile.

‘Scattered in learned tomes’: Seán Ó Ríordáin’s library

The poetry and prose of Seán Ó Ríordáin (1916-1977) has been a source of fascination to most Irish literary scholars, with numerous essays and books available analysing many diverse aspects of his work. However, little research has been conducted on the contents of his personal library, currently housed in the Boole Library, University College Cork. His vast collection of books, comprising both works of literature and works of reference, provides invaluable insights into possible formative influences and inspiration for his writing. These insights are further enriched by the abundant annotations contained in some of the books, which enable us to identify numerous concepts and ideas of interest to him. This paper aims to provide a brief overview of Ó Ríordáin’s library, and subsequently analyse the significance of the works of European philosophy contained therein in our interpretation of the poet’s life and writing.

This paper presents some of my findings from a structural study of the remscéla ‘prefatory tales’ to the Táin Bó Cúailnge in Eg. 1782 (Eg.); it outlines the application and adaptation of Proppian methodology in the search of an overarching principle governing the use of the classificatory term remscél. Moving away from the traditional taxonomy, Propp’s framework provides a fitting empirical schema for the study of the Remscéla Tána Bó Cúailnge, as it looks beneath the descriptive details of the superficial narrative stratum. I endeavour to show that, through the application of the Proppian model, we can unearth the minimal narrative components (i.e. the narrative ‘functions’) of the series of these twelve tales. Once revealed, the narrative ‘functions’ of the remscéla corpus in Eg. provide us with a better understanding of their textual reception and the compiler’s intentions. I hope to show that, although the remscéla list was a secondary invention to the composition of the individual tales, their collocation and form in the Eg. compilation reflects a conscious attempt at creating a narrative whole.

As part of a comprehensive study on the organisation of medieval Irish literature, Proinsias Mac Cana discussed in detail two manuscript catalogues containing lists of Irish tales which were classed according to themes or titles (Mac Cana 1980). Given the prominence of tochmarca ‘courtship tales’ in both lists, Mac Cana distinguished this group of tales from the aitheda ‘elopements’ category, arguing that ‘in the aitheda is it normally the woman who takes the initiative and compels the man to follow her, like the goddess of sovereignty courting her chosen spouse; but in the tochmarca the man is the active suitor and generally he carries off the woman without the consent of her kinsmen, though with her own collusion’. Is Mac Cana’s observation applicable to all tochmarca? In this paper, I will address the question of whether there was an expectation attached to the title tochmarc on the part of the audience upon hearing titles such as Tochmarc Étaíne, Tochmarc Emire, or Tochmarc Ailbe. If this is the case, can we compare stories beginning with tochmarc on a generic level?

I have in a previous paper (2007) discussed suicide in Early Irish literature and argued that suicide is not as rare as previously thought. In this paper, I will present further research into the subject of suicide, focusing on less straightforward examples found in the literature, where the actor can be seen to be actively involved in actions and behaviour that directly cause his own death. The death may be a threat, a completed act, or remain unfulfilled. These examples include episodes where the protagonist is inviting or provoking someone to kill him (as Iliand in TBC Rec. 1), sometimes in order to instigate further violence (as Atherne in Talland Étair). The death can also be the result of a sacrifice where the subject is actively choosing death, either to save someone else, or for a reward (as the jesters in Orgain Denna Ríg and Cath Maige Mucrima). Connected to the latter are examples where a protagonist willingly performs an act that he knows will bring about his own death (as Conchobar in Aided Chonchobuir). The main focus of the paper is a discussion of agency on the part of the subject and suicide and self-killing as a narrative device.

Yng ngorffennaf 2014 bu farw Gerallt Lloyd Owen, ffigwr amlwg ac arwyddocaol ym myd barddoniaeth Gymraeg ers hanner canrif ymron. Bu’n brifardd Cadair yr Eisteddfod Genedlaethol ddwywaith a chyhoeddodd dair cyfrol o farddoniaeth, gan ennill Llyfr y Flwyddyn (1991). Ef hefyd oedd Meuryn cyfres boblogaidd Y Talwrn ac ymryson yr Eisteddfod Genedlaethol am flynyddoedd lle cafodd ddylanwad nid bychan ar genhedlaeth o feirdd ifainc. Nod y papur hwn fydd dadansoddi’n feirniadol naratifau cofiannol a hunangofiannol am GLlO, gan ganolbwyntio’n benodol ar ei hunangofiant swyddogol, Fy Nghawl fy Hun (1999) a’r ffilm ddogfen Gerallt (2013). Craidd y drafodaeth fydd amwyso’r ffiniau rhwng ‘ffurfiau’ llenyddol, megis y cofiant, yr hunangofiant a cherdd, drwy ystyried sut y gall naratifau cofiannol o’r fath ddyrchafu a chynnal persona barddol. Dyma elfen hynod arwyddocaol o safbwynt barddoniaeth, cenedlaetholdeb a chanoloesoldeb GLlO. Drwy herio rhagdybiaethau parthed perthynas goddrychedd a chreadigrwydd â naratifau hunan/gofiannol, ynghyd â gwrthod yr egwyddor mai eu pwrpas yw cyflwyno’r gwirionedd am wrthrych, neu ‘the reconstruction on paper of the essential fundamental person’, chwedl Liz Stanley, gobeithir bwrw goleuni newydd ar GLlO fel bardd a chyfoethogi’r drafodaeth brin sydd i’w chael yn llenyddiaeth y Gymraeg parthed naratifau llên bywyd (life writing).

‘[G]wneud fy nghawl fy hun’ [lit. ‘Making my own broth’]: the auto/biography of Gerallt Lloyd Owen

In July 2014, the death was announced of Gerallt Lloyd Owen, an eminent and significant figure in Welsh-language poetry for almost fifty years. Twice winner of the Chair of the National Eisteddfod, he published three volumes of poetry, and was awarded the Book of the Year prize (1991). He also presided as the influential ‘Meuryn’ or adjudicator over the popular bardic contests on Radio Cymru (Y Talwrn) and at the National Eisteddfod, and was therefore a figurehead for a generation of young poets. The aim of this paper is to critically analyse biographical and autobiographical narratives about GLlO, with special reference to his official autobiography, Fy Nghawl fy Hun [‘My Own Broth’] (1999) and the documentary film Gerallt (2013). The central thesis will be based on blurring the boundaries between literary ‘forms’ and genres, such as biography, autobiography and poem by interpreting how life-writing narratives promote and support a fundamental characteristic of GLlO’s poetry, nationalism and medievalism, that of the bardic persona. By challenging assumptions with regard to the relationship between auto/biographical narratives and concepts of subjectivity and creativity, along with rejecting the principle that their aim is to present the truth about a subject or, as Liz Stanley has noted, ‘the reconstruction on paper of the essential fundamental person’, I hope to shed new light on GLlO as a poet and enrich the limited discussion in Welsh literature on life writing narratives.

Daw’r gorffennol Brythonaidd a’r Gymru amlddiwylliannol, amlieithog gyfoes ynghyd yn y papur hwn sy’n archwilio’r berthynas rhwng iaith, llenyddiaeth a pherthyn yn y stori fer ‘Neges o Frynaich’ gan yr awdur Cymraeg, Tony Bianchi. Ymddengys y stori yn ei gyfrol lled-hunangofiannol, Cyffesion Geordie Oddi Cartref (2010). Lleolir y stori yn nheyrnas Brythonaidd, Brynaich, sydd erbyn hyn yn rhan o Northumberland. Yn yr ardal hon y ganed ac y magwyd Bianchi, ac mae’n lleoliad pwysig yn hanes llenyddiaeth Gymraeg a Saesneg. Mae rhai o ffigyrau blaenllaw’r traddodiadau llenyddol hyn yn ymddangos yn y stori hon. Mae portread Bianchi o ‘Frynaich’ yn y stori yn fodd o drafod ei hunaniaeth gymhleth fel Sais sy’n siarad Cymraeg, gan ansefydlogi’n dealltwriaeth gyfoes o draddodiad llenyddol a hunaniaeth genedlaethol. Mae’r modd y croesir ffiniau daearyddol ac amseryddol yn y stori, yn ogystal â’i harbrofion â realaeth hudol a dyfeisiau fframio, yn cynyddu’r ymdeimlad o ansicrwydd a dadleoliad a geir yno. Mae’r papur hwn yn dadlau bod ‘Neges o Frynaich’, a gwaith Bianchi yn gyffredinol, yn cynnig hunaniaeth y ‘Bryneichwr’ (enw barddol Bianchi, a grybwyllir yn y stori) fel hunaniaeth amgen, sy’n caniatáu i’w amryw weddau cyferbyniol ac anghyfarwydd gydfyw.

Welsh? English? Bernician?: Unsettling literary and national identity in the Welsh-language fiction of Tony Bianchi

The Brythonic past and multicultural, multilingual contemporary Wales are brought together in this paper which explores the relationship between language, literature and belonging in the short story ‘Neges o Frynaich’ (‘Message from Bernicia’) by Welsh-language author Tony Bianchi. The story appears in his semi-auto-biographical collection, Cyffesion Geordie Oddi Cartref (‘Confessions of a Geordie Exile’, 2010). It is set in the Brythonic kingdom of Brynaich, located in modern-day Northumberland. Bianchi was born and raised in this area, which is an important location for the literary heritage of both the Welsh and English languages, some of whose famous figures appear in the story. Bianchi’s portrayal of ‘Brynaich’ in this story negotiates his own complex identity as a Welsh-speaking Englishman by unsettling contemporary understandings of literary tradition and national identity. The crossing of geographical and temporal boundaries in the story, as well as its experimentation with magical realism and framing devices, increase the sense of uncertainty and dislocation portrayed. This paper argues that ‘Neges o Frynaich’, and Bianchi’s oeuvre in general, offer the identity of ‘Bryneichwr’ (Bianchi’s bardic name, as is mentioned in the story) as an alternative identity, where his own multidimensional, oppositional and unfamiliar allegiances can coexist.

A hithau’n 150 mlynedd ers sefydlu’r Wladfa Gymreig ym Mhatagonia, bydd y papur hwn yn mynd ar drywydd Irma Hughes de Jones (1918-2003); un o lenorion amryddawn Dyffryn y Camwy a aned yn y Wladfa ac a fu’n byw yno drwy gydol ei hoes. Deillia’r papur o waith ymchwil sy’n archwilio yn benodol agweddau ar hunaniaeth y bardd yn ei chyfrol Edau Gyfrodedd (Jones, 1989) trwy ystyried materion yn ymwneud â chenedligrwydd, dinasyddiaeth, tiriogaeth a thrawsgenedlaetholdeb. Honnodd Saunders Lewis yn Ysgrifau Dydd Mercher (1945: 98) mai ‘hanes arwriaeth yw hanes Y Wladfa’ ac mai Cymry Patagonia (1942) R. Bryn Williams yw ‘epig’ fawr y Wladfa. Gofynnir yn y papur hwn ai teg galw corff gwaith Irma Hughes de Jones yn ‘epig’ wladfaol trwy ei ystyried yng nghyd-destun syniadau Bakhtin am yr epig yn The Dialogic Imagination (1981). Eir ati i daflu golwg newydd ar ei barddoniaeth trwy ystyried swyddogaeth y cerddi yng nghyd-destun creu naratif llenyddol gwladfaol. Manylir hefyd ar y modd y darlunia’r bardd y berthynas amlhaenog rhwng y gwladfawyr a Chymru’r ‘famwlad’.

On the eve of celebrating 150 years since establishing the Welsh settlement in Patagonia, this paper will explore the work of poet Irma Hughes de Jones (1918-2003) from the Camwy Valley in Chubut. The paper derives from current research into aspects of identity in the poet’s volume Edau Gyfrodedd (Jones, 1989) which analyses the interrelationship between citizenship, territory, nationality and transnationalism. Saunders Lewis argued in Ysgrifau Dydd Mercher (1945: 98) that the development of the Welsh settlement in Patagonia is a history of heroism and that their ‘epic’ is R. Bryn Williams’s Cymry Patagonia (1942). This paper will ask whether Irma Hughes de Jones’s oeuvre may also be considered an epic by discussing her work in the light of Bakhtin’s commentary in The Dialogic Imagination (1981). Particular attention will be given to the way in which the poetry contributes to creating a distinct literary narrative, and how it depicts the Welsh settlers’ complex relationship with the land of their forefathers.

Three decades ago, when Lachlan MacDonald, one of the last surviving adults from St. Kilda, defined the Gaelic word fìon as ‘the sacrament’ in an interview with Eric Hamp, this understanding of wine’s use as solely religious reflected longstanding Irish views about the beverage stretching back into late antiquity. Yet literary, archaeological and linguistic evidence suggests that the recreational use of wine was not entirely unknown in early Ireland, even though its availability was undoubtedly quite scarce. A new survey of Roman archaeological finds from Ireland – along with new understandings about the use and reuse of artifacts connected to the transport, storage and serving of wine – allow us greater insight into its importation into Ireland in late antiquity, as well as the larger question of Roman cultural influence among the early Irish.

Celtic Voyages in Skin boats This paper sets out to look at Voyages in Skin boats by Celtic and Early Christian travellers along the west coast of Europe. Skin boats in the form of the currach, (curach or curragh) are in use along most of the west coast of Ireland. This living tradition of currach use, rooted in the past but persisting into the present, affords an opportunity to study the use, tradition and operation of this ancient technology. It has been shown that boats are a particularly important source of material for evaluating technological development, and the study of ethnographic evidence is now acknowledged as one of the principal methods for interpreting nautical life in the past. This particular study has examined the literary evidence for voyages in currachs, and documented several modern journeys. By evaluating the physical characteristics of the currachs, and collecting ethnographic data, it can be demonstrated that currachs were quite capable of connecting the Early Christian coastal sites of Ireland, Scotland and Brittany.

Travel is an oft-mentioned aspect of life on early medieval Iona. Caught in the midst of busy sea-routes, the island of Iona received many visitors. Some of these journeys were narrated in Adomnán’s Life of Columba, but it is not only these sea journeys that are preserved. Within the Life of Columba there are brief glimpses of land travel as it occurred in Ireland and in Pictland. This paper presents the evidence for travel amongst the neighbours of Iona. This is placed in the context of what is known about travel in Ireland and Pictland. It will be argued that through the eyes of this intermediary, there were substantial differences between travel in early medieval Ireland and Pictland. These are supported more broadly, and may represent a real-terms divergence in terms of the actuality of transport.

Studies of twelfth-century English chronicle-writing have focused not only on the production of chronicles as a means of propaganda, but also how Scots were portrayed in these narratives and why. Most scholarship about the portrayal of Scots in twelfth-century English chronicles has centered on the link between civility, chivalry and warfare and the disparity between English and Scottish warfare. The portrayal of Scottish kings as pious and civilised, particularly David I, has also received scholarly attention. Yet there has been little scholarship devoted to understanding how David I was compared and contrasted to his father, Malcolm III, in twelfth-century English chronicles. David I was portrayed as a paragon of civility, Christianity and usually good kingship, contrary to the image of Malcolm III as a crude barbarian. Using the works of William of Malmesbury, Symeon of Durham, Richard of Hexham, and William of Newburgh, this paper will argue that not only were Malcolm III and David I portrayed by English chroniclers as complete opposites, but that the marked difference in their portrayal emphasised the benefits of Norman acculturation.

Scholars have long known that the common law of medieval Scotland owed as much to Gaelic antecedents as it did to ideas introduced in the twelfth century by an incoming English and continental aristocracy. This twin legacy accounts in large part for the flourishing there of a unique combination of ‘private’ and ‘public’ justice, one kin-based and compensatory in nature, the other, mediated through the agency of the neighbouring kingdom of England in the Norman and Angevin periods (1066-1216), an expression of classical European ideas about sovereignty, princely authority and royal prerogatives. The mix of old and new legal principles is especially apparent in a study of medieval Scottish concepts of royal mercy and pardon. Scottish kings grasped fully the implications of clemency in both the Gaelic and European contexts; over the course of several centuries, they developed imaginative and powerful ways of deploying the royal pardon within the limitations of Scottish common law. This paper charts the development and maturation of the royal prerogative of pardon over the course of the later medieval period by exploring the ways in which notions of pardon, mercy and royal authority shaped, and were in turn influenced by, notions of redemption, wrongdoing, crime and punishment among Gaels and Europeans.

In his Scotichronicon, Walter Bower (1385–1449) tells the story of ‘Penvyn’, a Welshman who betrays the prince of Gwynedd, Dafydd ap Gruffudd, to Edward I of England. Upon applying to the English king for his reward, ‘Penvyn’ is told that his reputation means that he is fully deserving of his fate, namely to be being hanged higher than the rest of his kindred. Dafydd ap Gruffudd, meanwhile, suffers a traitor’s death at Shrewsbury. ‘Penvyn’ has not hitherto been traced, but he may be identified with a north Welshman (Iorwerth y Penwyn) who did indeed receive payment for services to Edward. His act of betrayal is also recorded in an anonymous Welsh poem found in a seventeenth-century manuscript that was later reproduced several times in nineteenth-century periodicals. This paper will discuss what is known of Penwyn’s career and consider how his story (unrecorded in Welsh narrative sources) came to Bower’s attention. The paper will also consider what these sources can tell us about popular memory of the conquest in late-medieval and early modern Wales.

Utilising geospatial analysis techniques, this paper offers a brief overview of the development of Welsh-language popular music. Observed shifts in the location and distribution of Welsh-language bands and artists are accounted for through analysis of infrastructural developments. The notion of transient concentration – the temporary assembling of a grouping of artists and infrastructural elements within a particular urban or suburban locale – is advanced and explicated.

In 1988, the Welsh theatre company Brith Gof entered a collaboration with the industrial music collective Test Dept to stage a performance based on Y Gododdin. Conceived as political theatre in the light of ‘Thatcherism’ (Pearson/Shanks 2001), the production positioned itself far from romantic depictions, but deliberately used anachronistic features. Following an international tour, Test Dept / Brith Gof released an accompanying album, which – even devoid of the actual performance context – became a highly influential point of reference for the industrial music scene and beyond. My paper will examine notions and functions of Celtic immanent in Test Dept / Brith Gof’s Gododdin. Socio-historical and cultural contexts of the production will be discussed as well as contemporary academic opinions on northern British ethnic identities of the Early Historic period. By exploring this particular production and its framework, overall strategies in the ‘pop’-negotiation of Celtic historical narratives will be extrapolated.

References:

Test Dept / Brith Gof: Gododdin (1989). Ministry of Power.

Pearson, M. and Shanks, M. 2001, Theatre/Archaeology. London: Routledge.

In the European Celtic fringe, Celtic festivals constitute a very organized form of consumption allied with personal belonging. For the past decades with the growing participation in capitalist economy, those festivals have become known worldwide and attracted different kinds of organizations to invest money for boosting those festivals and changing the main perception of it. Our proposal here is to identify those Celtic festivals within the Atlantic fringe as some kind of institutional rituals, and by that trying to understand how such meetings assert social categories, ethnic boundaries and perceptions of Celtic identity. Drawing on an analysis of institutional festivals as a social and symbolic performativity, the paper argues that rather than a repository of ancestral customs, as claimed by some groups, those specific festivals publically state the conditions for the ethnic group at play to be integrated within a large and modern Celtic fringe outside their major State, but without being apart from the State itself.

Tha an tionndadh sòisealta ann an rannsachadh L2 (Block, 2003) air sealltainn dhuinn gu bheil luchd-ionnsachaidh stèidhichte ann an suidheachadh ionnsachaidh sòisealta caochlaideach, am broinn agus taobh a-muigh an t-seòmar-teagaisg. Sa phàipear seo, tha sinn a’ tarraing air an eòlas a thàinig à pròiseict a bha stèidhicte air modhan-rannsachidh eadar-dhealaichte, a’ gabhail a-staigh ceisteachan le luchd-ionnsachaidh inbhich a bha air clasaichean sa choimhearsnachd a fhrithealadh; sealltainn air clasaichean, agus; agallamhan le tidsearan is luchd-ionnsachaidh. ’S e amas a’ phàipeir seo brosnachadh ann an ionnsachadh Gàidhlig a sgrùdadh. Thèid cothroman agus bacaidhean a chomharrachadh airson brosnachadh a chumail beò ann an diofar suidhichidhean ionnsachadh sòisealta. Tha toraidhean an rannsachaidh seo a’ sealltainn nach eil am buidheann measgaichte seo cho dualtach a bhith a’ cur ri ath-bheothachadh na Gàidhlig mar luchd-cleachdaidh na Gàidhlig ’s a tha luchd-poileasaidh an dùil. Tha na toraidhean a’ togail cheistean air ciamar a chumar taic ri luchd-ionnsachaidh tro dhòighean-teagaisg agus poileasaidh togail cànain airson foghlam inbhich.

Structure and Agency: Influences on and Experiences of Learning Gaelic in Adulthood

The social turn in L2 research (Block, 2003) has shown that learners are situated in a dynamic social learning environment, both in and beyond the classroom. In this paper, we draw on a mixed-method study, involving a survey of adults engaged in community classroom learning of Scots Gaelic, classroom observations, and, qualitative interviews with learners and teachers, to analyse motivation in Gaelic language learning. We identify constraints and opportunities for sustaining motivation as afforded by different social learning environments. Our findings suggest that the potential for this diverse group of community language learners to contribute to Gaelic language revitalisation through becoming active speakers is relatively less than policy makers might hope. The paper concludes with a discussion of the pedagogical and policy implications arising from the findings.

Tha Bòrd na Gàidhlig air cudrom a chur air ròl luchd-ionnsachaidh inbheach na Gàidhlig ann an ath-bheothachadh a’ chànain. Aig an aon àm, ge-tà, tha easbhaidhean ann am poileasaidhean a thaobh foghlam cànain a’ cur dùbhlain orra agus iad airson an ròl sin a choileanadh. ’S e fear dhe na h-easbhaidhean sin nach eil dòigh ann a tha stèidhichte air dàta dearbhte airson measadh agus tuairisgeul air sgilean cànain a dhèanamh. Tha am pròiseact Comasan Labhairt ann an Gàidhlig (CLAG) airson aghaidh a chur air an easbhaidh seo tro mheadhan frèam-obrach airson teagasg agus ionnsachadh na Gàidhlig. Rinn luchd-ionnsachaidh inbheach na Gàidhlig, aig gach ìre fileantais, eacarsaichean a’ gabhail a-steach agallamh neo-fhoirmeil, gnìomh sgeulachd, agus gnìomh airson structaran gràmarach fhaighinn. Cleachdar an dàta seo airson corpas Gàidhlig bheòil a chruthachadh, a bhios na bhun-stèidh de chlàran-tomhais Ghàidhlig airson luchd-ionsachaidh inbheach agus an tidsearan. Anns an taisbeanadh seo, bheir mi cunntas dhen adhartas a thathar air dèanamh gu ruige seo air a’ phròiseact, agus nì mi tuairisgeul air na ceumannan a tha romhainn airson an fhrèam-obraich a chruthachadh. Nì toraidhean CLAG cinnteach  gum faigh luchd-ionnsachaidh inbheach na Gàidhlig goireas deatamach, coltach riutha sin airson cànain Eòrpach eile, leithid Beurla, Duitsis, agus Gàidhlig na h-Èireann.  Cuideachd, cuiridh am frèam-obrach ri àrdachadh anns an àireamh de luchd-ionnsachaidh a bhios a’ ruighinn fileantachd ann an Gàidhlig.

Gaelic Adult Proficiency: A framework for the description and assessment of proficiency in adult L2 spoken Gaelic

Adult second language (L2) users of Scottish Gaelic have been identified as key agents in efforts to revitalise this language, but some limitations in Gaelic language-in-education policy are making it difficult for adult L2 users to fulfil this role. One such limitation is the absence of an empirically-derived means of assessing and describing proficiency in Gaelic. The Comasan Labhairt ann an Gàidhlig (CLAG) project aims to address this limitation through the development of a framework for the teaching and learning of spoken Gaelic. Adult L2 Gaelic users of all proficiency levels were asked to engage in several tasks, including an informal interview, a narrative task, and grammar elicitation tasks, in order to build a corpus of spoken L2 Gaelic. This corpus will serve as the basis for the development of proficiency scales for use by adult L2 Gaelic users and their teachers. This presentation reports on the progress to date on CLAG, and outlines the future steps to be taken in developing the framework. The CLAG framework will provide Gaelic learners with a crucial resource on par with those for other European languages, including English, Dutch, and Irish, and will help to maximise the number of adults reaching fluency in spoken Gaelic.

A rèir luchd-rannsachaidh is eòlaichean, is tric gun toir ideòlasan cànain buaidh chudromach air na dòighean anns am bi luchd-labhairt dà-chànanach a’ cleachdadh, agus a’ dèanamh dàimhean pearsanta leis an cuid chànanan (Boudreau & Dubois 2007; Makihara 2010; Cavanaugh 2013). An lùib mo chuid rannsachaidh dhotaireil, tha mi air cleachdaidhean agus ideòlasan cànain a sgrùdadh am measg sampall de dh’inbhich a thòisich ann am foghlam tro mheadhan na Gàidhlig eadar 1985 agus 1995. Stiùir mi 46 agallamhan leth-chruthaichte còmhla ri luchd-chompàirt ann an Albainn, a bharrachd air feadhainn a bhios a’ fuireach nas fhaide air falbh san latha a th’ ann. Cha robh ach 4 dhen luchd-chompàirt ann san t-sampall seo ris am b’ urrainnear cantainn ‘luchd-labhairt ùra’, a rèir an iomraidh as coileanta dhen abairt sin ann an sòisio-chànanachas (O’Rourke & Ramallo 2013; McLeod, O’Rourke & Dunmore 2014). ’S e sin ri ràdh: daoine a chaidh a thogail gun a’ Ghàidhlig aig an taigh, agus a dh’ionnsaich a’ chànain tron sgoil, ach a bhios fhathast ga chleachdadh gu tric sna beathannan làitheil aca an-diugh. Bidh mi a’ tarraing aire, sa phàipear seo, gu na h-ideòlasan is cleachdaidhean a tha (agus nach eil) gan sònrachadh bhon luchd-chompàirt eile san t-sampall agam.

New speakers, new Gaels? Language ideologies and bilingual continuation among adults who received GME

Researchers have theorised that language ideologies can have an important influence on the ways in which bilingual speakers in minority language settings identify and engage with the linguistic varieties that are available to them (Boudreau & Dubois 2007; Makihara 2010; Cavanaugh 2013). My recent PhD research examined language use and ideologies among a purposive sample of adults who started in Gaelic-medium education (GME) during the first decade of its availability in Scotland, between 1985 and 1995. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 46 informants located throughout Scotland as well as further afield. Only four of the 46 informants may be described as ‘new speakers’ of Gaelic, having been raised without Gaelic at home and acquiring the language in GME, but nevertheless choosing to make frequent use of it in the present day. In this paper I would like to draw attention to some of the language ideologies conveyed by these four speakers, which may (or may not) distinguish them from other participants when describing current engagements with Gaelic.

I propose a reconsideration of the origin of preaspiration and tonal accents in Gaelic, often seen as candidates for borrowing from Norse. I argue that it is feasible to see them instead as diagnostic of a Scotland-Ulster dialect area; areas where the Norse influence should be the strongest for historical reasons turn out to be archaic rather than innovative in the relevant respects. In the case of preaspiration, ‘weak’ or ‘variable’ preaspiration is found on the periphery of the Gaelic world (Lewis, northern and eastern mainland, Donegal) whereas ‘stronger’ preaspiration is a north Argyll and central mainland feature. I argue this indicates strong preaspiration to be an innovation spreading out of the central region, which in turn presupposes that variable preaspiration was once characteristic of the entire Northern Gaelic sphere, correlating rather weakly with Norse settlement on a scale sufficient for a strong enough linguistic influence. With respect to tonal accents, I propose a reconstruction where a rising declarative intonation (still found in Donegal) leads to a phonologization of rising tonal accents of the type seen in Lewis; the latter, via peak delay, creates rapid falls which in turn give creaky phonation found in both Argyll and Ireland.

This paper examines the development of geminate consonants in the Celtic languages in cross-linguistic perspective. Geminates are conventionally reconstructed in order to to explain stop-spirant contrasts in Goidelic on the one hand, and correspondences between a stop in Goidelic and a fortis fricative in Brythonic, e.g. MW moch, OIr. mucc < *mokku- ‘pig’, as well as associated mutation trajectories. One view holds that fortis stop geminates developed directly into fortis fricatives in Brythonic. However, there is a considerable typological literature demonstrating the immunity of geminates to spirantisation and the possibility of an intermediate non-siblant affricate stage is also typologically suspect. An alternative view holds that the geminates were first simplified to singletons and then spirantised. However, consonant mutation is not merely a phonetic change, but rather a systemic phenomenon which is a cognitive reality for speakers. This paper proposes that fortis geminates developed into preaspirates before becoming spirants in Brythonic. In this view, the preaspirate stops of Scottish Gaelic are not an innovation, but rather a retention. A parallel is to be found in Numic languages, where the historical developments are transparent and a similar variety of reflexes to those in Insular Celtic can be observed.

Arguably the feature which most distinguishes Cornish from the other Brittonic languages is the assibilation of /d/, giving tas ‘father’ contrasting with Breton and Welsh tad. This assibilation and the associated palatalization are still not fully understood. After the pioneering paper by Loth (1897), significant progress was made by Williams (1990), who showed that palatalization is text-dependent. Chaudhri (2009) examined in more detail palatalization in the texts. In this paper, the historical forms of several hundred place-names are analysed for evidence of assibilation and palatalization. The remarkable results show that the median date of assibilation in final syllables was c.1250, but in medial syllables it was c.1325. Although there is some evidence of palatalization medially at that date, a significant proportion of place-names do not show this change until c.1575. This late palatalization occurred in the hundreds of Penwith, Kerrier and Pydar, but hardly at all in that of Powder, which suggests the possibility of dialects in traditional Cornish. The significance of these results is examined.

This paper examines the semantic-syntactic role played by the le vs. do distinction in Scottish Gaelic copular constructions. Adger & Ramchand (2006) propose that le introduces an experiencer argument, while the apparent object is the subject of a lower predication, as in (1) ‘prefer’:

(1) ’S fheàrr leam bainne

(2) [COP better [with-me [milk ] ] ] ]

In (2), the adjective is predicated of the subject bainne ‘milk’, while the noun phrase marked le ‘with’ is a mental location for this predication. The adjective surfaces adjacent to the copula; a typical position for predicates. In contrast, do functions as a simple case marker for a subject of a lower clause, as in (3) ‘had better’:

(3) B’ fheàrr do dh’Iain seinn

(4) [COP better [to [VP Iain sing] ]

The analysis predicts that le allows nominal phrases (inc. nominalized verb phrases) following the preposition, while do will block nominal phrases. It also predicts that the le-marked nominal phrase will be animated (as a mental location), while the do-marked phrase will not. We test these predictions through an extensive corpus investigation, e.g. Digital Archive of Scottish Gaelic (DASG). The corpus data provides further semantic evidence for the syntactic distinctions proposed.

Popular perceptions hold that the current use of phrasal verbs are direct translations of their English counterparts (troi’r teledu ar ‘to turn on the television’, instead of cynnal y teledu) and are an indication, among others, of language deterioration and decline. Such judgements are ideologically based, but are often taken as the default position on the matter (Thomas 1995). As a consequence, numerous phrasal verbs are absent from dictionaries of Welsh and often considered incorrect by authors of pedagogical resources (Price 1997, Cownie 2001). In this paper, I wish to trace the evolution of the use of phrasal verbs in the history of the Welsh language and demonstrate that they can, to a certain extent, be considered as a traditional feature of the syntax of Welsh, with parallels with other Celtic languages, such as Breton (Rottet 2005). I examine the assertion that this is a simple case of direct English to Welsh transference and suggest that the situation is more complex than it at first appears. In particular, I consider the use of phrasal verbs in contemporary Welsh-language novels, including, for comparative purposes, ones by Patagonian authors.

Irish words in the semantic field of keep, especially coinnigh, show a striking similarity regarding the expressions they are used in with English keep, including the grammatical function of continuous aspect (keep up / keep on – coinnigh suas / coinnigh air) involving phrasal verb constructions. Due to the close sociolinguistic contact of the two languages over centuries, an initial suspicion points towards this being a case of convergence (bilateral), or, due to the sociolinguistic context, a case of contact-induced change in Irish (unilateral). However, closer scrutiny of the material, while corroborating the modern similarities, suggested is a two-step development, namely an initially parallel and independent development, followed by a period of reinforcing influence from English on certain constructions in Irish, with interesting implications for the existence and frequency of phrasal verbs in Irish.

Phrasal verbs are generally associated mainly with English (and to some extent with Germanic based on their origin in prefix-verbs), but their existence in the Celtic languages Irish, Scottish Gàidhlig and Welsh shows that they are not an isolated phenomenon. The question is how and when they developed in the Celtic languages and whether they are simply a language contact phenomenon or if internal developments that can be adduced to explain their emergence in the Celtic languages – or at least whether they may have facilitated their spread in the modern varieties. Taking into account the findings of the case study of keep-verbs, complemented by the synchronic analysis of other phrasal verb constructions in Modern Irish as well as similar phenomena in Gàidhlig and Welsh, it will be suggested that also more generally the independent (and crucially early emergence of phrasal verbs) – different in nature from their English equivalents – was superseded by borrowing of specific constructions that lead to their very similar modern appearance. 

Comaithches, usually translated ‘neighbourhood’, enters into the title of one early Irish law tract; and others, such as Bechbretha and Coibnes Uisci Thairidne, belong within its scope. But there remain uncertainties in the secondary literature and some inconsistencies in the texts hampering a clear answer to the question, ‘what was comaithches?’ This paper will address the problems.

This paper sets out a proposed approach to itemising and evaluating what can be established concerning the law in Gaelic Scotland in the period between approximately 500 and 1000 CE. It suggests an approach to narrow the gap between two areas of knowledge. On the one hand, we know a great deal about the legal system of Ireland during this period, and can surmise that, in broad terms, it applied also to Gaelic Scotland, largely on the evidence of Cáin Adomnáin which was promulgated widely within both areas in 697. On the other hand, thanks partly to the People of Medieval Scotland database, we can access references, sometimes preserving Gaelic terminology, to legal institutions within Scottish charters and similar material of the centuries immediately following those in question. The paper suggests that analysis of the charter evidence may be combined with detailed consideration of the Irish legal materials to confirm and enhance our understanding of the law applicable in Scotland between 500 and 1000.

The law tract Bretha Forloisctheo ‘Judgements on Arson’ is no longer extant, but five separate commentaries on the law text survive. All date from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. To date, these texts have received little attention. They focus on the impact of arson upon homes, farms and industrial buildings such as mills and kilns. The commentaries are mostly concerned with the fines to be paid by the perpetrators of this crime. These are calculated according to the type of arson involved, whether committed deliberately, through negligence or by accident, and with regard to the status of the person affected by the fire. In my paper, I will explore medieval attitudes to arson as reflected in the commentaries. Though only small fragments of the canonical text have survived, the commentaries allow us a glimpse of issues central to the original law text. With this in mind, I intend to explore common themes in the commentaries to see if it is possible to construct a partial overview of the original law text.

Hagiographical writings are frequently mined for historiographical evidence, but less often examined for their relationship to images and structural forms found in the Bible. This paper will explore a range of biblical allusions in Cogitosus’ Vita Sanctae Brigitae, including references to the Garden of Eden, Cities of Refuge, Peaceable Kingdom, and New Jerusalem as models for the descriptions of Kildare. Individual chapters may be read as parables and metaphors, an approach which may open up some new interpretive possibilities. In addition, biblical images for Brigit may be seen to refute the alleged identification of the saint with a pagan goddess. Finally, the whole narrative may be read as a chiasm, a form commonly used in both Old and New Testaments, and which may be the key to understanding Cogitosus’ description of his text as presented in ‘inverse’ order. A broader appreciation of the extent of biblical material in the Vita Brigitae may contribute to revised understandings of the seventh-century city of Kildare, as well as to the relations between Kildare and Armagh.

This paper undertakes a critical chronological and textual analysis of the language about and representation of St Brigit of Kildare among the three vitae which form the corpus of the earliest Brigit materials, (the bilingual Bethu Brigte, the so-called Vita Prima, and the Life of Brigit by Cogitosus.) The Brigidine corpus can be read as an interplay between texts, a study in intertextuality regarding the specific referent vocabulary for Brigit, as well as the retention of or suppression of motifs, miracles, and characteristics which signify sanctity and culturally constructed systems of influence. A close comparative study of the three texts – and various manuscript traditions within the three texts – indicates a dynamic cultural understanding of female sanctity influenced by contextual factors both at the level of composition and transmission.

The commentary to Broccán’s Hymn on St. Brigit has received relatively little attention, in comparison to her early Lives. The difficulty of dating the text, as well as its repetition of many of Brigit’s best known miracles, means it offers little that is new to the saint’s dossier. Felim Ó Briain has dismissed any influence of Cogitosus on the text, despite the fact that the miracles, for the most part, follow the sequence in Cogitosus’ vita; the editors of the Irish Liber Hymnorum have disagreed. Yet, neither has examined very closely the content of the scholia in relation to the Hymn, the variants in the miracle stories, and the additions made by the commentator. Of the several intriguing elements is the anecdote regarding the underwater monastery, where Brigit’s ‘blind boy’ receives the new Rule, as well as the story (also told in the appendix to the Old Irish Life) of St Brendan’s visit to St. Brigit after witnessing the clash of two water monsters, one of whom calls upon the name of St. Brigit. This paper attempts an examination of such scholia, in the hopes of offering some further ideas as to their interpretation and their relationship to Brigit’s early Lives and traditions.

Three early Irish manuscripts contain copies of a previously unpublished text consisting mainly of short, glossary-style interpretations of the eight letters that form the Latin word magister (‘master, teacher’), in which the various attributes of individuals who pursue the vocation of teaching are outlined. The version of this text found in TCD MS H 4. 22 (1363) is written on two fragments of vellum that are separated in the manuscript by several leaves containing a copy of the grammatical compilation Auraicept na nÉces, and were not identified by the original cataloguers as being two parts of the same text. Two further copies of the commentary, both of which contain some additional material not found in the H 4. 22 version, occur in manuscripts that otherwise consist primarily of medical material, namely TCD MS E 4. 1 (1436) and NLI MS G8. This paper will examine the contents, textual transmission and manuscript context of this commentary, and will consider some of its possible sources.

Historiographical poems like Ériu ard inis na ríg (12c), Éri óg inis na náem (12c) and A éolcha Éirend airde (post-12c) are preserved in scores of manuscripts on parchment and paper, sometimes up to the nineteenth century. During the centuries of their transmission various changes in content, approach, or language have taken place. The hypothesis of this paper is, that unlike often communicated, medieval historiographical poems were never sacrosanct. Those poems were learned by heart and transmitted orally within the traditional educational system of the various families of historians in the post-12c period. The transmission process results in many variae lectiones, variations concerning the extent of the poems and deviations concerning the details of content. Thus many of those variations are not the result of simple scribal carelessness or incompetence but rather reflect the existence of equally valuable contemporaneous versions kept in the memory of the different schools of historians. Striking is the emergence of various additions of stanzas concerning e.g. the authorship of the poem, the extent of the composition or e.g. the number of kings dealt with. Those later additional stanzas are what I propose to call ‘control stanzas’, because they are composed in order to help the bearer of tradition to verify the accuracy of his memorised verse compositions. Thus the ‘control stanzas’ may have the potential to throw some light on the process of oral transmission in the post-medieval period. They deserve closer investigation.

For a long time, historians have known that the ‘history’ presented in Shakespeare’s Macbeth was both erroneous and intended to flatter King James. Less well known is the fact that two of the major lineages claiming descent from the sixth century Dal Riada had, from the seventh century, practiced alternating the kingship, thus cutting out other lineages from the 4-generation scheme of royal eligibility. The practice broke down, however, when Malcolm II killed his predecessor, Kenneth III, and then, in the last year of his own reign, killed Lady Macbeth’s husband, Gillacomgain, the son or grandson of Kenneth the III, who would have been next in line of succession following the practice of alternation, and supplanted him with Malcolm’s own grandson, Duncan I. The question that arises from this series of historical facts is whether Shakespeare knew of this actual history and, if he did, whether such knowledge is reflected in the play. I will argue that there is evidence that Shakespeare was aware of the actual history, via his knowledge of particular Scots and his apparent knowledge of the famous Prophecy of Berchan, and that this knowledge is reflected in some aspects of the Scottish Play.

The Irish king was a person of an extremely high status, but he had to act right and to fit (to satisfy, to correspond to) the idea of the king’s truth, if he wanted to keep this status and, in some cases, even his life. The proper marriage was an important part of the king’s life. The status and parentage of his wife affected his own status. Wedlock with the wrong person could lead to an absolute disaster; on the other hand, the marriage to a high-king’s daughter or granddaughter improved her husband’s claims to this title. We see this idea not only in the legal sources, but also in the narration. The Irish kings’ sagas frequently depicted matchmakings or marriages of the rulers. In this paper we’ll observe several Irish sagas from the Cycle of the Kings, paying the particular attention to the Tochmarc sagas, i.e. ‘Wooings’. The subject of our interest is the qualities, which were important for the future wife and conditions of the perfect marriage.

Scholars are consistently attracted by the issues related to royal power. In Ireland each tuath of more than three thousand people was headed by a king. These kings most often seized power by force and were primarily warriors. But on the other hand it is possible to call them learned men because they are often associated with judicial functions. We need only look at the Irish legal texts to realize that people whose task it is to take power by force and to hold it were unable to know these tangled laws fluently. Such rulers will certainly require judges to advise, although a king himself is mentioned as a judge in various sources. So there is a question repeatedly raised by researchers: whether a king is just a manager who surrounds himself with skilled advisors and only confirms (or not) their decisions or he is a judge himself in some way? In this paper references to the kings’ justice will be considered. The purpose of the paper is to outline the scope of the kings’ legal knowledge, to find out in which legal issues kings took the greatest part and to guess what is the reason of such distribution.

The earliest extant references to Fionn Mac Cumhaill in Irish literature reflect a fían leader on the margins of society behaving much as ecclesiastical and legal sources suggest such a warrior might have behaved. By the tenth century, however, the characterization of Fionn and his followers begins to change. Disreputable aspects of their outlaw existence are shed as they move increasingly into the social sphere of Cormac mac Airt, the legendary third-century Irish high king traditionally associated with legal justice. This paper queries how and why Fionn came to be associated with Cormac, and explores the impact of this association.

This paper is part of an ongoing attempt to map and understand the itineraries undertaken in Acallam na Senórach – the core text of the Fenian cycle – as St Patrick and the remnants of the fían of Finn mac Cumaill journeyed throughout Ireland. It will propose that one of the key factors determining the selection of sites along the route was the significance of the specific locations to the topography of early colonial Ireland. Driven by the archaeology of the sites, the paper will argue that the author favoured places that had resonance in both the Gaelic and English worlds, suggesting that the itineraries themselves constitute an acallam, or dialogue, between the two spheres. A final focus of the paper will be an exploration of the possibility that the Acallam contains allusions to specific Anglo-Norman magnates.

The opacity of Finn mac Cumaill’s death in the medieval tradition is almost paralleled by the dearth of modern scholarship on the same topic. This paper will examine the various accounts of Finn’s death, focusing particularly on the conspicuously different, and late, tale known as ‘The Chase of Sid na mBan Finn and the Death of Finn’, which itself has not received much critical attention. Although the text breaks off before Finn’s death is related, Finn is depicted here as about to die – having vigorously battled the Luaigne Tara and the sons of Uirgriu, he stands before his enemies emanating blood. This paper will consider how our understanding of the traditions of Finn’s death are modified by the evidence of ‘The Chase of Síd na mBan Finn’.

In the summer of 1212, Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, prince of Gwynedd and de facto prince of Wales, sent a letter of alliance to Philip II, King of France. This letter confirmed a political relationship born out of a mutual enemy: King John of England. It records a promise made by the Welsh to not enter into any alliance with the English and the expectation that the French will neither without mutual consultation. This letter and the alliance to which it alludes provide important historical context for an intriguing Latin poem recorded in a late-thirteenth-century Norman manuscript but long attributed to a Welsh author. The poem, which begins ‘Trucidare Saxones soliti Cambrenses,’ has been little studied and deserves renewed attention for its implications regarding Welsh attitudes towards not just the usual English suspects, but also the expectations of alliance with France. My paper provides a new date for the poem’s composition and a fresh analysis of its purpose in responding to contemporary political events. By re-examining the language of the poem, I have found evidence of Welsh resentment towards the French that sheds light on the shifting political alliances of thirteenth-century Britain.

Dafydd ap Gwilym is considered to be one of the greatest and most popular poets of the Welsh Middle Ages. His oeuvre includes religious poetry, nature poetry, panegyrics and satirical debates, as well as almost a hundred of ‘canonical’ love-poems in which he praises, sometimes humorously and sometimes seriously, the integrity of free love. In many of these poems, the body of the beloved young woman within the poem is metaphorically superimposed over the surrounding landscape: her perceived openness to the poet’s erotic advances is rendered in warm, lush, summery language; while her unresponsiveness is conversely portrayed as cold, sterile and wintry. In some of these poems, erotic access to the beloved’s body is metaphorically associated with gaining entry to the house she inhabits; the white walls of her dwelling then become her skin, which the poet can touch and caress without ever gaining the desired doorway. This paper will carefully examine Dafydd’s use of architectural metaphors in a number of poems, drawing parallels with possible classical antecedents by Ovid and various contemporaneous poems of Welsh, French and English provenance. This paper will attempt to elucidate Dafydd’s use of the architectural terminology to construct a unique Dafyddian vocabulary of love.

A survey of references in late medieval Welsh poetry to London, its neighborhoods, and its environs, undertaken with an eye to assessing just how far the work of the Beirdd yr Uchelwyr can provide an index to the developing relationship between Wales and the British metropolis.

Despite the linguistic and cultural barriers between the two nations, English influence was pervasive in sixteenth-century Welsh ecclesiastical affairs. The loss of Welsh independence in 1282, and the Welsh church’s subordination to the see of Canterbury meant that politically and ecclesiastically speaking, Wales was part of England. As a result, the establishment of Protestantism as the state religion of England resulted in its imposition on the largely unwilling Welsh population. Protestantism was often referred to dismissively as Crefydd y Sais, the Englishman’s religion, something foreign and distasteful, and as a result Welsh resentment of the conquest gathered strength. The strength of the English Counter-Reformation movement, as opposed to the plight of independent Welsh efforts by contrast, was deeply admired by many Welsh Catholic writers, particularly the Douai seminary priest Robert Gwyn. In his 1574 work, Na all fod vn Ffydd onyd yr Hen Ffydd (‘That there can be no Faith save the Old Faith’), Gwyn is heavily indebted to the work of his English contemporaries at Douai, particularly Cardinal Allen, Thomas Stapleton and Richard Bristow, and whenever his readers are exhorted to take a particular person as an example of correct behaviour or belief, that person is almost invariably English. This paper will investigate the extent to which the English are used by Gwyn as a positive role-model for the Welsh, and to compare this stance with the more traditional cases of anti-English sentiment found in his work.

This paper primarily examines the efforts of one of the more enigmatic Tudor prelates, Arthur Bulkeley (1542-1552/3), to administer to the religious instruction of his flock in North Wales during the Henrician and Edwardian Reformations. It particularly considers the earliest surviving set of articles issued as a result of an episcopal visitation in Wales during the Henrician Reformation (1542). This paper discusses Bulkeley’s efforts to confront problems of lay religious instruction in the Welsh tongue and the implementation of religious reforms in his diocese as well as the wider situation in other Welsh dioceses, England, Ireland, Scotland, and Cornwall. Bulkeley’s episcopate and his injunctions shed new light on contemporary concerns and ongoing dialogues over the use and politics of the vernacular in the liturgy and worship, Renaissance humanism, the changing expectations of the bishop’s role in his diocese, and early Protestant reforms in sixteenth century Britain, Ireland, and Europe.

This paper aims to show how provincial institutions (especially the Estates of Britanny) and the nobility use the history of Britanny to justify their specific relationship with the French monarchy. After 1532 and the edicts of union, Brittany, as a special province (‘pays d’Etats’), continues to support its policies and especially tax claim on the memory of the history of the medieval duchy and practices of negotiations between nobility and royal state which were those of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. However, this use of history is occasional and strictly limited to an educated elite. It does not lead in any case on the claim or the assertion of cultural identity but rather a political situation protected from increased fiscal demands of the monarchy. It was only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century that the history, interesting now to the entire population, is based on the cultural and linguistic characteristics demand, failing political privileges, their own cultural personality.

It is now generally accepted that the ogham alphabet, though used from the outset for writing Irish, is nevertheless based upon the Roman ABC; and hence that the ogham tradition ultimately depends upon some contact with the Latin world (McManus 1991). A statistical analysis (Harvey 1987) has shown, in addition, that the extant ogham corpus depends upon Latin influence not merely in its alphabet but also in its spelling system, which implies a measure of Latin-language literacy on the part of those responsible. A further analysis, prompted by a challenge (Ziegler 1994) to the earlier results, now demonstrates the Latin influence to have been exerted particularly strongly on precisely those oghams that constitute the earliest-looking stratum of those that survive. In other words the older the inscriptions we look at, the closer now appears to have been their carvers’ acquaintance with the Latin language as written. Given also the need (hitherto neglected) for a lead-in period between the invention of ogham and the earliest extant examples, the paper will investigate whether we should not therefore allow for the presence of a Latin literacy in Ireland that had some degree of vitality already in Roman (and therefore possibly in pre-Christian) times.

The so-called Hiberno-Latin Tradition has encouraged several forms of dialogue and interactions in historiography. Generally speaking, this tradition has been understood as the Latin language literature spread by Irish monks from the sixth to the tenth century. It is also known Irish did not start to write in Latin during the sixth century, the standard year that Irish history may be said to begin is 431, when Palladius was sent to Ireland ‘Ad Scottos in Christum credentes’, as narrated by Prosper. There are many reasons to be concerned about those ideas: firstly, to determine the way something like a tradition goes through or not is a very hard task; secondly, differently from the late nineteenth century, today it is not so simple to state that the historian depends mainly on written documents for his knowledge of the past, quoting only two examples. This paper aims to address this subject, analyzing some notions such as ‘Hiberno-Latin Tradition’ and ‘the year of 431 as a secure date for Irish history’. Are the Ogham Stones the last of romanization or the beginnings of Hiberno-Latin Tradition?

There is a recent trend towards taking a more comparative approach to Celtic myth again, and I would like to advocate the employment of a particular theoretical method as one component of the scholarly toolkit. It rests on making a clear distinction between preliterate and post-literate cultures. All our verbal evidence necessarily comes from post-literate culture and, although oral elements may be retained, the whole orientation of a society is affected by the change. If it is acknowledged that the gods pre-existed literacy, it can be assumed that the myths were created in a society where ‘religion’ existed in embedded form and that they connected with the social milieu of that prehistoric time. I argue that we can model this milieu through study of the different Indo-European descendant strands and that, when we do this, we can see that memory storage is a key, as illustrated in the recent work of Jan Assmann, and that we can understand certain Celtic stories as relating to a mythic model centred on the king’s descent within the four generations of the true kindred.

This study will analyse the Irish folk motif of the changeling and of fairy abduction and will explore the deeper meanings of these folk stories. To do so, it will focus on folk accounts about humans taken away to the Otherworld by fairies, who leave behind a substitute to replace the stolen person. This paper will look more particularly at one episode of the narratives: the trick leading to the discovery of the fairy impostor. In Ireland, and, to a lesser extent, in Scotland, the fairy creature is led to play amazing tunes on the bagpipes to reveal its otherworldly nature. This humorous trait comes as a way to counterbalance the unease created by the liminality inherent to the changeling, whether it be through its physical characteristics or through the narration itself with the fantastique effect. If the narratives were a means of making fun of the fairies, according to Zipes, humour also acted as a relief against the tension brought about by the fears embodied in the changeling tales. Based on works by Van Gennep, Turner, Freud and others, this paper aims to analyse how liminality is depicted in the stories. The characters of the changelings, half-human, half-fairy, are indeed embodiments of the liminality in the tales. Yet they are not the only ones to be on the threshold of worlds, since the narrative technique itself for instance is also in-between, enabling a hesitation and unease, which the comical musical aspect attempts to downplay.

Contemporary folklore scholarship (Ben-Amos, Satu, Siikala) recognises the importance of situating a folktale within its original cultural context in the interpretation of its significance and meaning. This paper draws on the collector’s diary entry of the night this Gaelic variant of ATU 510B was recorded, in order to present a detailed contextual account of the storyteller, his audience and the intimate setting of the storytelling occasion. This elaborate tale, which spans 35 MS pages (8,000 words), was collected in December 1935 by Proinnsias de Búrca, a folklore collector with the Irish Folklore Commission. The storyteller was Ruaidhrí Ó Comair, a sheep-farmer in the Joyce Country region of County Galway. The fairy tale plot centres on the trials and hardships faced by Cóitín Luachra (‘Coat of Rushes’), the young heroine who flees the incestuous advances of her father, only to be subjected to hostility and humiliation at the palace of her future husband, where she is employed as a servant. The central focus of the paper is the paradoxical portrayal of Cóitín Luachra as the subservient helper, who willingly suffers physical and emotional pain for the good of her suitor, on the one hand, and the provocative temptress, who leads him astray with her sexual advances, on the other. Analysis of the specific storytelling situation within the wider social context of 1930s rural Ireland raises intriguing questions about the role of such popular folktales in both affirming and challenging notions of patriarchal domination and social control.

Tha rannsachadh anns na h-Eilean Siar, an sgìre as treasa a thaobh na Gàidhlig, o na 70-an a’ sealltainn gu bheil, a bharrachd air lùghdachadh àireamh luchd-labhairt na Gàidhlig, roinntean cleachdadh a’ chànain, gu sònraichte co-cheangailte ri Gemeinschaft air crìonadh. Aig an dearbh àm tha iomairtean oifigeil tionndadh gluasadachd cànain, gu sònraichte às dèidh reachdachadh Achd na Gàidhlig (2005), stèidhichte air in-stèidheachadh agus proifeasantachd nan leasachaidhean seo, le dleastanasan Bòrd na Gàidhlig fon Achd seo a’ toirt iomradh air ùghdarrasan poblach a-mhàin. Tha an taisbeanadh seo a’ beachdachadh air na ciad toraidhean ann am pròiseact rannsachadh gus buaidh nan leasaichean oifigeil air cleachdadh cànain agus ideòlasan cànanach an luchd-labhairt anns na h-Eilean Siar a mheasadh. Sgrùdar poileasaidhean agus planaichean cànain aig buidhnean poblach gus na h-ideòlasan agus cleachdaidhean cànanach aig ìre oifigeil a stèidheachadh. Nìthear coimeas eadar am manaidsearachd cànain oifigeil seo agus cleachdaidhean cànain de facto an luchd-labhairt fhèin, a bhios measadh tro sgrùdadh conaltraidhean fior-àm ann an suidheachaidhean poblach cho math ri beachdachadh ideòlasan a bhios a’ stiùireadh cleachdaidhean cànanach an luchd-labhairt fa leth. Thèid an rannsachadh seo a chleachdadh gus comharraidhean cànain agus stiùirichean cànanach anns an roinn phoblach a stèidheachadh agus buaidh nan leasachaidhean oifigeil a luachadh.

Gaelic language use in the public domain

Research in the Western Isles from the 1970s onwards has shown that in addition to a significant decrease in the number of Gaelic speakers, there has been a contraction of the linguistic domains, especially those linked to Gemeinschaft, in which the language is routinely used. Official initiatives to preserve the language, most notably after the Gaelic Language (2005) Act, have been associated with the creation of language plans and policies and this presentation will discuss the initial research findings of a project to investigate the relationship between these official language preservation measures and the language practices and ideologies of Gaelic speakers in the Western Isles. This research will compare official attitudes and usage of the language, as articulated in language planning and policy documents, with the de facto language practices in the public domain of the speakers themselves, which will be evaluated through real time observations of language use in public domains as well interviews with individual speakers themselves to establish the ideological background to language choice. This research will then be used to identify the main drivers of language choice and how public language policy can be used to strengthen the use of the Gaelic language.

Stèidhte air rannsachadh ‘ethnographic’ a chaidh a chruinneachadh thairis air seachd bliadhna tha am pàipear seo a’ toirt sùil air Poileasaidh Cànain Teaghlaich (PCT) am measg trì ginealaich de theaghlach san Eilean Sgitheanach, a tha feuchainn ri Gàidhlig a ghlèidheadh mar chànan na dachaigh. Tha an rannsachadh a’ cleachdadh chlàraidhean a chaidh a dhèanamh aig dà eadar-ama a tha còig bliadhna o chèile, is tha dòighean-obrach càileachdail air an cleachdadh airson sùil mhionaideach a thoirt air còmhraidhean bho na clàraidhean. Tha am mion-sgrùdadh a’ tòiseachadh le iomradh air na dòighean cànanachais a tha seanmhair is mathair na cloinne (an treas ginealach) a’ cleachdadh ann a bhith feuchainn ri Gàidhlig a chumail beò riutha: a’ glèidheadh ‘dualingualism’ (nuair a bhios aon duine a’ bruidhinn ann an aon chòd is tha duine eile ga fhreagairt ann an còd eile) is a’ brosnachadh Gàidhlig sna co-theacsaichean a tha stèidhte air a’ chlann fhèin. An uair sin, bidh am pàipear a’ toirt sùil air mar a bhios an dàrna ginealach uaireannan a’ cleachdadh Gàidhlig ris an treas ginealach, ged a bhruidhneas iadsan ri chèile sa Bheurla a-mhàin. Bidh an sgrùdadh stèidhte air buaidh a’ chleachdaidh chànanaich seo.

Situated in seven years of ethnographic observations of three generations of a family on the Isle of Skye, this paper examines the Family Language Policy (FLP) of a family trying to maintain Gaelic as the home language. The research draws on recordings made five years apart and qualitative methods are used in examining the conversations from the recordings. The analysis starts with discussing the linguistic methods the grandmother and mother of the third generation use in trying to maintain Gaelic with the children: maintaining ‘dual-lingualism’ (where one person speaks one code and the other answers in another code) and encouraging child-centred contexts through the medium of Gaelic. The paper then looks at how although the second generation only speaks English to each other, sometimes they use Gaelic with the third generation and the discussion centres on the impact of this linguistic practice.

Tha Sgoiltean-Àraich, Cròileagain agus buidhnean den leithid air a bhith bunaiteach ann an stèidheachadh agus leasachadh Foghlam tro Mheadhan na Gàidhlig. Chaidh Cròileagan Dùn Èideann a stèidheachadh son taic a chumail ri pàrantan le clann òg aig a bheil a’ Ghàidhlig no le ùidh sa chànan ann an 1983. Le còig seiseannan san t-seachdain ann an trì sgìrean air feadh a’ bhaile, tha an Cròileagan air leudachadh gu mòr on a thòisich e le còrr is 100 pàiste ga frithealadh gach seachdain. Anns a’ phàipear seo, cuirear gu feum toraidhean rannsachadh eatnografaig a rinneadh leis a’ bhuidheann fad sia mìosan a bha na phàirt de rannsachadh PhD aig Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann | Soillse. Fo shealladh leasachadh cànain, bheirear sùil air a’ phàirt a tha aig a’ Chròileagan ann an leasachadh na Gàidhlig ann an Dùn Èideann. Chithear mar a tha an Cròileagan a’ brosnachadh ionnsachadh na Gàidhlig mar theaghlach agus gu bheilear a’ treòrachadh teaghlaichean gus Gàidhlig ionnsachadh agus cleachdadh còmhla seach a bhith a’ togail ùidh ann am Foghlam tro Mheadhan na Gàidhlig a-mhàin. Mu dheireadh, mìnichear buil an t-seallaidh seo air Foghlam tro Mheadhan na Gàidhlig ann an Dùn Èideann.

Learning Gaelic as a family: Cròileagan Dùn Èideann and Gaelic in families with young children

The development of Gaelic Medium Education began with, and has continued to be supported by, playgroups, nurseries and other parent and child preschool groups. Cròileagan Dùn Èideann was established in 1983 to allow Gaelic-speaking families to meet weekly and was also open to other families interested in learning Gaelic. The group now has five sessions per week in three locations across the city. It now provides an introduction to Gaelic through rhymes, songs and craft activities to more than 100 children a week. This paper will be based on 6 months of ethnographic research conducted with this organisation and families with young children in Edinburgh as part of my PhD research at the University of Edinburgh | Soillse. I will illustrate how the Cròileagan promotes learning Gaelic as a family and supports and encourages families to learn and use Gaelic. I will then utilise this understanding to assess the promotion of GME at preschool and primary level in Edinburgh and more generally in Gaelic language revitalisation efforts.

Bydd y papur yn dechrau trwy nodi natur ddwylosig draddodiadol y bwlch rhwng Cymraeg Llenyddol a Chymraeg llafar yn y tafodieithoedd. Yna holir a yw’r ffurf Uchel, Cymraeg ffurfiol ysgrifenedig, bellach wedi mynd y tu hwnt i ddealltwriaeth siaradwyr Cymraeg bob dydd. Ai dyna’r rheswm pam mae siaradwyr Cymraeg mor gyndyn o lenwi’r fersiynau Cymraeg ar ffurflenni swyddogol sy ar gael yn helaeth erbyn heddiw yn dilyn ymgyrchoedd iaith yr hanner can mlynedd diwethaf? Disgrifir gwaith ymchwil a wnaed gyda dau grŵp ffocws o siaradwyr brodorol, un yng Nghwm Gwendraeth yn y de a’r llall yn Ynys Môn yn y gogledd. Dangosir sut rhoddwyd prawf ar allu aelodau’r grwpiau i ddeall Cymraeg llenyddol a ffurfiau ystwythach a mwy tafodieithol o destunau arbennig. Datgelir agweddau y siaradwyr brodorol hyn at eu hiaith lafar eu hunain a’r synnwyr dwfn o fath o ddwylosia estynedig sy ganddynt pan ddeuir at ddewis iaith at ddibenion ‘swyddogol’.

Everyday Welsh Speakers and the Literary Language

We begin by recognising the traditional diglossic gap between Literary Welsh and the spoken language in its various dialects. We then ask whether the High variety, formal written Welsh, has by now gone beyond the grasp of everyday speakers of the language. Is that the reason why Welsh speakers are still so reluctant to fill in the Welsh versions of official forms which are now widely available following fifty years of language campaigning? We then describe research work carried out with two focus groups of native speakers, one in Cwm Gwendraeth in the south and the other on Ynys Môn in the north. We show how we tested the groups’ ability to understand Literary Welsh and other more flexible and more dialectal versions of set pieces of text. We disclose these native speakers’ attitudes towards their own spoken language and a deep sense of a form of extended diglossia they share in matters of their chosen language for ‘official’ purposes.

Wales has never been a country renowned for philosophical studies, nor does it seem that there have ever been a large number of people interested in philosophy since the beginning of the 20th century. Studying philosophy through the medium of the Welsh language seems to be further lacking of any substantial importance for most students and researchers. This is evident from the scarcity of philosophical sources in the Welsh language. Concerning Plato, only six of his Dialogues have been translated into Welsh, by D. Emrys Evans alone between the 1930s and 1950s. Having grown up in an environment of language and culture other than both the Welsh and the English, once a philosophy student and now studying Welsh literature, I think that my background provides me with an advantageous position to explore the complexity that forms when the universality of philosophical ideas encounters with the peculiarities of the Welsh culture. My paper intends to carry out this task by comparing the introductions and explanatory notes in the Welsh and contemporary English translations of Plato and through this case study tries to give a tentative answer to the question: what is the value of doing philosophical studies in Welsh?

In 1588 William Morgan published his monumental Welsh translation of the Bible. This work is notable, among other aspects, in that it has the Old Testament translated directly from the original Hebrew. This fact invites comparative study of the Welsh and Hebrew texts, which may shed light on the Welsh text and language, the translation process, and (the translator’s reading of) the original text. In this paper I will attempt a close examination of the lexical means by which Morgan translated Hebrew phrases concerning the senses (chiefly verbs of perception). The Hebrew and the Welsh lexicon and grammar are structured differently; that obliges the translator to make constant meaning-bearing choices, interpreting the text according to their reading thereof. Structural description of Morgan’s lexical choices will be at the heart of the paper. I hope the proposed description, which is based on formal linguistic grounds and aims at understanding (Bible) translations through the lens of structural linguistic analysis, will contribute to our understanding of the 1588 Bible and its language. (This paper broadens the scope of a paper delivered at ICCS14, in which the semantic field of ‘hearing’ was in focus. Attendance at the previous paper is not required nor assumed.)

General overviews of Welsh dialects (e.g. Awbery, 1984, 2009; G. E. Jones, 1984; Ball & Williams, 2001; Hannahs, 2013) distinguish between northern and southern phonological systems. It is therefore surprising that the nature of the phonological transitions found in mid-Wales has hitherto not been a serious subject of investigation.

Drawing on material first presented in my PhD thesis (Rees, 2013), this paper aims to investigate the extent to which socially uniform groups of Welsh speakers from mid-Wales are linguistically homogeneous. The fieldwork was conducted in two adjacent areas in the region, the districts around Harlech and Tywyn, and concentrated solely on the speech of the older generation. This paper will focus on three of the phonological variables analysed, namely the high central vowel [ɨ:], the fronted and raised low vowel [æ:], and the palatalised velar plosives [kj]/[gj], and will consider how they are handled by speakers from the two areas.  
Complex patterns of variation arise when linguistic and extra-linguistic factors are taken into consideration, even in the case of socially uniform groups. Previous approaches to dialect variation and geographical transitions, and even the concept of ‘dialects’, will therefore be explored and challenged. 

Preaspiration (normally defined as aspiration preceding voiceless segments; Laver 1994: 356) is said to be relatively rare amongst the world’s languages. It is attested, however, in many varieties in North West Europe either as an obligatory feature (e.g. Scottish Gaelic) or one which can be present or absent and subject to sociolinguistic constraints (e.g. dialects of Swedish; Helgason 2002). Ball (1984: 18) suggests that preaspiration could be a feature of Welsh. Since then, preliminary studies have shown that it is variably present both in the English and Welsh of northern and central areas of Wales (Morris 2010; Hejná 2014). There remains to be, however, a systematic investigation of linguistic and extra-linguistic constraints on its production. This paper examines the nature of preaspiration and the sociolinguistic factors which influence its production in the Welsh of Bethesda (North West Wales), based on wordlist data from 16 Welsh-English bilinguals aged between 16 and 18. Preaspiration was found preceding the majority of voiceless plosives in the dataset. Preliminary analyses suggest that the segmental conditioning of pre-aspiration follows the generally described patterns (e.g. Gordeeva & Scobbie 2010), whilst, contrary to the general description of the phenomenon, gender does not play a role (e.g. Helgason 2002).

References: Ball, Martin J. 1984. Phonetic for Phonology. Welsh Phonology: Selected Readings, eds. Martin J. Ball & Glyn E. Jones, 5-39. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Gordeeva, Olga B. and Scobbie, James M. 2010. Preaspiration as a correlate of word-final voice in Scottish English fricatives. Turbulent Sounds: An Interdisciplinary Guide. Mouton de Gruyter: Berlin.167-207. Hejná, Michaela. 2014. ‘Is there gender variation in pre-aspiration in Aberystwyth English? An apparent-time study’. Paper presented at Linguistic Diversity in Wales, Aberystwyth, 18-19 July. Helgason, Pétur. 2002. Preaspiration in the Nordic Languages: Synchronic and Diachronic Aspects. PhD Thesis, Stockholm University. Laver, John. 1994. Principles of phonetics. Cambridge: CUP. Morris, Jonathan. 2010. ‘Phonetic variation in Northern Wales: preaspiration’. Proceedings of the Second Summer School of Sociolinguistics, The University of Edinburgh 14 - 20 June 2010, eds. M. Meyerhoff, C. Adachi, A. Daleszynska & A. Strycharz. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh [accessed 12/9/14].

This paper describes the use of the Paldaruo Corpus for investigating socio-phonetic variation in Welsh. The crowd-sourced speech data was collected using a smartphone app by the Language Technologies Unit, Bangor University as part of a project to develop resources for speech recognition for Welsh. This corpus also presents a valuable resource for the study of phonetic variation. The corpus contains recordings of 646 speakers reading a pre-prepared set of prompts. The prompts were designed to contain representations of all of the phonemes in the language as well as the most frequent combinations of phonemes. There are 43 prompts in the set, each containing 8 words. The corpus also includes background information for the contributors such as their age and sex, the geographical area in which they spent their childhood, their current geographical location and the frequency and domain of Welsh language use. This paper primarily presents the possibilities for exploitation of the corpus; describing the makeup of the data as well as the profile of contributors. However, data analysis is underway and this paper will use the example of variation in the acoustics of the lateral fricative [ɬ] to illustrate the potential of the Paldaruo Corpus for socio-phonetic research.

The process of justice in medieval Ireland, whether secular or religious, requires an act of recompense for a crime or sin. In a Christian context, sins are perceived as an offence to God, and compensation must be made through an act of penance. Based on the principle that God punishes the wicked and rewards the just, the consequential relationship between one’s sins and good works in this world and one’s rewards or punishments in the next informs the perception of penance and punishment both in the present and the eschatological future. Penitential handbooks detail how particular offences may be atoned for in the hope of achieving forgiveness and ultimately salvation. Eschatological texts represent the fate of the soul in the hereafter both as a continuation of and a departure from this earthly system. This paper analyses the relationship between earthly and heavenly attitudes to sinning and atonement at the hand of three key elements in the divine adjudication of the soul: 1. the nature and classification of sins; 2. punishment and purgation; 3. the relationship between sin and punishment. This approach reveals areas of particular social concern and allows us to explore the common values underpinning secular and divine justice.

Penance in the Middle Ages functioned as a form of satisfaction for sins not only before God but also before society. Consequently, penance is a recurring theme in early Irish sources. It features not only in penitential books, canon law, conciliar acta, monastic rules and hagiographies but also in the vernacular legal literature. This paper will argue that: (1) when sin had social repercussions such as in the cases of murder, theft and sexual related sins, the concepts of sin and crime were treated interchangeably in some texts; (2) in the cases of ‘social sins’ penance could function sometimes as a form of punishment; exile and forced peregrinatio are examples of it; (3) penance was valued by the Irish literate elite and possibly it became an important aspect of early Irish society.

In the Late Antique Mediterranean a variety of corpora were employed by diverse faith communities to enact supernatural protection for the individual, including ritual handbooks. For example, The Magical Book of Mary and the Angels (P. Heid. Inv. Kopt. 685) is a parchment book containing the text of spells, ingredients for ritual use and instructions for the creation of a phylactery. Accompanying the text are numerous images of spirit beings and designs that incorporate text, including ring-script. Recent scholarship has increasingly turned to examine the function and role of these images and design elements. Indeed, these elements are no longer perceived as of secondary importance to the textual content, but rather, take a central role in the ‘agency’ of the spell or ritual. This paper seeks to extend recent work in this area by applying a new methodology of analysis to selected manuscript examples from the Insular context, including The Book of Deer. In addition, it will pay particular attention to the visual presentation and design elements associated with ‘words of power’ (e.g. demon and angel names). It aims to detail possible iconographic influence from the Mediterranean world on the development of Insular manuscripts of the Early Christian period.

This paper begins by examining three specific forms of cross found in Coptic fresco art (especially of the monastery of Bawit) and metalwork which appear in early medieval stone sculpture and metalwork in Ulster. The distribution of these cross types is examined with a view to assessing possible routes of artistic influence connecting eastern Mediterranean and Irish art in the early medieval period. Finds exhibiting rare types of cross from the Early Christian church site of Raholp (County Down), the well-preserved monastic site at Nendrum (County Down) and the Blackwater hoard (County Armagh) will be considered in relation to Coptic archetypes, and their significance will be explored. The discussions will be placed in context by reference to the newly identified ceramic dish fragment from the Coptic monastery of Wadi Sarga (now in the British Museum), showing an archetypal image of two figures breaking bread, which may have shaped the later images of the two Egyptian hermits, Antony and Paul, performing the same act, found on early medieval Pictish and Irish stone sculpture (King 2013). This transfer of Christian imagery from Coptic painted surface to Insular stone sculpture appears to mirror the processes identified in relation to the migration of specific cross-types from Coptic to Insular art.

King, M.D. 2013, ‘Sharing bread from Heaven – the Downpatrick High Cross’, Archaeology Ireland, vol. 27 no.4, issue no. 106 (Winter 2013), 15-18.

Otherworld islands and adjacent spaces encountered in early Irish and Hiberno-Latin journey-tales exhibit a number of distinct material features as well as aspects of layout. These ‘materialities’, as we will term them, reference Near-Eastern (Biblical, Patristic, monastic) as well as European sources. The multivalent nature of this reference plays a significant role in allowing the travellers to accomplish journeys that position their life on earth within longer religious narratives.

The fact that Biblical legend provided the models for the development of the Irish pseudohistorical tradition has been recognized and accepted by scholars of medieval Irish literature and history for quite some time now. The manner in which the medieval Irish literati attempted to present their own society as parallel to that of the Biblical Israelites and themselves as analogous to the priestly caste (Levites) of that society has been well documented in early Irish literature, historiography, and pseudohistorical legend. The influence of Biblical genealogical tradition on the formation of the Irish genealogical scheme, however, has been largely untouched. This paper will examine this understudied aspect of Old Testament influence on the development of the Irish origin legends and genealogical scheme. Topics discussed will include the probably Biblical Inspirations of the names of important Irish ancestral figures as Éber, Iarél Fáith, et al; the persistent superiority of the youngest of a set of brothers; and the repeated division of Ireland along a north-south axis along genealogical lines.

This talk analyzes the Threefold Death motif found in an unpublished praeconium paschale (‘Easter proclamation’) from BAV, Reg. lat. 49, a late tenth-century Breton manuscript. It describes the types of deaths, their order, and the context in which the motif is mentioned. It discusses the traditional Threefold Death patterns found in the primarily Irish sources and places the BAV example within the dated sequence of instances of this motif. It compares the ways in which the BAV example is like and unlike these other occurrences. It explores what purpose the Threefold Death serves in the text and why the author may have changed the traditional pattern.

De réir an bhrollaigh a cuireadh le Beatha Colaim Chille, trí chéim a bhain lena cruthú .i. tiomsú, aistriúchán, agus athnuachan teanga. Tabharfar léargas sa gcaint seo ar chuid den amhábhar a cuireadh sa téacs, d’fhonn spléachadh a fháil ar a raibh d’fhoinsí ar fáil dóibh siúd a scríobh an bheatha. Ina theannta sin, féachfar le tuiscint a fháil ar an leas a baineadh as an amhábhar agus ar an modheolaíocht a bhí acu siúd a d’fháisc ina chéile é.

Beatha Colaim Chille: A Discussion of its Sources

According to the preface of Beatha Colaim Chille, its creation comprised of three stages – collection, translation, and language renewal. This paper will shed light on some of the material which was incorporated in the text, with a view to gaining an insight into the sources which were available to those who compiled it. Furthermore, the paper will consider how these sources were used and the methodology of those who forged them together.

Roderick MacLean published elaborate Latin poems about the life of St Columba, based on Adomnan’s Life of Columba, at Rome in 1549. He was successively parson of several parish churches in the Western Isles of Scotland, archdeacon of the Isles, commendator of Iona Abbey, and bishop of the Isles. His Gaelic scholarship was widely acknowledged. His career and poems cast light on contemporary society and scholarship in the Western Isles on the eve of the Reformation.

Though founded primarily to train young men as Franciscan priests for the home mission, both St Anthony’s College in Leuven and St Isidore’s College in Rome have been acclaimed for different reasons. Commentators consider the former’s claim to fame as stemming from its contribution to Irish history, hagiography and the publication of catechetical material in the Irish language, while the latter’s renown derives from its commitment to theological research. The reality, however, is far more complex. While hagiographical and catechetical publications in Irish did not figure high on the agenda in St Isidore’s, Irish saints and inscriptions in the Irish language play a prominent role in the art work of the college. The most likely conduit for bringing these texts to Rome is the community in Leuven, one particular verse in Irish deriving from a manuscript that was closely associated with St. Anthony’s. There was constant interchange of personnel and ideas between the two colleges and of the nine friars depicted in the frescos in the Aula in St. Isidore’s, all but two either studied, taught or carried out administrative roles in Leuven.

Flann Mainistrech (ob.1056) is well-attested as the author of multiple Gaelic (pseudo-) historical texts. Modern scholarship characterises him as a master chronologist, an exemplary ‘monastic’ scholar, and key to the development of Irish national historiography. We also encounter various medieval uses and presentations of him: a political commentator and panegyricist, a learned critic of texts, a starkly originative source of knowledge. Furthermore, certain texts present him as distinctive by virtue of his overlapping expertises and functions. For example, he is the only fer léiginn (‘textual scholar’/’teacher at a monastic school’) in the medieval Irish chronicles who is also explicitly accredited in filidecht (‘poetry’). This paper examines these various aspects of Flann’s textual persona and considers the extent to which medieval sources deliberately present him as distinctively multi-faceted – almost a samildánach (‘skilled in various arts’), in fact. The results reveal the complex network of concepts of authorship in which medieval Gaelic learned culture could implicate an individual author like Flann. They also call into question the usefulness of the theoretical categories into which that culture is often sub-divided, suggesting that certain terms and certain models are the product of critical contexts rather than historical assessments.

The poem ‘An frim, a rí richid ráin’ attributed to Ciarán of Clonmacnoise, was published no fewer than five times in the last century. None of the editions, however, draws on the full range of manuscripts in which it is attested. This paper presents a new edition and examines the poem’s relations with the Latin and Irish Lives of Ciarán.

Gáir na Gairbe (‘The Cry of the Garb’) forms the centrepiece to a unique cycle of five late Middle Irish poems, transcribed ca. 1630-34 by Mícheál Ó Cléirigh into Brussels Bibliothèque Royale MS. 5100-04, which relate the prophesied arrival, death, burial and resurrection of Suibne Geilt in the company of his anamchara, Saint Mo-Ling. I will present a new edition of this oft-anthologised work, best known from Gerard Murphy’s Early Irish Lyrics (Oxford, 1956), assessing its likely historical context and concern with natural imagery, notable places, time, eternity and the sources of water that secure the penitent wild-man’s self-foretold salvation at Mo-Ling’s monastery.

Gereint vab Erbin has not generally speaking been regarded as an ‘authoritative’ text. The issue of authority in regard to medieval text requires a consideration of the text tel quel, as its own authority, and thus perhaps the most logical, straightforward way to proceed that actually engages the primary text and its relationship to its avatars (recognizably the ‘same’ narrative that also addresses other traditions/cultures) would be to take a rhetorical critical approach. The material in question is deployed by narrative artists who understood the ‘meaning’ of those even cryptic or oblique moments. These things may be aporias to us, and even to those artists who are deploying the elements of that tradition in the high middle ages, but we cannot presume that we know better than they how to structure or interpret these texts. Further, it is necessary to note the peculiarly forthcoming discussion by Chrétien de Troyes of the process of converting a collection of traditional elements (from a foreign culture) into a narrative, coherence notwithstanding. Among those Celticists who discuss the generation of this tale it seems as if there is a consensual acknowledgement that these texts as literary artifacts evolved in a multilingual milieu and that they developed slowly through the eleventh century, influenced by Norman ideas and the authors/redactors own storytelling techniques. Further, it has become clear that the redactors’ and compilers’ choices in regard to manuscript organization and structure cannot be ignored when we are seeking evidence in regard to relationship, trajectory and internal consistency.

The term Mabinogion has long been used to describe a collection of eleven Middle Welsh ‘native’ prose tales, although this terminology is problematic. McKenna (2009) uses the term ‘native’ prose to differentiate these eleven tales from translations of foreign texts. Included in the eleven tales are the three Welsh Romances which are adaptions of the French Arthurian Romances by Chrétien de Troyes. Why then are the Welsh Romances, by their inclusion in the Mabinogion, seen as native tales, when other adaptions, such as Cȃn Rolant, are not? This paper will explore what appears to be a minor difference between the French and Welsh texts. In the French tale, Yvain faces a crisis in his marriage after 12 days, whereas in the Welsh text this has been changed to three years. This is significant, as Gereint similarly encounters marital troubles after the three-year mark. This occurrence is also found in the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, suggesting the time frame has been changed to aid a comparison between the tales in the manuscripts.

Medieval Welsh poets made use of a highly ritualised pseudoerotic relationship with their noble patrons, placing themselves as the symbolic spouse of a powerful lord. This relationship, well-attested in early Irish poetry, has been acknowledged by previous scholars but not fully explored in Welsh. The conflict between the figure of Taliesin and Urien Rheged eflects a deep affection and loyalty; Dafydd ap Gwilym uses the same language to describe his relationship with Ifor Hael as he does with his mistresses, claiming that he cannot bear to leave his patron’s side for even a single night. Later, the fifteenth-century poet Guto’r Glyn writes of a ‘marriage in the eyes of God’ with his patron Hywel ap Fychan. Cynddelw Brydydd Mawr refers to Rhirid Flaidd as ‘a wolf who loves me’, and other examples abound in the work of the gogynfeirdd, the poets of the princes, of the language of a love affair used to characterise the ultimately professional relationship between the medieval bards and their sponsors. This paper employs models of Celtic masculinity, kingship, and gender fluidity to explore the significance and the reality of the ritualistic relationship between the poet and his prince.

In 1999, Nicole Müller was one of the first to apply the concept of code-switching to medieval Irish sources. This approach proved successful and more papers investigating the interaction between Irish and Latin in medieval sources followed. In these studies, it seemed, code-switching was the result of a consciously employed strategy developed by the medieval scribe. Code-switching had a function in the text that Nicole Müller called Hervorhebung – changes of language that could guide the reader, add more emphasis to parts of a text and, at the same time, shape and strengthen the common identity of an intellectual elite. However, when can we speak of a conscious use of code-switching as a strategy of communication? How does the concept of a mixed-code, as existed in medieval England, fit into this idea of Hervorhebung? And what roles do genre and intended audience play in the consciousness of language choice? In this paper, the XML-encoded code-switches, as found in the Rawlinson-B505 version of the commentary on the Félire Óengusso, will be used to provide answers for some of these questions.

This paper will take as its starting point the image of the dialogue as contest that opens the bilingually glossed and annotated didactic poem, Dúan in chóicat cest, investigating its significance for our understanding of the educational practice and spoken interactions lying behind the production of didactic textual material. It will then evaluate the interactions between Latin and Irish in the two MS versions of the text and its commentary as witness to the social context lying behind the production of bilingual and macaronic texts, exploring the conjunction of didactic dialogue and bilingual glossing and commentary as a window into the intersections between classroom practice and the creation of bilingual texts.

The construction of collective identities is closely linked to the process described as ‘creation or invention of tradition’. Memories of the past define the present, but these memories are subject to continuous redefinitions and refinements that allow them to be adapted to the circumstances of each historical period. Based on these general considerations, the present paper aims to explore the various and sometimes even contradictory uses of the concept ‘Celtic’ based on two specific case-studies from the Atlantic area. Firstly, the north of the Iberian Peninsula and in particular the region of Galicia, which is conceived in Spain as the embodiment of everything ‘Celtic’, from music to landscapes and traditional festivities. And secondly, Wales, where the concept of Celticity and the use of the Welsh language plays a major role for peoples’ identities. Both examples constitute an excellent framework to analyse the dialectics between scientific discourse and popular culture.

It is assumed that ‘Celtic Art’ got its name as the art of the Ancient Celts. This is not true as when it first gained this name in the 1850s it was thought that the style was confined to Britain and Ireland. The term was initially used for medieval art, but was recognised also to be prehistoric in 1857. The description ‘Celtic’ was based on the false assumption that the ancient inhabitants of Britain and Ireland were Celts. In the late 19th century the continental dimension and 5th century BC origin were recognised by English scholars. In Germany Lindenschmid who published the majority of finds refused to accept there was metalworking north of the Alps before the Romans. In France and Switzerland it was assumed that the Celts arrived in the Bronze Age and were replaced by Gauls in the Iron Age so the material from La Tène was not considered to be Celtic. Déchelette was the first continental scholar to accept the concept of Celtic Art (1914) re-dating the arrival of the Celts to the La Tène Iron Age. This historiography of the art style queries its use to define the Celts Ancient and Modern and write their history.

This paper explores the potential impact of Celto-scepticism on the display and interpretation of public forms of Iron Age heritage in the UK. It seeks to address the way that the Celto-sceptic agenda has impacted on the discussion of the Iron Age past at certain museums and open-air museums across Wales, England and Scotland. It addresses the extent to which the term ‘Celt’ may have been written out of public heritage and the problems with some of the versions of the Iron Age past that have arisen. The marginalisation of ideas of warfare, religion and spirituality and the development of ideas of agricultural sustainability in these public heritages is addressed. The paper aims to suggest that it is important to address the contemporary meanings of the variety of stakeholders but also to keep a focus on the ethics of study.

This paper traces the recent evolution of a strongly interdisciplinary tradition of research into the material culture of the Scottish Gàidhealtachd, drawing upon indigenous perspectives. This approach was inspired by two developments in the discipline: the work of the late twentieth-century international cohort of university and museum scholars whose field of research was designated ‘European Ethnology’ or ‘Regional Ethnology’; and the more recent innovation of ‘material culture studies’ influenced by cultural anthropology. Interdisciplinary in focus, the study of cultar dùthchasach, of Gaelic material culture, offers a blend of history, sociology, human geography, cultural anthropology, and folklife studies. In highlighting indigenous perspectives, its approaches consciously challenge existing ideological and academic landscapes within the humanities and social sciences. In particular, the Gaelic material culture approach stresses an engagement with the complexities and nuances of the language and the ‘meaning of things’. Using a variety of examples, this paper illustrates the value of this innovative approach in enabling us better to understand the social and domestic life, the work and physical environments, and indeed the popular mentalities and lifeworlds of Scottish Gaels.

From the early modern period onwards there is plentiful evidence from the Scottish Gàidhealtachd for the pervasive consumption of imperial trades – in particular sugar, spices, tobacco, tea, and coffee – at all levels of society. This evidence is prevalent in the historical material culture of the region, in contemporary documents, and in Gaelic literature, challenging still all too common representations of the Highlands as a remote and primitive backwater. Inspired by recent interdisciplinary work framing material culture studies within indigenous perspectives, this paper examines how Scottish Gaels engaged with imperial trades. It draws upon a variety of sources: ethnographic collections from the Highlands; manuscript and printed Gaelic folklore, songs, and traditional narratives; travellers’ accounts; and new major online resources of particular relevance to material culture, in particular the Digital Archive of Scottish Gaelic, the Carmichael Watson Project, and Tobar an Dualchais. As well as addressing questions of consumer infrastructure, tracing how Scottish Gaels were able to acquire exotic and fashionable items in the first place and so to participate in global commercial networks, we can also examine how the imperial ‘world of goods’ was received in the Highlands, and how metropolitan tastes were inflected, adapted, and ‘indigenised’ by the people of the region in fascinating and unexpected ways.

In common with other communities on the north-west coast of the Scottish Gàidhealtachd, the district of Applecross is in the process of major, far-reaching linguistic and cultural shift. Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork in the area, this paper will investigate a number of specific features of the ‘traditional landscape’ of Applecross and of the material culture of the area. It will recount how different groups within the community engage with them, before assessing how these might serve as a resource for promoting local identity and heightening cultural and linguistic awareness.

La présence du breton dans l’université française est rare. Deux universités proposent un cycle complet de formation jusqu’au doctorat (Brest et Rennes). Dans les autres universités françaises, on ne trouve aucune offre d’enseignement du breton. Une exception : l’Université de Paris 8 - Saint Denis propose un cours de breton dans son département des Langues et des cultures minorisées. Cette université est singulière ; elle est l’héritière du Centre expérimental de Vincennes créé en 1969 dans l’effervescence intellectuelle des événements de Mai 68. Sur le plan académique, l’histoire du breton à l’Université de Paris 8 reste à faire. C’est le travail que je conduis aujourd’hui. Dans la première étape de ma recherche, j’ai mené une série d’entretiens auprès des enseignants qui ont été en charge du cours de breton. Au fil des rencontres avec ces enseignants, il apparaît que leur profil s’est transformé au rythme de la reconnaissance institutionnelle du breton : les enseignants-militants des débuts (quand le breton était exclu des institutions) ont laissé place à des enseignants-chercheurs (quand le statut du breton s’est normalisé dans les institutions). Cependant, pour les uns comme pour les autres, le breton reste une langue minorisée en dépit de sa reconnaissance institutionnelle ; ce qui conduit à actualiser la définition de ce statut sociolinguistique particulier.

The teaching of Breton language at the Université de Paris 8: Redefining the concept of minoritised language

Breton is very rarely taught in French universities. Only two universities offer a full-fledged program up to doctoral level (Brest and Rennes). No other French university offers a Breton language course. An exception, however, is the Université de Paris 8 – Saint Denis that offers an introductory course in Breton, in its Département des Langues et des cultures minorisées. This university is unique being the outcome of the Centre expérimental de Vincennes established in 1969 as a result of the intellectual ferment of the events of ‘Mai 68 Révolution’. On the academic side, the history of the teaching of Breton at the Université de Paris 8 remains to be done. This paper is about my ongoing research on this topic. In the first stage of my research, I conducted interviews with the teachers who have been teaching Breton at this university. In the course of my interviews with the teachers of Breton, it appeared that their profile has changed as the institutional recognition of Breton was on the making: teacher-militant of the begining (when Breton was excluded from institutions) has given way to teacher-researcher (when the status of Breton has been normalized). However, for both of them, Breton remains a minoritised language despite its institutional recognition. This leads to update the definition of this particular sociolinguistic status.

The Irish Universities Act 1908 established two universities – Queen’s University Belfast and the National University of Ireland (NUI) with its constituent colleges in Cork, Dublin and Galway. The establishment of the NUI sparked an acrimonious public controversy about the status of the Irish language and about language as a marker of national identity. The debate concerned the position of the Irish language in the new university structure with demands for the establishment of a university structure that would ensure that adequate provisions were made for the inclusion of Irish/Celtic studies as an academic discipline of the university. Conradh na Gaeilge / The Gaelic League were not content with such provisions and demanded that the new university structure would be ‘an intellectual headquarters for Irish Ireland’ supporting competence in the Irish language be a matriculation requirement for all students. The position taken by Conradh na Gaeilge divided nationalist opinion in Ireland. The debate that followed proved divisive and controversial. This paper will review the opposing arguments in this debate and will focus on issues of the perceived value of the Irish language and of language as a marker of national identity.

The main focus of this talk is the effect that diglossia had on the writing of Irish in the period 1800-1870. Because literacy for Irish-speakers became associated more and more with English, two ways of writing Irish developed in the 19th century. The first represented the last remains of the scribal tradition, the second was based on the orthographical conventions of English. The paper briefly examines two texts, Párliment na bhFíodóirí by Dáibhí de Barra, and An Haicléara Mánas by Patrick Lyden. The former was written by a scribe, the latter by an emigrant who was literate in English but not Irish. The texts represent not only different spelling conventions, but also different registers of Irish. As such, they are a valuable source of information about the language of the 19th century. Contrary to received wisdom, Irish was not a seamless garment, but a language in which different codes of speech co-existed within the community of speakers. In conclusion, it is argued that by taking into account such factors as diglossia and literacy levels it is possible to achieve a more nuanced picture of the history of Irish than was hitherto available.

This paper will examine the use of words such as fine to denote both a collective (‘kin’) and an individual member of the collective (‘kinsman’) and of words such as cerd to denote both and abstract concept (‘craft’) and a person who embodies it (‘craftsman’), and will then go on to examine the meaning of cétmuinter and especially the definition ‘chief wife’ supplied in DIL s.v.

Due in part to the lack of participles and converbs, Old Irish like other Insular Celtic languages makes extensive use of the verbal noun to form non-finite subordinate clauses. Combined with various prepositions, verbal nouns are used as predicates of adverbial clauses. The participants of such clauses like subject/agent and object/theme can be overtly expressed by a genetival or prepositional attribute. If they are covert, they are either controlled by participants of the matrix clause or generalised. Based on a comprehensive collection of non-finite adverbial clauses from the Old Irish glosses (Würzburg, Milan, St. Gall), the paper examines the distribution of these three possibilities.

In this talk I address a locus in the Milan Glosses, namely 59c5: huare nandguid acht dilgud ápecthae do tantum ‘because he prays only for the forgiveness of his sins to him’ The text apparently poses no particular problems, but raises many syntactic questions if compared with other loci. The issues raised are: (1) whether the infix in nandguid is non-referential indefinite (lit. ‘he does not pray for anything’) or is co-referential with the accusative Noun Phrase dilgud (or whether the verb form should be read nadnguid); (2) whether the Prepositional Phrase do belongs to the NP dilgud ápecthae and its third singular pronoun is co-referential with á or rather represents the third argument of the verb guidid; (3) in connection with (2), whether the absence of nasalisation on do (to be compared with its presence in 49d6, 59c3, 59c4, 59c6) may be linked with its syntactic status or not. To tackle these questions, the syntax of negative sentences with restrictive focus marked by acht, the syntax of object infixes with accusative NP arguments and their referential properties, the argument structure of the verbs guidid and do•lugai, the distribution of mutation across phrases need to be taken into account.

The Middle Irish tale Aislinge Meic Conglinne is rightly considered one of the most brilliant compositions in Early Irish literature. Set in the bustling monastic settlement at Cork during the eighth-century reign of the Munster king Cathal mac Finguine, it follows the mock-heroic career of the aspiring gutter-poet Mac Conglinne. The tale is a stylistic tour de force, an exhuberant parody of literary conventions, echoeing and mocking genres such as heroic saga, voyage tales, praise poetry, satire, genealogy, and legal and medical literature. Quintessentially monastic and literary in its inspiration and provenance, Aislinge Meic Conglinne nevertheless foregrounds oral performance and draws on popular oral literature. This paper explores the motif of the ‘demon of gluttony’ which inhabits the king, Cathal mac Finguine. The narrative of how Mac Conglinne entices this voracious creature to leave Cathal’s body is essentially identical with an oral narrative well-attested in Scotland and Ireland (ATU285B* Snake Enticed Out of a Man’s Stomach). 66 Irish and 11 Scottish versions have been recorded. The story’s wide distribution throughout Ireland and Gaelic Scotland, its structural stability, and its linguistic Gaelic profile all point to the story’s long-established presence in Gaelic oral tradition. This paper offers an analysis of the oral versions, drawn from the archives of the National Folklore Collection in Dublin and the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh. Exploring affinities and differences between the modern folktale and the medieval literary tale, I argue that the author of Aislinge Meic Conglinne drew on and adapted a popular oral tale.

Glosses on the term boicmell ‘fool’ in early modern glossaries and a legal digest betray a history of different etymological dissections of the term that have left their twentieth-century translators somewhat puzzled. These pseudo-etymologies include ‘goat-leap’ (as Donnchadh Ó Corráin has noted, likely a reference to the acrobatics performed by certain entertainers), and, more obscurely, ‘goat-lump’. In this paper, I will argue that the latter dissection has been influenced by a contemporary trend in Continental artwork and literature that associated goitre with folly, and I will elucidate how the pseudo-etymology presented in these Irish glosses contains a cleverly lewd description of traditional fool imagery.

The verse of the professional praise-poets of later medieval and early modern Ireland and Scotland contains a considerable number of references to other versifiers and entertainers who attended the courts of Gaelic nobles and with whom the praise-poets competed for patronage. As early as the fourteenth century, these poets complained of unlearned amhrán-makers diverting funds from more prestigious filidh, but mention is also made in verse as late as the mid-seventeenth century of the bard and cáinte, classes of poet more familiar to us from Early Irish material. Alongside these literary entertainers, there is also evidence Gaelic courts enjoyed cruder forms of amusement, including that offered by flatulists. This paper will examine the references to various classes of poet, versifier and entertainer in both the extant corpus of Bardic poetry and other contemporary material. In so doing, this paper will shed some light on these professions, while also attempting to reconstruct something of the cultural life of the Gaelic chieftain’s court c.1200-c.1650.

Old Irish Loricae (protective texts) have generally as a ‘model formula’ the enumeration of spiritual and physical dangers, together with body parts and the performer’s supposed future deeds. Mugrón’s Lorica (‘Cros Chríst tarsin ngnúisse…’) represents an early example of this ‘genre’ in the vernacular. The earliest-known model for such incantations is the Latin Lorica of Laidcenn (‘Suffragare, Trinitatis unitas…’). Similar lists appear in the Leiden Lorica (supposedly a love-charm) and in the famous Tabella defixionis in Plotium (‘Bona pulchra Proserpina, Plutonis uxsor…’). At the same time, the same ‘formula’ is present in Russian zagovor (charms), South-Slavonic basma (apotropaic prayers/charms), Greek magical papyri from Egypt and Vedic hymns. The enumeration of the parts of the body as a ‘device’ in love-charms represents a development of the ‘story’ of defixiones. Where lies its origin – in the Indo-European archaic past, the Greek mystic tradition, the Near East or Jewish tradition? Numerous parallels give us the impression that they were in origin oral, but how did the tradition of writing transform this practice? Special attention will be paid to written loricae, used in a monastic milieu as textual ‘amulets’.

Subject of this paper is a medieval Irish powerful text for healing eyes. It is extant in two versions: it is part of a narrative context in the Middle-Irish ‘Birth and Life of Saint Moling’ and it fills a blank space in a medical manuscript. This paper will present a close reading of these two versions and demonstrate that concepts central in them have predecessors in Egyptian religion, and that motifs stem from biblical and apocryphal Near-Eastern / Mediterranean texts. Special attention will be given to traditions about Saint Philip. I will tentatively suggest a new clue for knowledge of traditions about this apostle in medieval Ireland.

Since the earliest scholarship on the genre of charms, researchers have immersed themselves in geographical-comparative studies, with the question of origin establishing itself as one of the most popular topics within the field. This issue continues to be relevant, since much of the culture of the Ancient Orient was absorbed into the Greco-Roman tradition during the Hellenistic period. The process of influence and assimilation continued with the conversion of the Western ‘barbarian’ peoples to Christianity. It has thus been recognised that charms, especially within the European context, have analogues across broad vistas of time and space. This paper explores the co-existence and mutual impact of the shared European tradition and the local heritage in medieval Irish forms of verbal power. Special emphasis is laid on texts and motifs originating in the Near East. By investigating some of the individual features in the magical papyri of Graeco-Roman Egypt, as well as themes from the Mesopotamian tradition, an attempt will be made to elucidate the analogues that the Irish material has with the wider magical tradition. Accordingly, questions of ritual performance and transmission of magical texts are addressed in order to appreciate both the conformity and the originality of medieval Irish charms.

This paper will examine the figure of St Donnán of Eigg (d. 17 April, 617) through three aspects: (1) what we can know of his original historical context, and of his massacre, along with his monks, in 617; this will include an examination of the names of his companion monks, preserved in the 9th-century Martyrology of Tallaght; (2) the (meagre) evidence for his later cult in texts; and finally (3) the place-name evidence related of his cult in Scotland. In this final section it will be proposed that distribution of hagiotoponyms containing Donnán’s name suggest that his cult was particularly promoted by Scandinavian settlers, perhaps because of the nature of his death.

The early medieval period witnessed one of the deepest and most significant transformations in European societies with the spread of Christianity across north-western Europe. The emergence and establishment of Christianity not only altered the beliefs of people, but also facilitated shifts in power between secular and ecclesiastical elites. The use of carved stone as a medium is an important characteristic in northern societies. From the 5th century onwards, these monuments became prominent in the landscape, as objects of devotion and marks of political power. The use of stone monuments did not die out when Christianity first appeared; on the contrary, these stones were integrated into the expression of religious and secular identities.
 
Recent publications have demonstrated the close relationship between monuments and the elites that commissioned them. The act of erecting a stone, whether as a personal memorial, to record a historical event or a donation to the church, is a conscious act of political statement and the analysis of the relationship between the patron and the beneficiary enlightens our understanding of these connections.
 
This paper will present new insights into the adoption of Christianity by exploring essential forms of social, political and religious expression in stones, in early medieval northern societies. The meaning of these sculptured stone monuments is inextricably linked to their landscape settings and place-names; questions about the use or reuse of these monuments and their political and ritual contexts will also be central.

There are ten short texts grouped together within the Book of Leinster (ff. 278a-283b), and all these tales have moralizing themes and employ similar phrases and locations. Although they are in Middle Irish, it is quite possible that they were translated into Irish from another language, probably Latin. It may even be that these tales came from a similar source and may have been translated by the same person, or at least at about the same time. One of these texts is Íartaige na hingine colaige do Grécaib ‘The fate of the sinful daughter of the Greeks’, which is a text only found in the Book of Leinster. It tells the story of an unnamed princess who causes the deaths of three people. After many years her guilt causes her to confess, she does penance for her misdeeds, and she lives out the rest of her life as a holy hermit. By looking at all ten texts in general and by comparing them to each other and to Íartaige in particular, this paper will examine the way in which these texts work together and will discuss why they were included together in the Book of Leinster.

There is no doubt that the problem of love is at the core of Christian faith. It constitutes the essence of the New Testament, of Christ’s supreme commandment, and it describes the very nature of the Triune God. But at the same time, after the Fall, human wounded love is a chaotic and dangerous force, which can easily lead to sin and damnation. The history of Christianity is, from this point of view, a two-thousand-years-old struggle to understand and control love. This paper will explore how the medieval Irish monks known as the Céli Dé (the ‘companions of God’, around their founder saint Máel Ruain of Tallaght), relevant witnesses to Ireland’s early vernacular theology, addressed this complicated issue. First, through a survey of different devotional texts attributed to them (namely, the Martyrology of Oengus and the poems of Blathmac Mac Con Brettain), their ideas on God and His love will be explored, so as to show how the notion of célsine Dé (‘companionship of God’) came to be. Second, through their penitential and ascetic literature (such as the Old Irish Penitential, the Tallaght Memoir and the Rule of the Celi De), their discourses and attitudes towards human affection, from the spiritual friendship of saints to the lustful infatuation of sinners, will be analyzed in detail.

In Irish folkloristics similarities have been drawn between early Irish literature and more recent material collected from the oral tradition. This is in keeping with the theoretical framework of the Historical-Geographic, a methodology which supports the concept that there is an original tale from which most oral tales descend from. This has, at times, contributed to a perception of ‘tradition’ appearing as if it might be in some way one, seamless stream. There is a need to make a closer examination of Fenian material and its functions in the more intimate and personal settings in the verbal arts. Such an examination will on the one hand underline national importance but is also just as concerned with local expression and the needs within a community. Take for example Seán Ó Conaill’s (1853-1931) Faircheallach Fhínn Mhu’ Cumhaill which has been described as an oral version of Feis Tighe Chonáin by an tOllamh Séamus Ó Duilearga (1899-1980). The literary tradition emphasises the need to enforce power and prestige while the more local and regional material found in the oral tradition utilises the engagement with the same national figure that also faces hunger, survival and the challenges in doing what is considered right and good in one’s world.

The eleventh-/twelfth-century manuscript Rawlinson B. 502 is familiar to many scholars of Celtic studies as one of the most important medieval Irish manuscripts. In his catalogue of Irish manuscripts in Oxford Libraries, Professor Brian Ó Cuív described Section B of that manuscript (its largest section) as ‘undoubtedly the most magnificent of the surviving manuscripts containing for the most part material in the Irish language’ (Vol. I, p. 172). Despite the manuscript’s importance for Celtic studies, its place of production and much of its history is uncertain, not least owing to the absence of the normal identifiers that enable provenance to be established (e.g. scribal annotations of an autobiographical nature). Since the 1980s Professor Pádraig Ó Riain has argued extensively that Section B is the lost Book of Glendalough, an assertion that has been challenged a number of times since then, particularly by Dr Caoimhín Breatnach and Professor Pádraig Breatnach. Although Professor Ó Riain’s attribution of the manuscript to Glendalough has been challenged, no alternative location of production has been proposed. I intend to revisit the debate, and propose an alternative origin for Section B of Rawlinson B. 502.

Lebor na hUidre ‘the Book of the Dun Cow’ is the oldest manuscript we have that is written entirely in the Irish language. While there exist some earlier manuscripts that contain material in Irish, their primary language is Latin and their Irish content is secondary. For this reason, Lebor na hUidre (LU) occupies a central place in the study of the Irish language and its literature and has much to tell us about that literature and the intellectual culture in which it came into being. Since the publication of R. I. Best’s paper (Ériu 6, 1912, 161-74) on the different hands found in LU, much attention has focused on the role of the ‘Interpolator’, Best’s scribe H, in the MS. It has recently been argued that the designation ‘H’ covers a multiplicity of scribes, who engaged in interpolating additional material into LU. In this paper, I wish to examine some of these interpolations and to seek to establish the methodology and possible motivations of some of these scribes.

Dating to around 1250, the Black Book of Carmarthen (National Library of Wales Peniarth MS 1) preserves the earliest collection of Medieval Welsh poetry and is the only manuscript compiled in South Wales to survive from its period. As Daniel Huws has recently shown, the structure and primary contents of the manuscript were the work of a single scribe, but there were, however, several additions made by later medieval hands. Unfortunately, a one-man campaign to cleanse the manuscript in the 17th century resulted in the loss of much of this marginalia. The longest addition to suffer erasure is that found on fol. 40v, where an entire page left blank by the Black Book scribe was filled in by a hand of the late 13th century. Fortunately, neither the erasure nor the subsequent use of reagent on the page obliterated the text entirely, although very little is legible with the naked eye. Using high resolution digital images and photo editing software, it has been possible to restore some of the text, what excitingly appears to be an otherwise unattested piece of verse. It is an overview of this process and the results that I propose to discuss at the Congress.

This paper outlines the manuscript transmission of Pelagius’ Letter to Demetrias and its implications. I will also look at the manuscript transmission of other texts by Pelagius, and I will compare the pattern of transmission in the Insular milieu and on the Continent. I will contrast the facts of the manuscript tradition, as revealed by surviving manuscript witnesses, with the official narrative about Pelagius, which characterised his writings as heretical and dangerous to Christianity. I will consider the discrepancy between the caricature of ‘Pelagianism’ successfully disseminated by Pelagius’ opponents, and the content of Pelagius’ surviving writings. I will then look at the effect that the caricature of ‘Pelagianism’ had on Christian literature from the Insular milieu between the fifth and the eighth centuries.

Many texts have been put forward as potential sources of inspiration for Columbanus’ Instructiones, a set of thirteen Sermons addressed to his monks. Both Walker and Stancliffe have studied this question and they agree that one work Columbanus would have known and incorporated into his Instructiones was Cassian’s Conlationes Patrum (Conferences). However, despite their assertion that Columbanus drew from the Conferences for his Sermons, as yet there has been little evidence to support a link between the two texts. Past analyses have mainly been based on shared vocabulary, which is difficult to argue at best and much too tenuous at worst. So far, no specialist has taken the opportunity to relate Cassian’s concept of purity of heart (puritas cordis) in the Conlationes Patrum to passages in Columbanus’ Instructiones. This thematic parallel greatly strengthens the relationship between the two texts. An examination of both texts shows that Columbanus’ Sermons reflect many of Cassian’s ideas regarding puritas cordis.

The Vita Kaddroe Abbatis Metis in Lotharingia is a saint’s life written in the tenth century that contains a Scottish origin legend, St. Catróe’s early life, his pilgrimage England to France, and his life as a pilgrim for Christ. The Vita was originally recorded in the legendary of St. Hubert and supposedly written at Metz shortly after his death. Few details are known about the transmission of the Vita, and it has barely survived in one manuscript, which is no longer extant. Despite having a limited manuscript tradition and no extant form, this Vita is extremely important in examining contemporary Scottish sources of the tenth century, especially those concerning the historiography and hagiography of Scotland. For the purposes of this paper, I would like to examine Catróe’s pilgrimage to the Continent. Catróe was trained at Armagh and had many ties to Columba, so he was influenced by this concept of peregrinatio at a very young age. I want to further examine Catróe’s motivations for his pilgrimage and the influence he had on his community at Metz in order to gain a more comprehensive insight into this form of voluntary exile and how it was interpreted and utilized in Scotland.

Because of its widespread use of Latin and the vernacular medieval Ireland is a profitable area for the study of code-switching. In the genre of homilies, the combination of a Latin liturgy and an Irish audience gave rise to densely interwoven languages. At the same time, there are major differences in language use between various versions of one text in major manuscript sources. The active reworking of Latin and Irish material to fit personal needs therefore begs questions of the background and upbringing of individual scribes. When comparing the heavily bilingual Leabhar Breac with its cognate codices, one may hope to see in their difference or convergence the role of bilingual education in medieval Ireland. What remains to be seen is whether choice of language was a conscious strategy in the creation of the codex or a rather more unconscious process based on the availability of two language systems within a society and each individual. From the folia and pages of the Leabhar Breac and its brethren it may be possible to construct a glimpse of the monastic classroom that formed the bilingual basis of the genre of the homily.

At the 14th International Congress of Celtic Studies in Maynooth I presented an outlook on the ‘Dictionary of the Old Irish Priscian Glosses’ project (funded by the Austrian Science Fund and based at the University of Vienna). Now, four years later, the project has been finished and made accessible on the internet. Therefore, I would like to present the outcome and also show the possibilities the searchable electronic database offers. In the course of the project all Old Irish glosses dealing with Priscian’s Institutiones Grammaticae were analysed according to meaning and grammatical features. This means that also the glosses that had remained untranslated in the Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus have now been translated. Furthermore, problematic readings were either checked against scans of the manuscripts or – in the case of the St Gall and Karlsruhe mss – against the originals. Therefore new readings and also a few newly discovered glosses will be presented in my paper.

The first of the two parts of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 153 (henceforth CCCC 153), which comprises 67 folios, was probably written in Wales around 900 and contains the text of Martianus Capella’s De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii. It is heavily glossed in Latin and Old Welsh. The manuscript sheds light on early Insular links with the Carolingian continent: De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii is a central text within the Carolingian educational curriculum, CCCC 153 is the first complete copy of De Nuptiis to survive from Britain, the glosses provide evidence for its reception in Wales, and the hybrid script of hand C is one of the earliest examples of Welsh experimentation with Carolingian minuscule, predating the adoption of Carolingian script in Anglo-Saxon England. The lecture focuses on the function of the Welsh glosses, which serve the purpose of emulating Martianus’ Latin rather than of explaining the difficult Latin to readers.

That the key events of the Iberian Bronze-Iron Transition occurred earlier than previously recognized is now apparent from evidence from the Plaza de las Monjas site in Huelva town. This material can be dated by both ceramic typology and calibrated 14C and demonstrates a massive Tyrian presence at this emporium on the Atlantic by 900 BC. Most commentators on these discoveries accept the equation of Huelva with the Ταρτησσος of early Greek sources and the Tarshish of Semitic, including the Old Testament. That the final stage of the Atlantic Bronze Age now appears to be within the view of written records carries implications for Celtic studies. The paper discusses implications for the precocious Bronze-Iron Transition in the Iberian Peninsula and for the primary linguistic split in Celtic dialectology – with Hispano-Celtic on the one side and the commonality of Goidelic, Brythonic, and Gaulish on the other. The new work is broadly consistent with the model of Celtic origins proposed by Cunliffe in Facing the Ocean (2001).

Traditionally, archaeological analysis of metalwork illustrates that regions of Atlantic Europe were intensively connected through networks of long-distance exchange from the Late Bronze Age into the Early Iron Age (c. 1250–400 BC). The ability to undertake substantial sea-crossings has also been demonstrated by discoveries of shipwrecks of sea-going vessels along the British coast. This paper will reconsider what those objects and evidence of travel really tell us about the levels of connectivity that may have existed during this period when the transition to iron was underway. We wish to look beyond metalwork and explore how this strand of exchange was tied up with other spheres of interaction and impacted more widely on social and ideological structures. From 1200 BC onwards, for example, the emergence of hillforts and dramatic changes in funerary practices can be witnessed as roughly simultaneous developments in some Atlantic regions but not others. How did these encounters between people form the basis on which material objects and social structures were hybridized or recreated on a local level? What can the archaeological record inform us about the emergence of coherence in ideological practices across some regions, yet at the same time, rejection in others? Assessing current archaeological evidence from Iberia, Britain and Ireland this paper will explore the impact of various networks of interaction during the late second and early first millennia BC, questioning what the evidence really tells us about the emergence of a ‘Celtic identity’.

As a further development of the method carried out on previous forums (‘Ancient Iberian Peninsula personal names and parallels in Early Medieval British and Irish Celtic inscribed artefacts’, AEMA Workshop, Cardiff, April 2014, and ‘Examen comparativo de la onomástica personal celta en Hispania y Britannia’, XXX Seminario de Lenguas y de Epigrafía Antiguas Gandía, July 2014), this time the focus is put on a comparison of the personal names of the Atlantic façades of the Iberian Peninsula and France in Ancient Times, always with the aim of extracting characteristic patterns of distribution and recurrence which can be used in order to ascertain the distribution of personal names along the Atlantic territories with Celtic speaking people in Antiquity and, in some cases, Early Medieval times.

Although the economic, political and religious dimensions of Scottish immigration to 19th-century Nova Scotia have been extensively studied, the material history aspect of this experience has been given scant attention by scholars. In this object-oriented presentation, I intend to discuss the significance of the quern among Nova Scotia’s immigrant Scots. The role of this technology in early Scotland has attracted extensive academic attention; however, the quern in its Nova Scotian context has been generally treated by Canadian historians as an artifactual curiosity or a barbarous relic. For Nova Scotia’s early Scots, many of whom transported their querns to the colony, this object was prized for its utility and represented a tangible and portable symbol of a distinctive way of life. Furthermore, its intrinsic value was augmented by links to story and song, as well as cultural self-reliance, male physical strength, and female participation in rural food production. This topic is a reminder that it is in the so-called ‘small things forgotten’ that we often find the most valuable annotations about a way of life.

The ‘Soldier’s Leap’ at Killiekrankie is one of the iconic locations of Scottish tourism which guides treat as verifiable fact. The paper will place this ‘leap’ in the context of a widespread ‘leap’ tradition in place-naming in Gaelic Scotland. The failure of the tourism industry to understand the nature of the ‘leap’ is, it will be argued, part of a wider process of rendering the Gaelic landscape as empty ‘wilderness’ and is part of a post-colonial treatment of Gaeldom.

From September 2013, students of National 5 and Higher English in Scotland have been required to study one text from a prescribed list of ‘Scottish texts’. In contrast to the focus on (canonical) ‘British literature’ recently introduced into the curriculum in England, the Scottish texts are drawn from across the 20th and 21st centuries and have more gender parity of authors. There was a firm recommendation by the Scottish Studies Working Group to incorporate Gaelic and Scots language and heritage in the curriculum. It seems likely that for some students the Scottish text may be the primary means by which they engage with Gaelic and Scots. But very few of the texts in the list were originally written in those languages: Sorley MacLean’s (sic) and Robert Burns’ poetry being the notable exceptions. Language also forms a significant theme of John McGrath’s The Cheviot, The Stag, and the Black, Black Oil. So, what are the views of Scotland and of her two minority indigenous languages which are represented and therefore transmitted by the ‘Scottish texts’ of the SQA? This paper explores both representations within and of the texts and authors on the list, and considers the potential consequences.

Over recent years a public stereotype has emerged of viking activity beginning with devastating hit and run attacks on churches by anti-christian marauders followed by settlement and peaceful co-existence. This paper uses evidence from Ireland to challenge this perception. Chronicle evidence suggests that violence against churches increased after viking settlement. While some churches suffered through repeated attacks, others flourished through economic links with viking towns. Arguably vikings’ dealings with churches were driven more by local politics and long term trading interests than booty and religious difference. The Irish evidence can shed light on interaction between vikings and churches across the Irish Sea where the historical evidence is thinner but where stone sculpture tells its own story.

The sculpture of Northumbria from the later ninth century onwards is usually characterised as belonging on a spectrum with ‘Anglo’ at one end and ‘Scandinavian’ at the other. This paper draws attention to several pieces of sculpture from York and its northern hinterland with motifs which appear neither to belong to the Anglian tradition nor to be explicable in terms of introduced design and image paradigms from Scandinavia. Instead they resonate with material from Gaelic, Pictish and British churches. The paper will address a sample of sculpture from York, Stonegrave, Kirklevington, Winston on Tees and Wycliff on Tees. It will consider whether, in the near-absence of contemporary references to contact between the Northumbrian churches and those in the Celtic-speaking world, these parallels are best explained in terms of their being mediated through incomers of Scandinavian background, or whether we are justified in postulating continuing indigenous ecclesiastical contact.

There has been very little consideration of medieval references to Céli Dé in York. Several nineteenth-century writers noted their presence in passing, but assumed that the Céli Dé were identical to the earlier churchmen associated with Iona’s mission to the Northumbrian kingdom. The first task is to assess late-medieval references to the Céli Dé in York, which are found in texts concerning the foundation of St Leonard’s Hospital. One possible explanation for these references may be found in contemporary developments: twelfth-century writers may have rationalised the organisation of the pre-Norman Church of York by reference to unreformed Scottish institutions. Alternatively, the references may reflect links between churches in the former Northumbrian kingdom and their counterparts in the Gaelic-speaking world during the ninth and tenth centuries. This scenario can be set in the context of recent work on sculptural links between northern England and the Gaelic-speaking world. It has broader implications for our understanding of the fate of Insular churches during the Viking Age, a theme explored throughout this session.

The Collaborative Research Centre ‘SFB/TRR 138: Dynamics of Security. Types of Securitization from a Historical Perspective’, a cooperation of Philipps-University Marburg and Justus-Liebig-University Gießen, investigates how conceptions of security have been developed throughout history, how they found their way into politics and turned into particular policies. The research focusses on the creation and institutionalization of security as dynamic processes. The research project ‘Hostageship from Antiquity to Early Modern Times’ deals with the common practice of giving hostages to guarantee treaties between equal and unequal powers, with special regard to symbolic communication and the formation of norms. In the early Middle Ages, contractual liability could not necessarily be secured through a comprehensive legal system. Handing over hostages as a contractual guarantee is a commonly documented phenomenon in many historical sources, on the continent as well as in the insular context. For our research project, the insular example can open up new perspectives on the understanding of security and means of suretyship since many non-continental normative texts approach the legal role of hostages without the direct influence of the Roman mindset. In this paper, I intend to show how inherent ideas of security were displayed in the procedures and presentation of giving hostages in normative as well as in narrative sources.

Unarguably, food plays a crucial role in Celtic mythology, one that allows historians to get a glimpse of Celtic people’s attitude towards nature, of their fears, and of their utopias. In particular, given the peculiar geographical and social context surrounding the conversion of Ireland to Christianity, the symbolic and magic significance of certain foodstuffs was received by Irish saints, and it was at times translated and altered, at other times simply preserved and christianised. Ale, wine, honey, apples, blackberries, milk and hazelnuts are just a few among the most frequently mentioned foods in Celtic mythological tradition, being either endowed with supernatural properties or considered constitutive elements of the Otherworld; they would all later become the focus of the attention of hagiographers, but the modifications of their respective meanings in the Irish milieu are symptoms of a transformation. This paper wants to analyse permanence and change in the island’s food culture in the transition from Paganism to Christianity, with the intention of emphasising variations in the collective perception of nature and life during the Early Middle Ages.

The early medieval period was extremely dynamic both politically and socially, with the expansion and consolidation of kingdoms, development of trade networks and the introduction and spread of Christianity throughout Europe. By the time Christianity was introduced to Anglo-Saxon England in 597 A.D. the Irish, Welsh and some parts of Scotland were already converted and practicing Christians. Despite the long and increasing presence of Christianity in the British Isles it appears that both Britons and Saxons alike were still persisting in pagan rites, the starkest in the archaeological record being the funerary sphere. Through a comparative analysis of conversion period cemeteries throughout England it is clear that traditional post-Roman (and some pre-Roman) British burial practices were still known and practiced by communities which otherwise appear to be Anglicised and even in some cases Christianised as well. Are these individuals pagan Celts still burying like their ancestors, or is there another explanation for these outlying burials throughout England? There appears to be patterns in their localisation, which may suggest acculturation in the Anglo-Saxon migration period was not as successful as previously thought. These individuals marked themselves out in death, so what did that mean for the communities in life?

More often than not, women appear as marginalized figures in the early textual sources of medieval times. However, in their marginalization, such women have the opportunity to become heroic figures who exemplify their society’s understanding of ethical/unethical and legal/illegal actions, thusly demonstrating what the society values and the way in which it identifies itself. Using the examples of legislation in regards to women in early Irish law, I will therefore argue that the ‘female outsider’ was a paramount figure in early medieval Ireland who, in the law-tracts and literary tradition, reflected what was held as ethical / unethical through actions legal or illegal, according to her understanding. This will be exemplified in three tales: by Deirdre in Longes mac n-Uislenn, Medb in the Táin Bó Cúailnge, and Créidne in the Fianaigecht. I will therefore use the legal custom, along with the literary tradition in order to display how the medieval Irish ‘female outsider’ was a model for understanding ethical / unethical issues and illegal / legal action that demonstrated the values and identity of the society as a whole.

The medieval Irish justiciary rolls offer detailed evidence of capital punishment in Anglo-Norman Ireland. The extant rolls date between 1295-1314 and record the pleas and judicial outcomes of the royal court of the king of England, overseen by the chief governor of Ireland. The justiciary rolls indicate that hanging was the most popular form of execution for theft and murder in the areas of Ireland under Anglo-Norman jurisdiciton. They also suggest new forms of execution introduced to Ireland, including being drawn and hung, drawn and quartered, and being ‘put to the diet’. Informative as these documents are, they do not provide a complete view of law in the Anglo-Norman period, as the brehon law of the Irish tradition continued to be respected and enforced in areas outside the influence of English governance; however, the ethnicity, status, and gender of individuals condemned to death are much more apparent in the Anglo-Norman sources for this period. While the execution of men of varying status and ethnicity has received some scholarly attention, the following paper examines the crimes, status, age, and ethnicity of women condemned to death in the Anglo-Norman sources.

‘Nis ’s fheudar dlùtha’ ris mar mhnài na dùthaich’: ‘Now we must face it as women of the land.’ So lamented Mairearad Ghriogarach to her foster daughter Siusi Nic Calum as the day the child must leave her foster home approached. Scottish Highland women of all ages participated in the time-honored practice of fostering a child outside the birth family to a household of lower status. Birth mother, foster child – often foster daughter – and especially foster mother: these three females figure in almost all known Highland contracts of fosterage. This paper shall explore the roles women play from the late 16th century through the late 17th in Scots contracts and the sole, Gaelic legal document known. Special attention shall be paid to an unpublished or commented on 1689 Scots contract and the social commentary contained in the late 18th century Gaelic poem from which this paper’s title is taken. Far from being adjuncts to a male-focused social practice which promotes inter-generational and class unity, women are key to a successful fosterage and union between two, socially unequal households.

Precise chronological references are usually lacking in early Irish hagiography, but the necessary historical information was provided by enumerating the contemporaries of the saint, mostly prominent clerics and secular rulers. These synchronisms could be drawn up for many saints, provided that a substantial amount of hagiographical material relating to them has survived. It is possible to argue that these indications constitute a loose chronological system based on the idea of ‘generations’ composing the ‘Age of Saints’. Saints belonging to the same ‘generation’ were linked by friendship (or rivalry), while the relations between ‘elders’ and ‘youngsters’ were described as teaching and learning. The only systematic expression of a structured picture of Irish religious history comparable to the idea of ‘generations’ is found in the ‘Catalogue of Irish Saints’, variously dated to the eighth or tenth century. The ‘epochs’ (ordines) of the ‘Catalogue’ are roughly equivalent to the hagiographical ‘generations’, but the whole picture is much more consistent and free from contradictions than the chronological system of separate Lives.

The first Breton hagiographies date from the ninth century. They refer to insular saints and contain motifs that are arguably insular in origin. Frankish influence appears to be greater in eastern than in western Brittany and insular influence correspondingly weaker. At first glance, this difference may seem to result from cultural osmosis or to reflect the process of a peripheral region being pulled into a Carolingian orbit.

This paper will examine the inclusion of continental and insular material in the Vita Machutis, produced at Alet in eastern Brittany in the ninth century. It will question the idea that Carolingian or continental literary fashions were imposed on Alet from above and will instead examine evidence that Alet’s earliest hagiographer sought deliberately to display knowledge of and develop connections to a variety of literary, ecclesiastical and economic centres in the north Atlantic and the western Carolingian Empire. It will consider the early absorption of continental and insular material as an intelligent, deliberate step on the part of the clergy at Alet as they sought to promote their see both politically and economically on a wider European stage.

The very existence of a Breton mystery play with Saint Barbara at its centre might be interpreted as a wish of the Breton people to connect to the rest of Europe. Here, Saint Barbara’s legend is well attested and widely spread. In my paper, I will explore a Latin life, two French mystery plays and an Icelandic life of Saint Barbara and compare motives and contents. Based on such comparisons I attempt some tentative conclusions as to possible ancestors for the Breton mystery play, which is at the core of my current work research project.

This paper will examine the representation of pigs in Irish literary tradition with particular reference to the Old and Middle Irish period. The sources in which they feature, including tales such as Cath Maige Mucrama, Togail Bruidne Da Derga, Scéla Muicce Meic Da Thó and Tochmarc Becfola, will be outlined along with the terms used to refer to them. These will be examined with a view to providing a better understanding of the ways in which they are depicted and their specific associations with, for example, kingship, feasting and the Otherworld. Finally, this discussion will be concluded with a brief consideration of some later developments in their portrayal.

In a previous paper I spoke of similarities and differences between classical Adonis and Irish Diarmaid, especially their mutual connection with a wild boar. I now attempt to analyse in greater depth the essential role that the boar plays, both in literary and oral sources, in crucial incidents in ‘The Pursuit of Diarmaid and Gráinne’ and in the fate of the Irish hero.

Alexander the Great loomed large in the medieval imagination. To the European medieval mind Alexander was simultaneously an intrepid discoverer of many of the world’s wonders and a prideful tyrant. There are accounts of his life and exploits to be found in virtually every attested language of the medieval period. Early Irish is certainly no exception in this regard. In addition to Scéla Alaxandair, there are references to Alexander to be found in many broader Irish historical works including Sex Aetatis Mundi, Lebor Gabála Éireann, In Cath Catharda, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn and others. I intend to present the first complete and thorough catalogue of the many and varied references to Alexander in the medieval Irish corpus. Based on the material in this catalogue, I will posit a relative chronology of the reception of Alexander material from foreign sources in the medieval Gaelic world. Furthermore, I will examine how a consideration of this broader context may inflect our understanding of Scél Alaxandair. Finally, I intend to interrogate the possibility that there may exist a distinctly Irish interpretation of the Alexander-legend.

The renowned Welsh historian Sir John Edward Lloyd once remarked that only in two respects can modern Wales claim to have a direct link with its medieval past, namely the survival of the Welsh language and the unbroken tradition of writing Welsh poetry in cynghanedd. Formalized during the fourteenth century, cynghanedd was an integral part of the professional Welsh praise tradition throughout the late middle ages and early modern periods. It survived the demise of the professional praise tradition during the seventeenth century and continues to be practiced in contemporary Wales with renewed vigour. Based upon complex patterns of alliteration and internal rhymes, cynghanedd was described in the 1993 edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics as ‘the most sophisticated system of poetic sound patterning practiced in any poetry in the world’. This paper will report on the first ever attempt to assess how listeners neurologically react to cynghanedd. Based upon ground-breaking collaboration between an academic, a poet and a neuroscientist, all based at Bangor University, the paper will describe and present the findings of a preliminary series of tests and experiments relating to neurological reactions to cynghanedd poetry.

In her fascinating study of the English-language storytelling tradition in Ireland, C. B. Harvey observes that while linguistic virtuosity is at the basis of the aesthetic judgment of the Irish-language storyteller, there is a ‘[…] lack of a clearly defined native aesthetic canon or set of criteria’ for the English-language storyteller (Harvey 1992: 55-56). But is that really the case? This paper argues that such criteria may very well not be explicit or popularly recognized, but they nevertheless do exist as part of the narrator’s ‘linguistic toolkit’. Taking an inter-disciplinary approach of applying linguistic analysis to folklore material, this paper focuses on English-speaking storytellers and tradition-bearers in Co. Clare. By looking at narratives from various genres (from tall-tale ‘yarns’ to multi-episodic tales), I identify and describe several linguistic constructions as part of the storytelling domain. Moreover, I suggest a narrative function for each construction based on the interaction of grammar and storytelling performance. Thus I hope to answer the question of what linguistic ‘tools’ are available to the Irish storyteller in constructing his / her tale, and what meaning these tools convey to the listener.

Harvey, Clodagh Brennan. Contemporary Irish Traditional Narrative: The English Language Tradition. University of California Press, 1992.

The paper presents a narrative grammar analysis of the linguistic signals of narratorship in Pádraic Ó Conaire’s fictional writing. Narratologically speaking, the narrator is most perceptible in portions of the story pertaining to his/her here-and-now. In these portions, the narrator addresses the reader and makes meta-narrative comments as well as philosophical comments. The narrator is less perceptible when making background comments about the story world and the characters, when constructing the narrated world and setting the story, or in plot-concatenating portions of the narrative. Seen from a linguistic perspective, narrator specific grammar is characterized by expression of deixis, modality, evaluation and subjectivity. The paper will survey common grammatical elements, verbal forms and syntactic patterns.

Mae’n dra hysbys i’r bardd a’r llenor a’r ysgolhaig, T. H. Parry-Williams (1887-1975), ymddiddori mewn gwyddoniaeth gydol ei oes, a bod peth o’r diddordeb hwnnw’n cael ei adlewyrchu yn rhai o’i weithiau llenyddol. Hysbys hefyd yw iddo gefnu ar ei yrfa fel ysgolhaig Cymraeg yng Ngholeg Aberystwyth am gyfnod o flwyddyn yn 1919-1920 a chofrestru fel myfyriwr gwyddonol gyda’r bwriad o fynd yn feddyg. Er iddo ddychwelyd i’w hen Adran pan gafodd ei benodi’n Athro’r Gymraeg yn 1920, ni chefnodd yn llwyr ar ei ddiddordeb mewn meddygaeth, nac ychwaith ar yr ysfa am gael bod yn feddyg. Diben y papur hwn yw cyflwyno tystiolaeth newydd ynghylch ei ddiddordeb penodol mewn meddygaeth drwy sylwebu ar hyd a lled ei ddarllen yn ystod y cyfnod yn arwain at 1935, cyn iddo wneud cais am gael ei dderbyn i’r ail flwyddyn yn y Coleg Meddygol yng Nghaerdydd. Ystyrir y rhesymau paham y bwriadai newid cwrs ei yrfa yr adeg honno a phaham y newidiodd ei feddwl. Ystyrir hefyd y dystiolaeth sydd ynghylch ei ddiddordeb mewn meddygaeth wedi’r cyfnod hwnnw. Synhwyrir ei fod ar un adeg yn ysgolhaig Cymraeg anfoddog, ond a fethodd â magu digon o blwc i newid cwrs ei yrfa’n barhaol.

T. H. Parry-Williams the Medic

It is a well-known fact that the renowned Welsh poet and scholar, T. H. Parry-Williams (1887-1975), kept a keen interest in science all his life, which is often reflected in his literary work. He turned his back on a career as a scholar in Welsh language and literature at Aberystwyth University during the 1919-1920 academic session when he enrolled as a first year student with the intention of entering the medical profession. Although he returned to his former vocation as a teacher and scholar when he was offered the Chair of Welsh in June 1920, he did not entirely abandon his ambition to become a medical doctor. This paper will present new evidence about his interest in medicine by reflecting upon the books he read prior to enquiring about the possibility of being accepted as a second year student at the Welsh Medical School in Cardiff in 1935. Consideration will be given in this paper to the reasons for his state of mind at the time, and also to his continued interest in medical matters thereafter. Parry-Williams’ uncertainty can be sensed at a period when it appears he lacked the courage to change the course of his career for good.

Cymysg yw’r diffiniadau a gafwyd wrth geisio disgrifio’r prif ddatblygiadau o fewn barddoniaeth Gymraeg dechrau’r ugeinfed ganrif. Dehonglwyd gweithgarwch beirdd megis T. Gwynn Jones, R. Williams Parry, T. H. Parry-Williams, D. Gwenallt Jones a Waldo Williams ar wahanol adegau a chan amrywiol feirniaid fel rhyw fath o Ramantiaeth eildwym, Moderniaeth ddof, neu gymysgedd o’r ddeupeth. Er mwyn archwilio hyn, a chan gofio mai T. Gwynn Jones yw’r eithriad i awgrym John Rowlands ‘nad y tu mewn i hualau’ y gynghanedd ‘y mynegodd y rhan fwyaf o feirdd gorau’n canrif ni eu gweledigaethau’ (Bardos, 1982), olrheinir ymdriniaeth y bardd hwnnw o ffurf ac o’r mesurau caeth. Trwy wneud hynny, gellir gofyn sut yr aeth ati i ddehongli, addasu, ac ymwrthod ag elfennau o’r traddodiad llenyddol wrth lunio estheteg a barddoneg newydd. Awgrymir yn sgil hyn fod angen ymestyn y tu hwnt i ddiffiniadau hegemonaidd a monolithig i ddisgrifio datblygiad ffurfiol a syniadol T. Gwynn Jones, a datblygiadau beirdd eraill y cyfnod yn ogystal. Er mwyn gosod y gweithiau hyn o fewn cyd-destun theoretig ehangach, cyfeirir hefyd at weithiau a syniadau yn Iwerddon y cyfnod, gan drafod yn benodol waith y bardd W. B. Yeats, a gofyn cwestiynau ynghylch perthnasedd y diffiniadau hynny yn y cyd-destun hwn hefyd.

‘Cynghanedd in flight’: T. Gwynn Jones, Form, and the Romantic-Modernist Celt

As critics have attempted to outline the main developments of Welsh-language poetry at the beginning of the twentieth century, the results and definitions have been mixed. The work of poets such as T. Gwynn Jones, R. Williams Parry, T. H. Parry-Williams, D. Gwenallt Jones and Waldo Williams have been described at different times and by various critics as a kind of second-hand Romanticism, a muted Modernism, or an admixture of both. In order to explore this, and bearing in mind that T. Gwynn Jones (1871-1949) is the exception to John Rowlands’s dictum that it was not within the constraints of the cynghanedd that the majority of the foremost twentieth-century Welsh poets most fully expressed their visions, this paper will trace that poet’s engagement with form and with the strict metres. In doing so, the paper will ask how Jones interpreted, adapted, and rejected various elements of the literary tradition as he forged a new aesthetic and poetics. As a result, the paper will suggest that there is a need to reach for definitions beyond the monolithic and hegemonic terms offered by mainstream cultures, in order to describe T. Gwynn Jones’s formal and conceptual developments, and the developments of other poets of the period. In order to locate this discussion within a broader theoretical context, reference will also be made to texts and ideas in Ireland during the period, discussing in particular the work of W. B. Yeats, and questioning the pertinence of some of these definitions within this context also.

The Nonconformist religion has been one of the key factors shaping Welsh culture and identity. It is credited with contributing to the creation of a highly literate society in Wales as early as the 18th century, but also with eradicating traditional music and storytelling. As other Protestant sects inspired by Calvin, Nonconformism was characterised by distrust of visual arts and had a part, according to some, in hindering the development of the Welsh-language novel. In recent decades, however, the impact of Nonconformism on different aspects of Welsh life has been re-examined from a number of perspectives: its iconoclasm has been critically reviewed by John Harvey in his study The Art of Piety: Visual Culture of Welsh Nonconformity and its tremendous productive impact on Welsh writing in English has been demonstrated by Professor M. Wynn Thomas in his In the Shadow of the Pulpit. Literature and Nonconformist Wales. In this context it seems valid to raise the heretofore unexplored question of how contemporary Welsh fiction responds to modern image-dominated culture. This paper seeks to explore aspects of the visual in modern Welsh- and English-language novel which exhibits a strikingly rich gamut of image-related elements, ranging from ekphrastic descriptions, perspective as narrative device, thematization of the poststructuralist conceptions of the gaze and the scopic field to video, film and the implementation of photography. In the paper I would like to offer a preliminary classification of vision-related elements in the novels by Fflur Dafydd, Gwyneth Lewis, Robin Llywelyn, Angharad Price and Angharad Tomos. I also propose to examine the problem of the visual in the context of the anti-Nonconformist trend in Welsh literature and suggest that the present tendency to engage with image-related motifs may be seen as addressing the legacy of the word- and text-based Nonconformist culture.

It is long-acknowledged that T. F. O’Rahilly’s editions of the dánta grádha (Dánta Grádha, 1916; Laoithe Cumainn,1925; Dánta Grádha, Second Edition, 1926) drew attention to these love poems in Early Modern Irish so that they came to be seen as a distinct and distinctive genre, and a worthy subject for academic inquiry. Since then, most scholars have relied on O’Rahilly’s editions with little concern for the sources on which he drew: indeed O’Rahilly himself only gives the briefest of accounts of the manuscripts he consulted in making his editions. In this paper, I will give an overview of the extant manuscript copies of the dánta grádha: their temporal and geographic distribution, the patrons and scribes who preserved the poems (where known), and a number of other aspects of their transmission and reception that may be gleaned from looking at their manuscript contexts. I will also look at some previously unpublished poems of the Early Modern period dealing again with love and situate these within the genre as a whole.

Tá tábhacht ar leith ag baint le saothar scolártha Énrí Uí Mhuirgheasa, saothar a thugann eolas nach beag dúinn ar thraidisiún litríochta Chúige Uladh i gcoitinne. D’fhoilsigh Ó Muirgheasa sé leabhar mórluachach chomh maith leis an iliomad paimfléad agus alt in éagsúlacht mhór irisí agus nuachtán. Ba ar na hamhráin agus ar an fhilíocht bhéil is mó a dhírigh Ó Muirgheasa a aird agus d’éirigh leis corpas fiúntach ábhar a thiomsú as na lámhscríbhinní Ultacha agus ó bhéalaithris na ndaoine. Ní amháin go raibh Ó Muirgheasa ag cur ábhar as lámhscríbhinní in eagar, ach chnuasaigh agus shábháil sé bailiúchán tábhachtach lámhscríbhinní i gcaitheamh a shaoil. Bhí formhór na lámhscríbhinní a chnuasaigh sé i seilbh phríobháideach agus is cinnte go gcaillfear a mbunús murach é. Féachann an páipéar seo le hiniúchadh a dhéanamh ar ghréasán na ndaoine a chomhoibrigh leis i ngort na lámhscríbhinní agus le tábhacht Uí Mhuirgheasa mar bhailitheoir lámhscríbhinní a mheas.

‘Preservation, cultivation and entrustment’: Énrí Ó Muirgheasa and the Ulster manuscript tradition

The scholarly works of Énrí Ó Muirgheasa are of considerable importance as they, in their totality, provide us with a valuable appreciation of the Gaelic Ulster literary tradition. Ó Muirgheasa published six valuable books not to mention a large corpus of scholarly articles in various journals and newspapers. It was on the song and oral poetic tradition that Ó Muirgheasa concentrated his efforts and he succeeded in collecting a significant corpus of songs and poems from both oral and manuscript sources. Not only did he edit texts from manuscripts sources, he managed to gather and preserve an important collection of Irish manuscripts though-out his lifetime. Ó Muirgheasa acquired most of the manuscripts in his collection from private ownership and it is likely that many of them would have perished without his intervention. The aim of this paper is to examine the network of individuals with whom he collaborated and to assess his importance as a collector of manuscripts.

The polymath of the Hellenistic age, Posidonius of Apamea (135-50 B.C.), represents the most important ancient Greek source for the Celtic continental world. He was an invaluable eye-witness of Celtic customs, and his observations, handed down by Diodorus of Sicily, Strabo and Athaeneus, are about banquets, feasts, descriptions of clan leaders, warriors and military and country servants, duels, weapons, the anthropological ethnic nature of the Celtic people and the religion of druidism. Posidonius, even though carrying out research into Celtic ethnography, compares Celtic customs to the behaviour of heroes of the Greek epic tradition. Anyway, if we read Posidonius’ descriptions we can find a deep analogy with various aspects of the Celtic society of the sagas of Gaelic Middle-Ages tradition, particulary of some famous Irish sagas from Ulster: Fled Bricrend and Scel Mucci Meic Da Tho. This comparison between legendary stories written in twelfth-century in Ireland, a very conservative country, and the descriptions of this Greek writer shows that Posidonius was really a trustworthy writer in his ethnographical report of the Celts. In many cases this correspondance about Celtic world is really astonishing. In conclusion Celtic archaeology (Insular and continental) confirmed Posidonius’ reliability about ancient Celts too.

During the last fifteen years, a number of studies have proposed new interpretations regarding Celtic art and coinage. Particularly, views on object agency and culture contact have proved important in devising usage and conception of metal objects, and their decoration and iconography. It is widely known that the development of Celtic coinage was not related to trade, but rather to political statements of several oppida and their leaders. Thus being a means to convey a discourse of power and identity both in Continental Europe and in the British Isles. Nonetheless, recent studies on money archaeology have equally emphasized the later economic employment of Celtic coinage during the Late Iron Age and Early Roman Period. Drawing from such background, this paper proposes to study the Celtic coins of the numismatics collection of the National Historical Museum (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). My aims here are two-fold: first to analyze them as part of the material entanglements of cultural contacts and Roman conquest, and second to explore the interplay between iconography and cognition in order to understand their employment in social dynamics.

Galicia as a region in the North West of Spain shows quite some interest in Celtic matters. However, the Galician language is a Romance language, closer to Portuguese than to Castilian. The interest is related to centuries long ago when people from the British Isles immigrated to this part of the Iberian peninsula. Their language was similar to Breton in contrast to the Continental Celtic languages spoken earlier such as Celtiberian and Lusitanian. It will be investigated how these people organized their society, how they interacted with their neighbours. A particular focus will be on the religious situation in Spain during these centuries. It will be also discussed how the end of this period also influenced other parts of Europe.

Compared to many minoritised languages, notably Irish, the issue of dialectal diversity has not been significantly controversial in relation to Gaelic language movements or revitalisation initiatives in Scotland. In part this is because Gaelic has been understood (or depicted) as having relatively little dialectal variation, at least in relation to morphology and syntax. In recent decades, as Gaelic has achieved greater institutionalisation in Scotland, issues of dialectal diversity have not been problematized to a significant extent. Nevertheless, in recent years there has been some evidence of increasing concern about the dialect issue, particularly as the range of viable dialects has diminished. In addition, the issue of dialect acquisition by non-traditional speakers (whether schoolchildren who learn Gaelic via immersion education or adult ‘new speakers’ of Gaelic) raises a number of philosophical and practical problems. This paper will analyse contemporary perspectives on the dialect issue in Gaelic, giving particular attention to issues of language ideology, and drawing on a range of sources, including print, broadcast and social media sources as well as research by Bell et al. (2014), Lamb (2011) and McLeod et al. (2014).

Bell, Susan, McConville, Mark, McLeod, Wilson and Ó Maolalaigh, Roibeard (2014). Dlùth is Inneach – Final Project Report: Linguistic and Institutional Foundations for Gaelic Corpus Planning. Glasgow: Soillse.

Lamb, William (2011). ‘Is there a future for regional dialects in Scottish Gaelic?’. Paper presented to the FRLSU Colloquium, 3 December.

McLeod, Wilson, O’Rourke, Bernadette and Dunmore, Stuart (2014). New Speakers of Gaelic in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Edinburgh: Soillse.

Since the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act was passed in 2005, the Scottish Gaelic language has enjoyed a favourable legislative framework for revitalization, along with a public body, Bòrd na Gàidhlig, which takes forward matters relating to Gaelic language, education and culture. Language planning has been undertaken with regards to the status of the language, but corpus planning remains scarce. In Ó Maolalaigh [et al.] (2014) Dlùth is Inneach. Linguistic and Institutional Foundations for Gaelic Corpus Planning (Research Project no. CR12-03) concepts relating to Haugen’s model of language standardization, such as ‘selection’ and ‘codification’, were used. This paper consists of a review and a discussion of this model applied to the linguistic foundations presented in that report. The two main objectives of this paper can be summarised as follows: on the one hand, to examine to what extent Haugen’s model (1983) is followed in the report; on the other hand, to reflect upon the state of an implicit language standardization process affecting the Scottish Gaelic language in Scotland.

One of the most important results of recent research into computational and cognitive linguistics is that the lexicon is not just a list of words. Rather, it is a multidimensional network containing many different kinds of lexical item – words, compounds, idioms, names, affixes, etc. One important class of lexical item which is difficult to handle in the traditional dictionary model is that of constructions. These are complex lexical structures containing one or more ‘gaps’, which are subsequently ‘filled’ with another lexical items during syntactic combination. Examples of lexical constructions include idioms, affixes, particles, prepositions, auxiliary and phrasal verbs. The hierarchy of constructions in the lexicon of any language is highly complex, with more general constructions often being instantiated by more specific ones. The Lexicopia / GD website (http://dasg.ac.uk/lexicopia) is a prototype for a comprehensive electronic dictionary of Scottish Gaelic, designed on cognitive principles, and inspired by the results of the 2013 Dlùth is Inneach project. In this talk, I discuss the system I have developed to represent constructions in this dictionary, using a model of Gaelic phrase structure which is expressive enough to handle all the data, yet simple enough to be understood by linguistically-aware users.

For a number of years my interest has lain with the Bórama tract from the Book of Leinster. With this paper I explore some of my thoughts regarding the Bórama poems, both from the Book of Leinster as well as from other manuscripts. The poems of the Bórama tract in the Book of Leinster are thirty-three in total and there are a few more that need to be considered as well. Since the poems are numerous I will explore their function briefly but mostly I will focus on their metric forms in terms of the Book of Leinster text. There is ample reason for researching the poems further because of the incredible variety of poetic metres the Bórama tract contains and why they occur as they do. The sentence ‘iar n-úaim trilech’ taken from one of the poems, made me question what happens to a text ‘after composing a poem (trilling)’? The question is whether this was done as a deliberate stylistic ‘show off’ or was it a possible random occurrence with the construction of a very elaborate text focusing on the legendary Leinster saint Mo Ling.

Prose and prose-dominated prosimetrum are the principal forms employed in secular narrative literature written in Old Irish and Middle Irish. It is commonly acknowledged that verse is used within prosimetra to mark moments of emotional climax, signal formal exchanges, and to corroborate or otherwise authenticate what has been said in the preceding prose. This paper will ask how instances of verse-capping are to be approached. It will be argued that this form of embedded verse is used within a series of narrative depicting the composition of poetry to pose questions concerning (true) identities, and that perhaps its most famous manifestation, within Fingal Rónáin, is to be understood against that wider pattern.

In 1974 the Irish scholar Proinsias Mac Cana wrote that for late-medieval Gaelic Scotland and Ireland ‘literature and poetry became synonymous’ (Ériu 1974). Bardic poetry is seen to have become the high-status vernacular literature of choice from 1200-1650, with a concurrent reduction in the production of new prose / prosimetrical narratives. Tromdhámh Guaire is a vernacular prose text thought to belong to the period in which bardic poetry first emerged. This satirical text portrays poets composing panegyric so opaque that kings must politely enquire as to the meaning. It also mocks the poets for their ignorance of well-known narrative. This paper will investigate relationships between bardic poetry, intentional obscurity, and prose narrative.

In this paper I will examine the development of the historical present from Old to Middle Irish. To do this, I will use the two different recensions of the Táin Bó Cuailnge. By comparing similar stories with a marked difference in age I will attempt to indicate how and why the use of the historical present changes over time. In a paper presented at the last Celtic Congress, I discussed my preliminary results on the use of the historical present to indicate an imperfective aspect. In this paper, I will combine the outcome of that research with the development of the historical present to recreate the environment of the loss of a grammatical indicator. This loss reflects both the development of the medieval Western European languages in general, but also the unique solitary position of the Irish language up until the ninth century.

This paper discusses the term Celtica eloquentia used by Prudentius of Troyes in one of his attacks on John Scotus Eriugena. Is this an example of the term ‘Celtic’ being used of an Irishman in the ninth century? If so, what are the implications? Or can it be explained otherwise?

Shared structural preoccupations between the music and literature of early Celtic chant (in both Latin and old Gaelic), extend to the conventions of elaborate book illumination, sculpture and, through the centuries, into the musical structures of piobaireachd. They can also be traced in a number of songs gathered from oral tradition. Following on a joint plenary paper given at Rannsachadh na Gàidhlig in 2014, this paper asks whether these apparent structural predilections represent some kind of shared aesthetic, perhaps even a shared philosophy. The extended influence of the patristic disapproval of instrumental music will be contrasted with the actual status of music in religious and secular contexts, as manifest in imagery and literature, and it will be argued that both the status of practitioners of the arts and their preoccupation with abstract form do indeed represent a distinctive aesthetic with interesting philosophical implications.

Depuis les travaux primordiaux du XIXe siècle, notamment ceux d’Emile Ernault, et ceux du XXe siècle, notamment ceux de Gwennole Le Menn, on s’accorde à donner le nom de moyen-breton à une période allant du début du XIIe siècle à la moitié du XVIIe siècle. Ce qui constitue une première difficulté : peut-on considérer que le breton a gardé un état de langue donné sur une si longue période (cinq siècles et demi). La seconde difficulté tient au fait que le corpus du moyen-breton ne devient conséquent qu’à partir du quinzième siècle, c’est-à-dire à la deuxième moitié de sa période. Les récentes découvertes, à la fois de textes, et de datations de textes déjà connus permettent de revoir les critères du moyen-breton et d’en donner une définition plus fine : moyen-breton primitif, moyen-breton classique et moyen-breton tardif. Dans notre intervention nous proposerons un examen de ces critères qui tiennent tant au corpus qu’aux datations nouvelles. Nous aborderons également les problèmes de dialectologie posés par la provenance des textes.

In 731 the Northumbrian monk Bede stated that Pictish was one of the four spoken languages of Britain, contrasting it with English, Irish and most importantly Brittonic. For the past four hundred years or so there has been an unrelenting debate about the linguistic affinities of Pictish with proposals ranging from the admirably cautious to the worryingly absurd. For example it has been claimed that it was Gaelic, Danish, Basque, Gaulish, Germanic, Frisian, Lappish, English or an unknown non-Indo-European language. From the early decades of the twentieth century the general scholarly consensus, punctuated by occasional blips, was that Pictish was closely related to Brittonic, perhaps no more than the most northerly dialect of this continuum. A small number of features were later identified as suggesting that Pictish was diverging from Brittonic perhaps as early as the pre-Roman period. However, these proposals can be demonstrated to be untenable, based on shaky evidence or linguistically trivial. This would again open the door to Pictish indeed being no more than a northerly variant of Brittonic taking us right back to earlier viewpoints. However, this paper will discuss one issue which has hitherto not been noticed – a certain linguistic feature which would seem to confirm the views of some scholars that Pictish may have escaped some, if not many, of the significant Latin influences which impacted upon Celtic in Britain and gave rise to Neo-Brittonic. A small number of Pictish words preserved in Gaelic will be discussed as will be some place-names. From these it will be argued that they may well demonstrate that Pictish was indeed conservative in one very important linguistic aspect and that this conservatism would probably have made mutual-intelligibility with Brittonic very challenging. This may therefore be the only truly significant piece of evidence that can be employed to vindicate Bede’s statement that Pictish was indeed a distinct language.

The Gaelic notes in the Book of Deer provide us with the earliest examples of the Gaelic tongue in a manuscript penned on Scottish soil. Strachan, Jackson et al. have described these notes as ‘Middle Irish’ in nature although, more recently, Ó Maolalaigh has hinted at the possible vernacular nature of this Gaelic material in Deer. The current paper will examine the verbal morphology of these notes (and will conclude that these are primarily ‘Middle Irish’ in nature) and ask what socio-linguistic implications this has for this body of material?

The core expressions of kingship theory in early Irish literature have been well established. Concepts such as fír flathemon and the personification of sovereignty as a woman or goddess are familiar to many, and have been identified across a broad range of genres, in both Latin and the vernacular. The importance of these motifs for our understanding of early Irish concepts of kingship has been much discussed, particularly in relation to Christian and pre-Christian concepts of polity. Less well researched, however, is the relationship of these concepts to one another. This paper will seek to address this deficiency by comparing the use of these themes in early Irish literature; their range, chronology, and dispersal.

The importance of Eusebius in the development of medieval Irish historiography is well established. His Chronicle, among other similar texts, provided a framework through which Ireland’s Christian present and pagan past alike could be reflected upon as the further unfolding of the sacred history found in Scripture. However, the question of Eusebius’ significance for medieval Irish kingship ideology has, thus far, been neglected. The concept of fír flathemon, that the welfare of a kingdom is immediately dependent on the justice of its king, is the central idea around which early Irish law texts organize their respective presentations of kingship. Yet, strong parallels to this doctrine are found in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History, a work that Breen and Herren have argued was known in Ireland by the 7th century. This clearly complicates the view that the concept of fír flathemon has an unambiguously pre-Christian provenance. This paper will explore these complications through a comparison of the kingship ideology of Audacht Morainn and De duodecim abusvivis saeculi with that of Eusebius. In doing so, we will come to a clearer understanding, not only of the place that the doctrine of fír flathemon has in intellectual history, but also of its own specific character.

In this paper I’ll introduce a collection of poems to be published in 2016, which deploys the metres and verse-forms associated with classical Gaelic verse. I’ll explore the problem of poetic form for a Gaelic writer in 2015 and the ways in which the poetry of the professional Filidhean – and their amateur imitators – might offer a solution. Poems from the collection will be read in the context of other post-classical Gaelic poets from Scotland and Ireland who have attempted to turn the older forms to new uses. I’ll argue that there is a thread of ‘neo-classicism’ running through twentieth-century Scottish Gaelic verse and invite a discussion about the success – or otherwise – of the formal strategies adopted in the new collection.

This paper will discuss a range of contemporary Gaelic poetry (in particular recent work by Aonghas Pàdraig Caimbeul, Meg Bateman, Aonghas MacNeacail, Rody Gorman, and the author) in terms of how Scottish Gaelic poetry interacts with – and angles itself – against other literary traditions. The paper will touch on different strategies of translation, as well as the possibilities of textual incorporation and fluidity in the digital age. It will also pose the question of what the ‘contemporary’ actually is in the Gaelic world, and if that is an energising or enervating notion.

The Four Branches of the Mabinogi are unusually rich in identifiable toponyms, more so than any other early Welsh prose. The prominence of the tales in the culture of Wales today depends to a significant extent on popular familiarity with the toponyms they contain. But literary appreciation of the Four Branches has tended to relegate discussion of toponyms to footnotes and has rarely looked at them in their geographical and phenomenological context. This paper describes a review, which has combined a study of the text with an understanding of other disciplines which look at landscape, to give additional insights into these wonderful tales and their talented author. Although the stories are fiction, the places and journeys between them can generally be readily identified and they add to the information we have on travel in medieval Wales from such sources as the Itinerarium Cambriae of Geraldus, the Vita Griffini Filii Conani and the Gough Map. Journeys in the Four Branches can be followed today and to do so enhances recognition of the author’s sense of place and deep connection with the landscape of Wales and, in particular, of Gwynedd.

After the Second Branch battle in Ireland, the surviving Welshmen return home. As they wander through the land, they realise that a mist has settled in and all trace of civilisation has vanished. What follows is an unlikely hero’s journey to restore his kingdom. My paper explores the wanderings of this leader, Manawydan fab Llyr and the ways in which he acts in order to lift the mist and restore order and culture to his kingdom: his insistence on retreat rather than conflict with English craftsmen whom he has surpassed in skill, and his eventual victory in (re)introducing agriculture and restoring his own land. I will further explore these events through a socio-historical lens in order to draw parallels with a historical reality amidst the turbulent era of the Anglo-Norman invasions. I will examine merchant and craft guilds of the Middle Ages and consider to what extent the events of the Third Branch might reflect legitimate relations between Wales and England.

Yn 1914 cyhoeddodd yr athronydd a’r cyfrinydd, Martin Buber (a adnabyddir fwyaf am ei waith Ich und du (1923) / I and Thou (1937)) gyfieithiad o Bedair Cainc y Mabinogi: Die vier Zweige des Mabinogi. Pwrpas y papur hwn yw archwilio i berthynas y chwedlau Cymraeg â syniadau Buber. Gosodir y drafodaeth yng nghyd-destun athroniaeth Almaeneg y cyfnod rhwng y rhyfel byd cyntaf a’r ail, gan gynwys y traddodiad ffenomenolegol a nodweddir gan weithiau Martin Heidegger.

In 1914 the mystic and philosopher, Martin Buber (the author most famously of Ich und du (1923) / I and Thou (1937)) published a translation of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi: Die vier Zweige des Mabinogi. This paper will explore the relationship between the Welsh tales and Buber’s philosophy. The discussion will be placed in the context of German-language philosophy of the interwar period, including the phenomenological tradition characterised by the work of Martin Heidegger.