Celtic Literature Research Articles

Alexander Smirnov and the Beginnings of Celtic Studies in Russia

Celtic studies in Russia which have developed during the twentieth century into a recognised and respectable branch on the tree of humanities owe much to one person who undoubtedly has won a right to be called a patriarch of Celtic studies in Russia, namely Alexander Alexandrovich Smirnov. Mostly known for his pioneering translations of early Irish tales into Russian in the early days of his career he was also prominent scholar of Welsh and Breton covering many aspects of Celtic linguistics and literary studies. His biography, achievements and approach to Celtic studies in Russia deserve better attention both on the Russian side and in the view of the history of Celtic studies worldwide. We are aiming here to connect facts of his biography with his academic career in the field of Celtic studies and because of the specific aims and limits of the present conference we are not going to touch on his role as a scholar of Romance literatures and as a Shakespearean scholar. Alexander Smirnov [27.8(8.9).1883 – 16.9.1962] can be considered the first professional Celtic scholar in Russia. He was a prominent medievalist and philologist with a range of interests from early Irish and Welsh literature to Shakespearean studies. The paper is devoted to some little known facts from Smirnov’s biography especially to the early years of his academic career in Russia, France and Ireland. His earlier publications on Celtic literatures and ideas expressed therein will be brought to light and examined. Smirnov should be recognised as a ‘founding father’ of a school of Russian Celtic studies. His ideas and influence are still alive in the works of subsequent Russian scholars of Celtic.

Helen Fulton (ed), Medieval Celtic literature and society

Helen Fulton (ed), <i>Medieval Celtic literature and society</i>

Ireland and the Grail (review)

Reviewed by: Ireland and the Grail Matthieu Boyd John Carey, Ireland and the Grail. Celtic Studies Publications xi. Aberystwyth: Celtic Studies Publications, 2007. Pp. xii, 419. ISBN: 978–1–891271–15–1. $29.95. Among specialists of medieval Celtic literature, John Carey has earned a reputation as an unusually meticulous and productive scholar. Ireland and the Grail displays his customary thoroughness and daring. It is a milestone in that, as Carey states, it is ‘the first attempt to present a detailed and text-based case for a Celtic background to the Grail legend since […] 1975, the first argument for such a background to have been undertaken by a specialist in medieval Irish since […] 1955, and the first such argument to propose a new interpretation based on the Irish evidence since […] 1930’ (p. xix). This alone makes the book a must-read. Carey argues that a group of medieval Irish texts, contained in the lost eighthcentury Book of Druim Snechtai, influenced a lost body of Welsh stories, and that these in turn influenced both surviving Welsh texts—such as the Four Branches of the Mabinogi and Culhwch ac Olwen—and also the earliest French texts that mention the Grail—especially Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte del Graal and its Continuations, but including Robert de Boron’s Joseph d’Arimathie and others. (Ch. 20 provides a lucid overview of the entire argument, and non-Celticist readers might well begin there.) Most of the book considers various features, often linked to personal names such as Bran or Mongán/Amangon/etc., that are shared among selected Irish, Welsh, and French tales; Carey seeks to show that these originate in Ireland and are passed on as a cluster all the way to France. In Chs. 9 and 17, he suggests precisely how his Irish stories could have influenced the Welsh ones (Irish scholars regularly visited ninth-century Wales), and how the predecessors of the Welsh stories could, in turn, gain currency on the Continent (the Welsh storyteller named Bleddri who may have visited the count of Poitou in the early twelfth century). Another distinguished Celtic scholar, Patrick Sims-Williams, has taken a skeptical position on both of these issues, and Carey rightly acknowledges the soundness of his views (e.g., pp. 44–45); but he asserts that there is still value in ‘an investigation in terms of concrete details, not of assumptions and generalizations.’ Indeed, all of the specific claims that Carey makes are plausible and warrant serious consideration. We are not likely to see these arguments made more convincingly (though that is not to say they are the only arguments that can be advanced in favor of a Celtic origin for the Grail legend). The related work by Roger Sherman Loomis, notably The Grail: From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol (1963), is largely superseded here; it should be remembered that Loomis, though a fine Arthurian scholar, was never more than an amateur Celticist. A great virtue of the book is that Carey translates generously from the lesser-known texts that he is dealing with, summarizes them [End Page 79] fully, and adverts to any relevant scholarly controversies. Speculative remarks are clearly identified as such. Even readers who are unfamiliar with the medieval Celtic languages and literatures ought to find that Carey leaves them well equipped to make up their own minds on the evidence; even if not fully convinced of the author’s hypotheses, they should continue to find Ireland and the Grail a valuable sourcebook. Ch. 18, though it obviously cannot address all competing theories of Grail origins, is particularly useful in comparing Carey’s work to other approaches, such as the ‘eucharistic approach’ (Carey’s phrase) recently championed by Richard Barber in The Holy Grail (2004). (Another contribution along similar lines is G. Ronald Murphy’s Gemstone of Paradise: The Holy Grail in Wolfram’s Parzifal [2006]). I cannot respond to Carey’s detailed arguments here, and in any case they often hinge on whether certain parallels are found to be convincing; this is partly a subjective matter. However, a few points may be singled out for comment. In Ch. 2, Carey (following Loomis) discusses the many similarities between...

The Permanence of Place: Places and Their Names in Irish Literature

This paper discusses the relation between places and their names as reflected in Irish literature. According to Robbie Hannan (1991: 19) attachment to place is among the strongest human emotions, explicitly revealed in literature. Celtic literature is ‘saturated’ with images of landscape and preoccupied with places and their names, landscape is constantly present in ancient sagas and bardic poetry, modern drama, short stories, novels and essays. The sense of place is explicitly manifest in medieval heroic tales (such as The Táin), and twentieth century novels (e.g. James Joyce’s Ulysses) and poetry, or contemporary drama (e.g. Brian Friel’s Translations). Patrick Sheeran (1988: 194) has observed that the idea of the Irish sense of place is: (a) a product of the native tradition; (b) it is a verbal or nominal preoccupation and has little to do with any actual cultivation of things; (c) it relates to death rather than to life. The principal aim of this paper is to further add to the above characteristics.

The Mary of the Celts by Andrew Breeze (review)

Reviews TheMary of the Celts.By Andrew Breeze. Leominster: Gracewing. 2008. viii + 183pp. ?9.99. isbn: 978-0-85244-682-9. Comprising sixchapters arranged roughlychronologically from theAnnunciation to the Assumption, with a concluding discussion on 'The Praise of theVirgin' and a bibliog raphy of reasonable size,Andrew Breeze's book offers an exploration of aspects of Marian devotion evidenced inmedieval Celtic Literature. In the opening chapters, 'The Annunciation I:Mary, Daughter of her Son' and 'The Annunciation II: God's Sunbeam and theHoly Trinity', Breeze traces the emergence and development of a number ofMarian-related themes in a range ofmedieval texts, including themater etfiliatopos, the strikinguse of theAva/Eve paradox, the symbolic representation of theVirgin's purity in themotif of a sunbeam passing through glass, and the depiction in both literary and material culture of the three persons of theTrinity as present in theVirgin's womb. The third chapter, 'Virgin and Child', is,with the fifth, perhaps the strongest in the volume. In itBreeze discusses various perceptions of theVirgin Mary in medieval Welsh and Irish literature, perhaps most interestingly in his examina tion of thepopular legend of the 'Instantaneous Harvest', contextualized in light of the Continental evidence for the idea. Chapter 4 deals with the crucifixion, opening with an analysis of theOld English Dream of the Rood, which, sethere in the context of the patristic tradition of Virgin and Cross as instruments of redemption and contrasted with the later and popular topos of the 'tears of blood', frames Breeze's discussion of the varying motifs available for Insular writers to draw on. The following chapter, 'The Assumption and Last Judgement', returns to theVirgin's intercessory role, both in church teaching and popular folklore, in its consideration of Mary's Girdle, thrown down as she ascended to heaven, and the legend of her rosary tipping the scales of judgement in favour of mankind. The concluding chapter considers some of thewealth of material composed in praise ofMary, with a particular emphasis on the five sorrows of theVirgin in Irish and Welsh texts. Those familiar with Breeze's scholarship and expecting something new in this volume might well be disappointed. Rather,' TheMary of the Celts brings together papers published between 1983 and 1999 inBritish, Irish, French and Canadian Journals' (p.vii). No major revisions, we are told, have been made to thematerial included, and consequently, whilst all the chapters are linked through their interest in aspects of Marian devotion, it is perhaps inevitable that no clearly defined central thesis emerges. This lack of a coherent, sustained argument in the volume as a whole is frustrating, not least because Breeze's impressive 200Reviews breadth of knowledge is such that itneeds focus to avoid the occasional lapses intowhat might appear as a European-wide roll-call ofmedieval texts,with little pertinent analysis. However, the author does succeed in highlighting thewealth and richness of the Celtic material he discusses, and inmaking itaccessible to non-specialists. Finally, a number of intrusive typographical errors mar the volume, for example 'conconclusions' for 'conclusions' (p. 30), 'at' for 'as' (p. 41), 'hands' for 'hand', 'amd' for 'and' (both p. 109), among many others, though culpability for thismust liewith the editor rather than the author. So toomust the responsibil ity for the baffling inconsistency in providing translations across chapters; for example, the (surely unnecessary) glossing of the term 'topos' (p. 2), or indeed 'gloss' itself (p. 136), sits incongruously with the unelaborated citation of Latin or French material within the body of the text. Queen's University Belfast Kath Stevenson Drama and Religion inEnglish ProvincialSociety,1485-1660. By Paul Whitfield White. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xii + 247 pp. ?50.00. isbn: 978-0-521-85669-0. Reading the Medieval in EarlyModern England. Edited byGordon MgMullan and David Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xiv + 287 pp. ?53.00. ISBN: 978-0-521-86843-3. Paul Whitfield White's book, as the title indicates, broadly traces the relationship between religion and the theatre indrama from theTudor period up to the startof the Restoration period when King Charles II became king of England. He begins by dispelling commonly held assumptions about periodization: 'one of the problems of periodizing drama is that it...

Francesco Benozzo, Landscape Perception in Early Celtic Literature

F. Benozzo constitue un cas assez rare chez les medievistes de philologue a la fois romaniste et celtisant (signalons d’ailleurs que FB dirige la revue Studi celtici, premiere revue italienne entierement devolue aux etudes celtiques, qui va sur son troisieme numero), et c’est notamment cette double orientation qui fait le prix de ses nombreux travaux, qu’il s’agisse de ses editions ou des etudes qu’il a par exemple consacrees aux elements celtiques de la poesie des troubadours ou aux origines...

&lt;i&gt;Haunted English: The Celtic Fringe, the British Empire, and De-Angelicization&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Haunted English: The Celtic Fringe, the British Empire, and De-Angelicization Paul Shanks Haunted English: The Celtic Fringe, the British Empire, and De-Angelicization. By Laura O’Connor. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. xx + 264 pp. $49.95. The emergence of Irish-Scottish Studies as a field of academic study has made possible new areas of critical debate in historical, literary, and cultural studies: these have included studies of the Irish and Scottish Diasporas, the shared Gaelic tradition of both countries as well as the overlaps that can be identified in literature from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ray Ryan, in Ireland and Scotland (2002), for instance, charts some of the familiar ways in which the two countries have been compared to one another as a pretext for his own wish to illustrate how “the terms—space, state, society, and nation—overlap” (137). Liam McIlvanney and Ryan’s edited collection of essays (Ireland and Scotland: Culture and Society, 1700–2000), the numerous conference proceedings published through ISAI (Irish and Scottish Academic Initiative) and Crosscurrents, and the recent publication of a journal exclusively devoted to these connections (Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies) all serve to illustrate the wide-ranging and solid scholarship that can be discovered in this burgeoning discipline. Laura O’Connor’s Haunted English—a study which focuses on Celticism as a hybrid discourse that deterritorializes the English language—forms a cogent contribution to these debates. Haunted English considers some of the ways in which Gaelic and English culture has co-existed from the sixteenth century onwards in Ireland and Scotland. O’Connor extends the concept of “the territorial Pale of early modern Ireland” (1), which historically separated English speakers from Gaelic speakers, in order to comprehend the borderlines that serve to “haunt” English, Irish, and Scottish writing. Indeed, this is a study of borderlines according to the colonialist rhetoric of translation and counter-translation. The “Celtic Fringe” is used to describe those writers who sought to translate indigenous Gaelic texts according to the conditions of the dominant culture. The term is also used to comprehend the hybridization that ensues when two different language traditions come into contact with one another. O’Connor uses these concepts in order to consider not only the poetics of [End Page 409] W. B. Yeats, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Marianne Moore but also a broad range of texts that engage with the idea of Celticism and Celtic identity. O’Connor begins with a close reading of Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596) in which it is famously argued that the best way to create sovereign English subjects in Ireland is programmatically to supplant the language and culture of the populace. Spenser’s View is described in neo-colonial terms and is seen to demonstrate the way in which “a radical Englishing of Ireland” became ideologically paramount (3). There are some rather abrupt leaps in this preliminary discussion, from the historical and cultural specificity of Spenser’s pamphlet to later historical events (such as The Highland Clearances). O’Connor goes on to consider the discourse of Celticism as it was developed by antiquarians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, locating a divide between indigenous Gaelic culture and its translation by “specialists.” This part of the discussion encompasses James Macpherson’s influential Ossian cycle (a sequence of alleged translations from Gaelic source texts that were later proved to be forgeries) and translations of Jacobite aisling poems. Lowland Scots becomes a rather problematic intermediary in this instance in that it denotes a rather different language tradition with its own history (although, like Gaelic, Scots was subject to increasing stigmatisation both within Scotland and externally from the eighteenth century onwards). O’Connor goes on to consider two texts that, like Spenser’s View, have accrued notoriety in Irish Studies. These are Ernest Renan’s La poésie des races Celtiques (1854) and Mathew Arnold’s “On the Study of Celtic Literature” (1865). O’Connor argues, in a manner that recalls similar assertions by Declan Kiberd, that both texts denote an attempt to frame Celtic identity in such a way that it is seen as subordinate, yet necessary to...

Medieval Celtic literature and society. Edited by Helen Fulton. Pp 304. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2005. €55.

Medieval Celtic literature and society. Edited by Helen Fulton. Pp 304. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2005. €55.

Merlin's last cry: ritual burial and rebirth of the poet in Celtic and Norse tradition

In early Celtic literature, a clear pattern may be identified in which the Celtic archetypal poet-prophet becomes inspired through interment in a tomb or some other dark, enclosed space. In this scenario, the novice poet-prophet undergoes an initiation into the secrets of his craft by means of a ritual death and rebirth that he experiences within a chthonic setting. The picture that emerges of the archetypal poet-prophet of Celtic, as well as other Indo-European literatures, is one of a mantically inspired figure who gains his phenomenal abilities directly from potent otherworldly forces, which are often, but not always, associated with spirits of the dead. Recent scholarship has established the validity of this pattern in the cases of the archetypal Welsh poets Taliesin and Aneirin, but it may also be demonstrated in the medieval Welsh and somewhat later Arthurian material concerned with Merlin (called

Medieval Celtic Literature and Society

Medieval Celtic Literature and Society

Medieval Celtic literature and society

Medieval Celtic literature and society

The quest for the shaman: shape-shifters, sorcerers and spirit-healers of ancient Europe

1. Shamanism: An Introduction 2. Beyond the Stone Gates: Later Palaeolithic Ritual Practice 40,000-10,000 Years Ago 3. Swans'Wings and Chamber Tombs: Searching for Shamans 10,000-3000 BC 4. Rocks and Gold: Bronze Age Shamanism 5. Priests, Politics and Powerr: Controlling the Supernatural 6. Monsters, Gender-Benders and Ritualists in the Roman Empire and Beyond 7. Myths and Magic: Shape-Shifting and Shamanism in Early Celtic Literature 8. Epilogue

Englishness, ethnicity and Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold's lecture series ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’ is famous as part of his ongoing battle against stolid Victorianism, and as the starting point of Celticism in the British Isles. It should also be read as a programmatic manifesto for the cultivation of literary Englishness. Rather than perpetuating an ingrained usage of the ethnic German-Latin opposition in order to label moral and temperamental aspects of Englishness, Arnold places English culture in a polarity between German and Celtic ethnotypes. That Arnold should use this polarity is not only a matter of personal family background, but also a cultural transfer from France: Arnold takes his Celticism, with its entire anti-German subtext, from his French inspiration, Ernest Renan.

Celtic Studies in Poland: Recent Themes and Developments

Though works devoted to various aspects of Celtic philology and history appeared in Poland already by the end of the 19th century, it is Stefan Czarnowski (1879–1937) who deserves to be called the forerunner of Celtic studies in Poland. Czarnowski, the author of numerous studies on sociology, religion, history and theory of culture, also published several articles devoted to Celtic issues, especially literature and religion, and translations of specimens of Celtic literatures. However, his most important achievement in the field of Celtology was Le culte des héros et ses conditions sociales: Saint-Patrick, Héros national de l’Irlande (Paris 1919), an historical and sociological study of St. Patrick and mediaeval Ireland, in which he followed the methodological assumptions worked out by Émile Durkheim. Though published more than eighty years ago, this study has lost very little of its value and importance, and still deserves to be closely analysed. Today, several Polish scholars and institutions conduct research pertinent to Celtic Studies: most notably at the Chair of Celtic Studies at the Catholic University of Lublin, the only place in Poland where regular courses in modern Irish and Welsh have been offered, and where vigorous research, especially in the phonology of the Celtic languages is conducted. Also other universities offer more or less regular courses and seminars, such as the ‘Introduction to Celtic Studies Seminar’ at the Department of English Language at Łódź University. Hopefully, the future will see more of such initiatives. In the paper, I also stress the importance and appropriateness of providing information about Celtic Studies to students of English.

Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival (review)

Reviewed by: Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival James Pethica Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival. Sinéad Garrigan Mattar. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Pp. x + 277. $95.00 (cloth). In his final years, W. B. Yeats defiantly described himself as one of the "last romantics." He claimed that "alone in modern times" he and his fellow Abbey Theatre playwrights J. M. Synge and Lady Gregory had drawn "all that we said or sang" from "contact with the soil" and from their "[d]ream of the noble and the beggar-man."1 While the impact of class, religious affiliation, gender, and proficiency in the Irish language have all been considered as significant factors shaping the ways Irish Revival writers recruited folklore and the figure of the peasant to promote their competing conceptions of "authentic" Irishness, Sinéad Garrigan Mattar's book is the first extended study to attend to the impact of late nineteenth-century developments in comparative anthropology as an influence on major figures of the movement. Focusing on the work of Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory to 1909, Mattar argues that their folklore gatherings and representations of Irish peasant culture have consistently been misread as predominantly informed by unreconstructed early-nineteenth century Romantic notions of the primitive. The image of the "noble savage" was indeed alluring to all three writers, and each conceived of an Edenic golden age and its surviving traces in rural Ireland as to some extent a potential antidote to what Yeats termed the "filthy modern tide" of contemporary life.2 But as Mattar emphasizes, Yeats and Synge were by 1900 well read in recent developments in anthropology. They were thus obliged to reassess both their own idealizing impulses, and the core assumptions of Romantic Celticism generally, in the light of scholarship that insisted on rigorous documentation of source materials, comprehensive historical knowledge, and, most of all, an objective and stringently comparative view of individual cultural practices. The work of Lang, Frazer and others prevented them from slipping into an easy reduplication of the idealized views of nationhood and the discourse of crude racial typographies that had marked most prior approaches to Irish folklore. It was thus a key influence on their evolving conceptions of Irish nationality. Their broader efforts to come to terms with comparative science, Mattar suggests, also place them as important transitional figures anticipating the modernist primitivism of Joyce, T. S. Eliot and others. In her reading, Yeats and Synge are positioned as what she wryly terms the "missing link" (1), functioning as "last romantics" obliged by their encounters with comparative anthropology to evolve into the "first modernists" (247). Mattar begins by tracing the rise of Celticism as a discipline, highlighting the emerging strains in the nineteenth century between the scholarly (or "critical") approach to Irish folklore and legend, and the Romantic (and typically patriotic) mode prevalent amongst Irish writers and artists. Already marked in Matthew Arnold's influential but conflicted 1860s lectures On the Study of Celtic Literature, these strains intensified into open hostility once the Revue celtique began to excoriate the merely "poetic" school of Celticism after 1886. At the very moment the [End Page 832] Irish Revival was stirring into self-consciousness, Mattar argues, time was running out for the "romantically primitivist vision of Ireland" (20). Yeats is the subject of two of the book's four chapters with a single-author focus. In "Yeats, Celticism, Comparative Science" Mattar shows that Yeats was "acutely aware of the division between 'scientific' and 'literary' versions of folklore" early in his career (44). He zealously claimed in Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) that the Celts of the western seaboard had remained untouched by modernity, and retained visionary forms of knowledge lost to people of the cities. At the same time,though, he was striving to assimilate the work of Alfred Nutt, John Rhys, de Jubainville and others suspicious of, or hostile to, "poetic" racial primitivism. He consequently took care to claim that his gatherings contained nothing that he had merely imagined, even while simultaneously emphasizing that he viewed folklore's primary importance as being a source of imaginative inspiration. From around 1896, however, under the influence of Andrew...

Thoughts on Oral Tradition

It is easier, I think, to say what oral tradition can be rather than what it is. I have been working in the field of Celtic literature for a dozen or so years, and have been moving in and out of more or less oral genres from the start. If, as I do, you are basically working with texts, it is of course the “more or less” that shapes one’s sense of orality, and mine has shifted with each new project. With medieval Welsh prose, for example, I was quickly irritated with critics who tried to rationalize the inconsistencies of plot and motivation in the tightly-packed, layered stories of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi. Why anyone should want to know where the Mysterious Claw came from, much less worry about why it had to snatch a newborn colt every May Eve was beyond me. What mattered was that it did. As a critical stance this doubtless leaves much to be desired, but even a passive acceptance of how things are can be a way of learning a language, of absorbing patterns and structures. With its elliptical references to unknown heroes and events, the Mabinogi taught me that stories existed “out there” beyond the text, and that it was best not to be too literal-minded in trying to track them down. Early Welsh poetry, especially the haunting runs of three-lined englynion, taught me to listen to the cumulative effect of rhyme and rhythm, to try to read the texts as a score. Working with the ballads of nineteenth-century Brittany, a new element appeared: place. The Breton gwerziou are rooted in the local landscape—their stories are connected to real churches, rocks, crossroads. Here again the extratextual, the dimension beyond the song itself, was crucial: the song both represented it, and opened a door into it. I became especially interested in the shorter, more elliptical texts: the less they said, the greater the fascination. Barre Toelken’s work has been a great inspiration here: his studies of the connotative and metaphorical nature of song idiom, and his emphasis on the importance of an active, engaged audience, have opened up all kinds of possibilities in the field. Gerald Porter and I have recently pursued these ideas in an exploration of “fragments” in

The Celtic West and Europe: Studies in Celtic Literature and the Early Irish Church. Doris Edel

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsThe Celtic West and Europe: Studies in Celtic Literature and the Early Irish Church. Doris Edel Dorothy AfricaDorothy Africa Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 78, Number 1Jan., 2003 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S003871340009919X Views: 4Total views on this site Copyright 2003 The Medieval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Celtic West and Europe: Studies in Celtic Literature and the Early Irish Church (review)

This book consists of a collection of Doris Edel's papers produced previously over the last fifteen years or so. Most were not published in English, and also in sources not necessarily widely available, and so this is a most welcome opportunity to have wider access to works by this scholar of Celtic literature. The papers have where necessary been translated by the author, and none of the slight idiosyncrasies (such as "fase" for "phase") make the meaning unclear. There is some slight repetition between chapters as some of the introductory rubric necessarily had to be repeated in separate publications, but overall the collection allows for the development of several key themes in Celtic literature and culture. In the space for this review, only some of the themes will be explored at length, though others will be mentioned.

Bos primigenius in Britain: Or, Why Do Fairy Cows Have Red Ears?

Many medievalists, especially scholars of Celtic literature, have observed that red-eared white animals are associated with fairies and other supernatural beings. What has not been satisfactorily answered is why this should be so. This article offers a possible explanation, suggesting that this widespread phenomenon is rooted not in fantasy but in zoology.

BOOK REVIEW: Edited by Cecil Y. Lang.THE LETTERS OF MATTHEW ARNOLD: VOLUME III, 1866-1870. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1998.

The third of a projected six volumes, this handsome and necessary book covers five momentous years in Matthew Arnold's life. Among his great contemporaries none attempted such extraordinarily diverse projects as Arnold set his hand to in these years. The range and the achievement are, on any estimate, simply stunning. This volume opens with Arnold preparing the lectures he would publish in 1867 as On the Study of Celtic Literature. It ends (nearly) with a letter to T. H. Huxley in which he hopes that his great friend will read aright the presentation copy of St. Paul and Protestantism (1870) that is on its way to him. In between these attempts to carry light from the Celts to his countrymen and throw light for his countrymen on the poetics of Scripture, Arnold had a go at reviving his poetic life (New Poems [1867]), wrote a masterpiece of Victorian sagacity (Culture and Anarchy [1869]), and turned his employment as a school inspector into an occasion for composing a model educational report (Schools and Universities on the Continent [1868]). For an encore, he brought out second editions of both New Poems and St. Paul and Protestantism and he did sustained (but, alas, not completed) work on a sort of handbook to Greek poetry. All of this he accomplished while keeping his day job, battling toothache, worrying about money problems, suffering the deaths of two of his children, moving from London to Harrow (partly because of the money problems), writing an array of contributions for various periodicals, and keeping up his affectionate relationships with his family and friends. Only someone highly serious would attempt so heteroglossic a life.