Celtic Fringe Research Articles

Island monasticism in Wales: towards an historical archaeology

Wales has a significant number of islands that have supported monastic life at some time in their histories. These monastic islands do not command quite the same international attention as those from other Celtic nations, for example Skellig Michael (Ireland) or Iona (Scotland), but islands such as Ynys Enlli (Bardsey) and Caldey Island (Ynys Bŷr) have sustained recognition as 'holy islands' in Welsh tradition. Those seeking assessments of the phenomenon of island monasticism in Wales will also find only a modest literature, now requiring some careful recalibration in the light of changing interpretations of Welsh church history. This discussion is an attempt to establish the data and models for a holistic reassessment. This is not necessarily just an academic desideratum. Welsh islands have recently, for example, been identified as assets for the emerging trend of 'faith tourism', with potential economic as well as environmental impact.<br/> In this study I will approach the archaeology of the Welsh islands initially by way of their historical context. There are a number of reasons for this choice of approach. It is arguable that only a multi-disciplinary approach here offers a sustainable body of data for analysis. Island sites are characteristically materially poor and the eremitical ethos of much island monasticism converges with that tendency. The 'island monastery' is also prone to rather singular conception as an 'early Christian' artefact, whereas much of what we think we know concerning the Welsh islands speaks most definitely of later medieval use—and only uncertainly of the early medieval. So a strongly diachronic approach is essential. For one or two of the islands, moreover, there is a requirement simply to resolve their historical identities. Finally, there is a pressing need to uncouple these islands from dated historical models of evangelism via the seaways and other models in which monasticism is conflated with secular Christianity—assumptions that can influence interpretation of archaeological evidence for settlement.

CELTIC FRINGES AND CENTRAL POWER IN GREAT BRITAIN:
 HISTORY AND MODERNITY

The article deals with history of interrelations between political centre and Celtic fringes of Great Britain in modern and contemporary times. As soon as nationalist movements in Celtic fringes became more active from the mid 1960s, the need appeared to analyze the history of interrelations between central
 power and Celtic regions in order to understand causes of Celtic people’s striving for obtaining more rights and even state independence. The article ascertains that attitude of central power to Celtic fringes was complicated by ethno-cultural differences between Englishmen and Celtic people, which resulted in discrimination of Scotland, Wales and Ireland by London's policy towards Celtic regions. Since British industrialization evolved the central power in Great Britain, it created conditions for balanced comprehensive
 development of industrial economy only in English counties, whereas Celtic regions were permitted to develop only branches of economic activity which were non-competitive to English business. The level of people’s income in Celtic fringes was always lower than in English parts of Great Britain. There was an
 established practice that English business dominated in Celtic regions and determined the economic development of Celtic regions. The English as distinct from Celts had prior opportunities to be engaged on more prestigious and highly paid positions. Celtic population’s devotion to preservation of their culture
 and ethno-cultural identity found expression in religious sphere so that Nonconformity and Presbyterianism accordingly dominated among Welshmen and Scotsmen. Political movements in Celtic fringes put forward ethno-cultural demands
 rather than social class ones in their activities.
 During the first half of the XX century the opposition between Celtic fringes and central power in Great Britain showed that in parliamentary elections Celtic population gave their votes mainly for the members of Labour Party. From the mid-1960s nationalist movements in Celtic fringes became more active. They began to make slogans of political independence. The author of the
 article comes to conclusion that interrelations of central power in Great Britain towards Celtic fringes can be adequately described by notions of I. Wallerstein’s world-system analysis and M. Hechter's model of internal colonialism.

Plaided or Dusky Forms: Highland Landscape in Scotland and Kenya

Accounts of empire in postcolonial critique largely remain silent on colonial relations internal to the United Kingdom, tending to elide the work of Scots, Irish, and Welsh within a solely English imperial enterprise. This article draws on recent reevaluations of the Scottish role in empire to outline the ambivalent place of Britain’s “Celtic Fringe” in its global hegemony. Focusing on eighteenth-century cartography and Scottish accounts of African exploration, it argues that the aesthetic practice of colonial control developed in Scotland established a pattern imperial agents could repeat in overseas territories. The colonization of the “White Highlands” in Kenya, it suggests, relied on aesthetic forms that originated in the landscape of the Scottish Highlands. By focusing on landscape's influence in a constellation of fields—in aesthetics, cartography, and natural history—this article also moves toward an understanding of landscape as a form of aisthesis, a “regime of sense perception.”

Celtic Correspondences: Letters from Whitley Stokes to Adolphe Pictet and from Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville to Ernst Windisch

When Johann Caspar Zeuss laid the foundations of modern Celtic Philology with his Grammatica Celtica (1853), he 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 specialist in ballistics and amateur 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 exchanged letters with Whitley Stokes, who was just beginning to make his name in Celtic Philology at that time. While Pictet’s letters to Stokes have yet to be traced, 26 letters and two postcards from Stokes to Pictet are extant among the papers of Adolphe Pictet in the Library of Geneva. Among the papers of the German Celticist and Indologist Ernst Windisch (1844–1918), which are preserved in the Archive of the University of Leipzig, the most extensive collection of letters and postcards in the field of Celtic Studies is due to Kuno Meyer (1858–1919), who was among Windisch’s earliest, most faithful and most productive pupils. Next to this, the most extensive Celtic correspondence of Windisch appears to have been with his French colleague Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville (1827–1910), first professor of Celtic at the Collège de France and long-time editor of Révue celtique. Unlike Windisch, who was an Indo-Europeanist by training and continued to combine an interest in ancient Ireland with one in ancient India for most of his active academic career, d’Arbois de Jubainville was first and foremost an historian with a strong archaeological bent. Both men, however, shared a keen interest in the fabric of ancient civilisations and its reflection in literature. Between 1884 and 1907, more than fifty letters and postcards from d’Arbois to Windisch testify to the cordial relationship between the two scholars, who are among the most important founding fathers of Celtic Studies as an academic discipline in France and Germany. In this paper, I shall try to present an overview of these letters, pointing out in which ways and to which extent they reflect specific problems of research, the institutional setting of Celtic Studies in the decades around 1900, and the personality of the letter writers. In conclusion I shall address the question to what extent a comprehensive analysis and appraisal of as yet unpublished scholarly letters may contribute not only to a profounder understanding of the formation and early history of Celtic Studies, but also to an enhanced appreciation of its present situation.

The Celtic sword with bronze hilt elements from Siarzewo, Nieszawa Commune, Kuyavian-Pomeranian voivodeship

A sword with bronze pseudo-anthropomorphic hilt elements typical of the Middle La Tène was found in the Vistula River not far from the village of Siarzewo, Nieszawa commune, Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship. The scabbard was discarded and lost, but the sword is now in the Kujawy and Dobrzyń Land Museum in Włocławek. The hilt consists of three solid bronze elements: the guard, the tang ring, and the pommel. At present, these elements are separated by empty spaces which were previously covered with elements made from organic materials. The pommel and guard are decorated on the surface with three small circles with a point inside. The blade of the sword is also very interesting. The surface of the sword is covered with a chagrinage decoration. In the middle part of the blade, below the top part of the hilt end, a crescent-shaped, star-like stamp (punchmark) is located. Similar bronze hilts and hilt elements are more typical of Celtic daggers and short swords, hence a sword with these elements appearing a long way north of the main Celtic area is a major surprise and mystery.

The Coming of the Celts, AD 1860: Celtic Nationalism in Ireland and Wales, by Caoimhín De Barra

Reviewed by: The Coming of the Celts, AD 1860: Celtic Nationalism in Ireland and Wales by Caoimhín De Barra Lisa Weihman (bio) The Coming of the Celts, AD 1860: Celtic Nationalism in Ireland and Wales, by Caoimhín De Barra; pp. xi + 360. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018, $45.00. The myth of a shared Celtic origin in Ireland and Wales during the nineteenth century was a powerful force in the intertwined history of both nations, as Caoimhín De Barra’s beautifully written, deeply researched book, The Coming of the Celts, AD 1860: Celtic Nationalism in Ireland and Wales, brings to light. Using newspaper archives to search for the terms Celt and Celtic, De Barra finds relatively little use of the label prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, when Celtic identity emerges from a hazy origin myth into an ideal vehicle for nationalist aspirations. “Over a twenty-year period, linguistic scholars gave the Celts a sense of prestige, scientists gave them a racial categorization, archaeologists gave them a glorious past, and littérateurs gave them easily identifiable characteristics,” De Barra writes. In response to the repression of the Irish language and the rapid Anglicization of both Wales and Ireland, De Barra argues, Celtic identity “offered a durable foundation upon which to construct a national identity, as well as a sense of a common bond among the other groups in the United Kingdom in the face of England’s growing political, industrial, and demographic might” (28). The relative success of the Welsh in preserving their language and culture during the nineteenth century inspired Irish cultural nationalists and language revivalists to do the same, and the relationship between the Irish and the Welsh during these years is the primary focus of De Barra’s research. To the Irish, the thriving population of Welsh speakers and vibrant Welsh print culture offered a vision of hope. The Society for the [End Page 661] Preservation of the Irish Language, founded in 1876, and the Gaelic League, in 1893, established ties with similar groups in Wales. As De Barra writes, “Many Irish nationalists were enthralled by the example of the Welsh language because they believed that the circumstances faced by the Irish language at the end of the nineteenth century were identical to those faced by the Welsh a century earlier” (39). De Barra convincingly argues that this vision of Welsh success was inaccurate; Wales had never faced the sort of devastation that the Great Famine brought to Ireland, and the proportion of the population who spoke Welsh decreased substantially throughout the nineteenth century. From the Irish point of view, however, the preservation of the Welsh language, music, and literature was a goal Ireland should strive to match. While celebrating a shared if largely invented Celtic identity brought Irish and Welsh language enthusiasts and cultural nationalists into an ongoing conversation about what it meant to be Celtic, there were also cross-cultural barriers beyond the mutual incomprehensibility of the two languages. How the Irish read the Welsh and how the Welsh read the Irish is one of the most compelling aspects of De Barra’s work, grounded in his analysis of contemporary periodicals. The largely Nonconformist population of Wales often associated the Irish with criminality, poverty, and Catholicism; the rise of Catholic nationalism in the ranks of the Gaelic League would provoke similar suspicion of the Welsh by the Irish. De Barra traces the concurrent rise of Home Rule movements in both countries from the 1880s onward, from the rise of the Land League in Ireland to its influence on the Cymru Fydd movement in Wales between 1885 and 1896. De Barra’s central chapters trace the foundation of Pan-Celtic organizations in an era when many pan-nationalist groups were rising out of racial, linguistic, and geographic affinities across Europe, strengthened by the rise of mass literacy throughout the nineteenth century. From the ashes of the short-lived Pan-Celtic Society came Edmund Fournier and Lord Castletown’s Celtic Association, through which Fournier believed “the Celtic love of beauty would save humanity from the soulless excess of the modern world” (115). The Celtic Association promoted regular contact among...

Phantom Time: Literary History at the Edge of the Nation

Phantom Time: Literary History at the Edge of the Nation

The Coming of the Celts, AD 1860: Celtic Nationalism in Ireland and Wales , by Caoimh�n De Barra (review)

The Coming of the Celts, AD 1860: Celtic Nationalism in Ireland and Wales, Caoimhín De Barra (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), 372 pages. Caoimhín De Barra’s The Coming of the Celts is a well-considered examination of the often-ambivalent relationship between the respective promoters of Welsh and Irish language, literature and culture in the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. De Barra, a member of the History Faculty at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, sees the language movements in Wales and Ireland both as part of the general development of romantic bourgeois nationalism that flourished among smaller, or divided, nationalities in nineteenth-century Europe and also as an often-failed attempt to discover political and cultural commonalities between the two countries, and the other Celtic nations, commonalities that sometimes simply didn’t exist. There were two significant fault lines separating the Welsh and Irish language movements. The first was mutual unintelligibility between speakers of the two major divisions among the six modern Celtic languages, the Goidelic languages (Irish and Scottish Gaelic, descended from a high Medieval form of Irish – two languages that are mutually understandable) and the Brittonic languages (Welsh and Breton, descended from a Celtic language spoken in Wales and West Britain in late antiquity – languages that are unintelligible both to speakers of the Goidelic languages and to speakers of the two major Brittonic tongues). Two other Celtic languages, Cornish (a Brittonic language) and Manx (a Goidelic language), died out, primarily in the eighteenth century (with remnants of Manx surviving until a few generations ago), but these languages recently have been revived as sometimes precocious hobby-languages by scholars and enthusiasts, through the examination of historic texts. While older ‘Irish’ and ‘Welsh’ thus are the primary historic progenitors of their respective modern language groups, these two languages developed mostly in isolation from one another and thus proved poor vehicles for a unified ‘Celtic’ consciousness and collective cultural/political programmes. Such programmes preoccupied a relatively small number of Pan-Celtic supporters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but their goals usually were hazy and unrealisable – the product of collective undefined goodwill as much as anything. Also, five of the six modern Celtic nations had Studies • volume 108 • number 431 360 Autumn 2019: Book Reviews Studies_layout_AUTUMN-2019.indd 128 21/08/2019 09:14 English as a well-established first language by the period in question, which tended to isolate the Bretons, who often were among the more enthusiastic of the Pan-Celts. Finally, while the later Gaelic League in Ireland had a political and cultural programme that was decidedly Modernist and forwardlooking , attempting to update the Irish language in contemporary settings, the Scottish, Welsh and Breton Pan-Celts too often (to the Irish, at least) seemed preoccupied with a ‘Golden’ past and too concerned with externals like Druidical ceremonies and national costumes. A second point of division, one repeatedly alluded to by De Barra but never considered in sufficient depth, was religious. Welsh speakers during the time in question were largely evangelical Calvinistic Methodist dissenters, extremely suspicious of Roman Catholicism, while members of the Irish language movement were mostly (at least cultural) Catholics. This religious division led to suspicion and a certain cultural revulsion between the two groups, more often coming from the Welsh than the Irish side of things, which sometimes proved a difficulty in efforts at mutual programmatic development. Both ‘primordial’ languages, however, survived periods of significant religious change in the twentieth century, with the Welsh national conversion from Protestant evangelicalism to the increasingly secular socialism of the Labour Party; and the general Irish detachment from Catholicism after the clerical sexual-abuse crisis of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The development of the nationalist impulse in each of the four major Celtic nations during the last half of the nineteenthcentury went hand-in-hand with a movement toward pan-Celtic appreciation, if not unity, perhaps inspired by the example of Italian and German unification. This impulse, while recurring and popular on the surface, ultimately was a failure. While there might have been distant linguistic connections between the two primary Celtic-language groups somewhere on the continent...

Waterford Merchants and their Families on Distant Shores: Traders in Spain and France from 1600 to 1800 , by Liam Murphy (review)

briefly highlight. His book is recommended to any library or reader with an interest in the history, language, literature, and folk-lore of the six modern Celtic nations. Dr John B Davenport is retired Professor of History at North Central University in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Waterford Merchants and their Families on Distant Shores: Traders in Spain and France from 1600 to 1800, Liam Murphy (Blackrock: Kingdom Books, 2019), 288 pages. Waterford was the second most important city in Ireland for hundreds of years after the Norman invasion, due to its extensive trading links with the continent. After the Cromwellian conquest, the city’s ruling Catholic merchants were forced to leave, having lost their right to trade and to hold civic positions.These emigrant merchants and their descendants set up trading houses in the port cities of France, Spain and the Spanish Netherlands and many of them were remarkably successful in both trade and public life. Most were members of the Old English Catholic merchant class who dominated the city before the Cromwellian invasion. Some of them had set up trading posts on the continent well before Cromwell arrived in Ireland, but it was the brutal and anti-Catholic nature of the settlement in the 1650s that forced them to leave. Not only did they lose their power in Waterford – they lost the right to trade as merchants. The loyalty of so many of the Old English to Catholicism was a remarkable feature of seventeenth century Ireland. These people were loyal to the crown, but were not prepared to abandon their religion and instead chose persecution and the loss of everything they possessed. Among the common surnames of the merchants who fled the city at this time were Aylward, Comerford, Fitzgerald, Power, Walsh and White. Descendants of the initial emigrants had remarkable careers on the continent. Antoine Walsh, a slave trader in Nantes, brought Bonnie Prince Charlie to Scotland for the ill-fated Jacobite rebellion of 1745. Nicolas Geraldino (Fitzgerald) from Cadiz commanded the Spanish flagship in the Spanish/French victory over the British at Toulon during the war of the Austrian Succession. Other truly remarkable people among the Waterford Studies • volume 108 • number 431 364 Autumn 2019: Book Reviews Studies_layout_AUTUMN-2019.indd 132 21/08/2019 09:14 families included Jose Blanco White, a well known writer and indefatigable controversialist, who changed his religion twice, beginning life as a Catholic, converting to Anglicanism and ending as a Unitarian. Maria Gertrudis Hore, described as the most beautiful woman in the Cadiz of her day, was a leading writer in Spain in the eighteenth century. Liam Murphy tells the fascinating story of these Waterford families. His extensive research is based on a wide variety of sources in Spanish and French, as well as English. The book throws light on a hidden part of our history which deserves to be much more widely known. It begins by tracing the history of Waterford from its foundation by the Vikings to the establishment of a thriving continental trade in the late Middle Ages. Most of the wine imported into the country at this period came through Waterford. The real focus is what happens from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, as the Waterford merchant families were forced into exile in order to continue trading. They were astonishingly successful in this endeavour, establishing thriving businesses in Malaga, Cadiz, Seville, Tenerife, La Coruña, Bilbao, St Malo, Nantes, Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Ostend and Bruges. As the families put down roots around the continent, they began to take part in the public and religious life of their adopted countries. Major figures like Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman and Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val were of Waterford descent. In 1850 Pius IX re-established the Catholic hierarchy in England and appointed Wiseman as Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, the first cardinal to reside in England since the Reformation. Cardinal Merry del Val served in the Vatican as secretary of state from 1903 to 1914 and as secretary of the Congregation of the Holy Office from 1914 to 1930. At a more conventional level, many of the descendants of the Waterford merchants had distinguished careers in the Spanish and French armed forces. Antoine Walsh, who...

Age-related factors influence HIV testing within subpopulations: a cross-sectional survey of MSM within the Celtic nations

ObjectivesDespite a recent fall in the incidence of HIV within the UK, men who have sex with men (MSM) continue to be disproportionately affected. As biomedical prevention technologies including pre-exposure...

In the name of Ossian: Celtic Galicia and the ‘brothers from the north’

ABSTRACTThe modern Celtic myth is a complex framework because of its variety of constituent elements. In essence, it consists of an empathetic celebration of otherness, based on a timeless narrative and restorative nostalgia, but including nationalist and capitalist-market interests. Since the first edition of the Ossianic poems by James Macpherson in 1760, Celticness has firmly settled within a collective imagination in search of alternative aesthetic, political, and even spiritual values. It has been exploited in different geocultural spaces and articulated in propaganda strategies, to found ethnic consciousness and fill the gaps of history. In addition to other Celtic areas of Europe, Galicia (NW Spain) has a long Celtophile tradition, with relevant intellectual support, ritual symbologies, and media productions. This article focuses on Galician Celtic-based history, icons, events, phenomena like the Real Banda of bagpipes, the Interceltic Festival of Ortigueira, and the renewed archaeological attempt to locate Galician ancestry within Iron Age Celts. Celticness has been the main identity locus in the construction of Galicia as a nation, shaping a specific social awareness and even invoking racial arguments. Comparison is established with Scotland, Brittany and Ireland (the ‘brothers from the north’) in their respective perception and treatment of modern Celticness.

Conceiving a nation. Scotland to ad 900 by Gilbert M�rkus (review)

Reviews 103 volume is a great pleasure to read. I have a single desire for improvement: the otherwise legible, elegant font is inconsistent in rendering lower-case italic ‘a’, which in some places appears proportionately together with its partners (see p. 86), yet elsewhere manifests an unusually low, squat counter (as at p. 138). This is perhaps a niggling criticism. However, one’s eye meets with that letter-form repeatedly. References Boll, Sheila. 2002. Foster-kin in conflict. Fosterage as a character motivation in medieval Irish literature. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge. Ní Bhaoill, Róise. 2010. Ulster Gaelic voices. Bailiúchán Wilhelm Doegen 1931. Béal Feirste: Ultach. Ó Corráin, Donnchadh. 1979. Onomata. Ériu 30: 165–180. ———. 2017. Clavis litterarum Hibernensium. Medieval Irish books & texts (c. 400—c. 1600). Turnhout: Brepols. Ó hInnse, Séamus. 1943. Fosterage in early and mediaeval Ireland. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University College Dublin. O’Rahilly, Thomas F. (ed.). 1926. Dánta grádha. An anthology of Irish love poetry (a.d. 1350–1750)2 . Cork: Cork University Press. ———. 1946. Early Irish history and mythology. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Parkes, Peter. 2006. Celtic fosterage. Adoptive kinship and clientage in northwest Europe. Comparative studies in society and history 48: 359–395. Smit, Johannes Wilhelmus. 1971. Studies in the language and style of Columba the Younger (Columbanus). Amsterdam : Hakkert. Tolstoy, Nikolai. 2009. The oldest British prose literature. The compilation of the four branches of the Mabinogi. Lewiston , NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Walker, G. S. M. (ed. & trans.). 1957. Sancti Columbani opera. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Gilbert Márkus, Conceiving a nation. Scotland to ad 900. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. ISBN 978–0–7486–7898–3. xiv + 295 pages. £70 (hardback) / £19.99 (paperback /e-book). Patrick Wadden Belmont Abbey College The early medieval history of northern Britain, with its legacy of Roman borders, the presence of several different peoples (Picts, Gaels, Britons, Anglo-Saxons, and Scandinavians ), and shortage of surviving textual sources, presents unique questions and obstacles for the modern scholar. In this engaging book, Gilbert Márkus deals with these in a conPatrick Wadden [patrickwadden@​ bac​ .edu] is Associate Professor of History at Belmont Abbey College, North Carolina. His interests focus on the political and cultural links that existed between the different part of the Gaelic world and on the place of the Gaels in the broader Insular and European worlds of the Middle Ages. 104 North American journal of Celtic Studies fident and compelling way. The result is a work that manages to be both informative and sophisticated and that will be of interest to students and more advanced scholars alike. As the first volume of the New History of Scotland, this book replaces Alfred Smyth’s Warlords and holy men of 1984. Recent decades have witnessed innovative changes in our approaches to medieval sources that emphasize the dangers and difficulties of reading texts written in later periods as sources for earlier events. Simultaneously, revolutions in our understanding of such crucial concepts as frontiers and ethnicity have fundamentally altered our view of early societies. Informed by these recent historiographical trends (vii–ix), Márkus provides a thorough overview of the period, while also attempting to reframe certain debates. After a brief preface, the book consists of six chapters. The first, sub-titled ‘Trade, culture and empire in the early centuries’, deals with the earliest recorded history of what is now Scotland through to the end of the Roman period. The author demonstrates an impressive breadth of knowledge in setting events in northern Britain not only in the context of events farther south on the island, but also in relation to developments elsewhere, particularly other frontier zones. He also uses archaeological and epigraphical evidence well to augment the scant historical records of the period. Gone is the image of the ‘Celtic fringe’ of Europe and, in its stead, we are presented with the image of northern Britain as already in contact with the rest of Europe before the arrival of the Romans. The next chapter, on the development of sub-Roman kingdoms, deals with the emergence of the polities familiar to students of early medieval northern Britain, including Dál...

Marginalization, Resilience, Integration: Reconstructing and Globalizing Canada’s Celtic Fringe Island Region of Cape Breton

Scholarship addressing informal peripheral regions in Canada is limited, with literature on territorial politics tending to privilege provinces and province groupings with uber-region status. The article provides a synthesized framework (using new institutionalism, identity, and new regionalism theorizations) for studying informal regions. The case of Cape Breton Island is presented to probe, through mixed methods, how political and cultural actors attempt to build, maintain, and reconstruct a region and adapt to globalization. Before Confederation, significant Scottish Gaelic immigration shaped a Celtic Fringe/Gaelic-sanctuary regional construction of Cape Breton. In 1820 Cape Breton was annexed to Nova Scotia, closing off a potential development path as a colony-province. It later entered a formally institutionalized province and federation as an informal region. Although Gaelic was then Canada’s third most spoken language, it was institutionally stigmatized, the Gaels marginalized. Industrialization, social modernization, attempted cultural homogenization, and transition in a post-industrial setting, have set the Gaels and the island on a challenging development path as the region is reconstructed. In the current era of globalization, pursuits of cultural, social, and economic development signal that, to some degree, regional cultures and political and institutional actors can resist, accommodate and offset globalization-related pressures, and, through incorporating regional preferences, identities, institution-building, and cultural revitalization, have an indigenizing effect on region-building and development.

‘Será que o antigo preconceito não é forte demais?’: a união no romance de Jane Austen*

Um dos traços distintivos dos romances adultos de Jane Austen é a ausência de qualquer incursão ficcional à chamada periferia celta do Reino Unido: Escócia, Gales e Irlanda. Tal interdição, embora deliberada, contraria o ostensivo realismo de Austen. Este ensaio discute como os romances de Austen, situados exclusivamente na Inglaterra, apenas com personagens ingleses, engendram, compensatoriamente, uma reticência narrativa que expõe a incompletude da União.

English centre vs. Celtic periphery: the Chief Rabbi, Shechita and Dundee, 1883

ABSTRACT Using a case study from Dundee, this article scrutinises historians’ assumptions about the nature of links between the major British-Jewish centres and ‘the periphery’. Utilising a cache of letters addressed to the Chief Rabbi concerning the provision of a trained Jewish butcher (shochet) in 1883, Abrams considers the Jewish community of Dundee in northeast Scotland as an example of Jews at a temporal, organisational, cultural and geographical frontier. The episode to which these letters refer tests the assumption of Anglo-Jewish historians that the provincial communities were considered, and considered themselves, subordinate to the regularly constituted ecclesiastical authorities in London.

Leisure, Popular Culture and Memory: The Invention of Dark Age Britain, Wales, England, and Middle-Earth in the Songs of Led Zeppelin

In the period of high modernity, and in the process of establishing the imperial nation-state of Great Britain, historians, archaeologists and enthusiastic amateurs searched high and low for material evidence and primary sources from what was called the Dark Ages. There is a gap in knowledge about this past, and all discussion rests on finding meaning in fading inscriptions, or dark earth, or trusting completely the writings of Bede and Gildas. The search for an identity and history for the nation for Great Britain was based on nationalist beliefs about Englishness, Britishness or Welshness. In the twentieth-century, the problem of Englishness, place and myth led Tolkien to write his Middle-earth stories in his leisure time. At the same time, the problem of Welshness or Britishness saw a growth in interest – in film and books - in Arthurian traditions, and a tourist interest in the Celtic fringe of Britain. In this paper, I show how the songs and album covers of Led Zeppelin, and their film The Song Remains the Same, draw upon both the work of Tolkien and the Arthurian traditions to construct ideas of masculine belonging in some mythological medieval time and place. While this constriction is idiosyncratic to the artists, they are drawing on and justifying the wider problem of England, Wales and Britain in leisure and culture.

The Coming of the Celts, AD 1860: Celtic Nationalism in Ireland and Wales by Caoimhín De Barra

Reviewed by: The Coming of the Celts, AD 1860: Celtic Nationalism in Ireland and Wales by Caoimhín De Barra David Lloyd The Coming of the Celts, AD 1860: Celtic Nationalism in Ireland and Wales, by Caoimhín De Barra, pp. 360. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. $45. In the Second Branch of the medieval Welsh prose masterpiece, The Four Branches of The Mabinogi, Bendigeidfran, king of Britain, sits with his retinue on the rock of Harlech in north Wales, looking across the Irish Sea. In the "once-upon-a-time" world of this branch of The Mabinogi, Welsh-speaking Britons rule the entire "Island of the Mighty." They sight thirteen ships approaching, bearing Matholwch, king of Ireland, journeying to the Island of the Mighty in peace. The Irish explain to Bendigeidfran that Matholwch "came to ask for Branwen [Bendigeidfran's sister]. . . . And if it pleases you, he wishes to bind the Island of the Mighty and Ireland together, so they would be stronger" (This is the account given in John Bollard's The Mabinogi: Legend and Landscape of Wales, 2006). Matholwch and Bendigeidfran converse—as do their retinues—without a mention of a language or cultural barrier. The marriage goes forward, with the union of the Irish and the Welsh-speaking Britons made manifest in Gwern, Matholwch and Branwen's son. But suspicion, jealousy, and both real and imagined grievances intervene, climaxing in the death of Gwern and cataclysmic war in Ireland. Written in the medieval period but drawing from more ancient sources, this branch of The Mabinogi offers a microcosm of the complex historic relationship between the Irish and the Welsh: close neighbors speaking cognate languages, familiar rivals simultaneously separated and connected by a narrow strip of water, frequent visitors to and combatants on each other's lands, joined and sundered by their distinct cultures and (eventual) national yearnings. In the modern era, their differences were accentuated by separate religious and socio-economic development and by the decline of the Irish language in comparison with Welsh. The ancient and ongoing history of these interactions is the subject of Caoimhín De Barra's The Coming of the Celts, AD 1860: Celtic Nationalism in Ireland [End Page 156] and Wales. De Barra demonstrates that although Ireland and Wales never came close to enacting a Pan-Celtic union such as that undertaken by Matholwch and Bendigeidfran, they nevertheless significantly affected each other's national and cultural development through to the present. With particular attention to the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, De Barra documents for readers "a sustained flow of commentary and ideas between Ireland and Wales that significantly shaped both countries' modern development." Until recently, scholars had settled on an origin story for populations of the British Isles speaking Celtic languages—the notion that, culturally and genetically, the British Celts were descendants of Celts who had once dominated central Europe. Without question, the Irish and Welsh languages are related, perhaps derived from a common insular Celtic language that divided into two branches: Goidelic (Irish, Manx, and Scots Gaelic) and Brythonic (Welsh, Cornish, and Breton). One need only compare the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge with the Welsh Four Branches of The Mabinogi to identify similarities in material culture and social organization (such as the practice of sending children to "foster parents" for their upbringing and to strengthen social and political relationships). But De Barra presents recent research that undermines the origin story sketched out above, positing instead that the idea of the "Celt" was created and promulgated in the nineteenth century, based on studies of Celtic languages by the seventeenth-century linguists Paul Yves Pezron (1609–1706) and Edward Lhuyd (1660–1709). Such recent genetic studies as "The Fine-Scale Structure of the British Population" (2015) do not establish a shared gene pool among Celts of Ireland and Britain. There is little evidence of an invasion of Britain by European Celts but "considerable continuity between Bronze Age Britain and Ireland and the Iron Age that followed." Indeed, rather than being a longstanding cultural reality, according to De Barra (and scholars De Barra cites, such as Simon James), the...

Self-Reflection in Yeats’s Mythic Method

Many modernists, including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and W. B. Yeats, make frequent use of the term “myth” in their works because they want to objectify their ideal and subjective individuality by using a mythic method. Another reason why they depend on myths is that modernism emphasizes tradition in addition to modernity. Modernists accept E. H. Carr’s view of history that “History is the dialogue between the past and the present.” In case of Yeats, he adopted the Celtic myth as materials of his dramatic and narrative poems. He extracted stories from Ulster and Fenian cycles because they all dealt with heroes who fell in love. Through adopting these stories, Yeats wanted to create a pure and romantic Ireland and inspire Celtic nationalism. However, besides this purpose, in his works such as “The Wanderings of Oisin,” “The Old Age of Queen Maeve,” “Baile and Aillinn,” and “The Two Kings,” Yeats tried to reflect his own story, especially his unrequited love with Maud Gonne by revising Celtic myths. Thus, Yeats tried to juxtapose his own love story with the love story of his heroes in myths.

Up in the Morning Early: Baroque Music from Celtic Countries – Ensemble La Cigale (CD Review)

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The Cry of the Cymry: Celtic Nationalism as a Response to Industrialization and Class in Wales in the 19th Century

The Cry of the Cymry: Celtic Nationalism as a Response to Industrialization and Class in Wales in the 19th Century