Celtic Studies Research Articles

A. A. Smirnov and the Christian point in Old Irish narrative tradition: a case of "nativism" in Early Russian Celtic Studies?

The article is devoted to the concepts contributed by Alexander Smirnov about the Irish Church and the role of Christian culture to the Old Irish narrative tradition in general. Archival records shows that so-called "Christian element" was entirely accepted by him and was emphasized in an initially neutral formula; later, however, passages about the ‘undoubted Christian influence’ related to some motifs were replaced by such markers as "late interpolations" or "artificial insertions". The turn from a comprehensive approach to an intensive search for the archaic "Celtic basis" has affected all aspects of Smirnov’s discourse: from the interpretation of particular motifs to the characteristics of Christianization and Irish Church organization in general. Due to these observations, we suppose to depict such Smirnov’s conceptions as the truly ‘nativist’ position.The author gives special gratitude to the National Library of Russia, the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) of the Russian Academy of Sciences for an opportunity to work and consult with their founds and record series.

Decolonising Medieval Irish Studies

This short article reviews some of the colonial underpinnings of the field of Medieval Irish Studies (a subdiscipline of Celtic Studies), using the career of Whitley Stokes (1830–1909) as a case study in the entanglements between British colonial activity in India and the development of philological research on medieval Irish literature in the 19th century. It then proceeds to use autoethnographic reflections from graduate students in the field of Medieval Irish Studies whose backgrounds locate them at various intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. These reflections offer constructive pathways toward working to decolonise the discipline.

Celtic Studies, Scholarly Networks, and Modernekritik

Abstract This study is concerned with the contribution of Jan de Vries (1890–1964), a controversial Dutch scholar of Germanic and Old Norse philology, folklore, and comparative religion, to the discipline of Celtic studies. First, therefore, his work is located within the context of De Vries’ biography and of his scholarly network of the post-war era, notably his correspondence with likeminded colleagues such as Dumézil, Höfler, Wikander, and Eliade. Subsequently, his theories of Celtic and Germanic ethnogenesis are examined, as well as his ideas about the connections between the Celtic and Germanic pre-Christian religions and traditions of heroic saga. Finally, the relatively limited impact of De Vries’s Celtic studies is elaborated on.

The Rhetorical Arts in Late Antique and Early Medieval Ireland, by Brian James Stone

The Rhetorical Arts in Late Antique and Early Medieval Ireland, by Brian James Stone

Gaeilge: a radical revolution by Caoimhín De Barra

Reviewed by: Gaeilge: a radical revolution by Caoimhín De Barra Jeff W. Justice (bio) Caoimhín De Barra. Gaeilge: a radical revolution. Dublin: Currach Press, 2019. ISBN 9781782189077. 272 pages. $29.99 (paperback). Without doubt, interest in the Irish language grew during the COVID-19 global pandemic, which makes Caoimhín De Barra's work one of interest to the Celtic studies community. The work attempts to take an approach accessible to a readership that stretches well beyond academia. In this regard, it would seem to succeed. De Barra begins with a chapter outlining his trials and triumphs in learning Irish. In addition to mapping his journey toward acquiring it, he also offers sage advice to readers who might pick up this book with at least a modicum of curiosity about learning it themselves. As is the case with many Irish, he studied the subject in school. Also like many Irish, he never really used it outside of the classroom, so he resorted to self-study methods. He describes his use of the long-respected Teach yourself books, which provide a good way to form a firm foundation in many of the tongues that they cover. He offers strong praise for Rosetta Stone, which teaches Irish (and other languages) through natural means that approximate the way we learn our native tongues. He also—very correctly—advises that language learning does not stop when one reaches the end of a given course. His organic advice, approximating language learning and retention to the need to exercise daily, is certainly spot on. One can appreciate this journey and may recognize one's own linguistic journey through his commentary. [End Page 162] From here, De Barra moves into a narrative within the sociopolitical headwinds that Irish continues to face, framing the post-independence linguistic policy situation as one that was full of desire and perhaps some promise, but whose application was half-baked at best. He provides a brief history in which English colonialism relegated Irish to the fringes and discouraged new speakers through the economic advantages that English provided. He points sharp criticism at the education system for its failure to teach Irish 'properly', then moves into the social hatred that he perceives toward Irish, one that was simultaneously vague and pervasive. He asserts that this hatred does not stem—contemporarily, at least—from the State's compulsory education policy in the subject. Rather, it would seem to come from English linguistic ideology, which he asserts has no tolerance for any other language. This attitude is a direct result of linguistic colonialism foisted upon Ireland in previous centuries: This disdain for speakers of other languages appears to remain today, long after the age of Empire has passed. A linguistic study from 2006 sought to investigate parental attitudes toward their children learning a foreign language, with more students believing that parents had a negative view rather than a positive view about second language learning. It seems incredible that any parent could have a negative view about their children learning a second language, but this study shows that such attitudes are not uncommon in the English-speaking world. (138) For sake of comparison, the prose delves into the sociopolitical headwinds faced by other languages, including several major tongues deemed by prominent public officials as 'useless' for no apparent reason other than those uttering the comments do not speak them. Celtic scholars will note with interest that he gives particular attention to Scottish Gaelic and Welsh as exemplars. He takes issue, albeit only in part, with what he terms 'Magic Béarla', or 'English worship', in a chapter that argues that the Irish people overstate the value of English to Irish society and to the Irish economy in a nod to the effects of neo-liberal capitalism on minoritized languages. Next, he takes on six myths related to why Irish should not continue to be revived, such as that Hiberno-English is the real national language or the (alleged) heightened difficulty in learning it. One chapter that will interest those who study language revival includes six case studies of minoritized languages which have been subject to (arguably) successful revival efforts: Welsh, Urdu, Québécois...

Review: Occult Roots of Religious Studies: On the Influence of Non-Hegemonic Currents on Academia around 1900, edited by Yves Mühlematter and Helmut Zander

Review: <i>Occult Roots of Religious Studies: On the Influence of Non-Hegemonic Currents on Academia around 1900</i>, edited by Yves Mühlematter and Helmut Zander

One Hundred Years of Irish Language Policy, 1922–2022 by John Walsh

Reviewed by: One Hundred Years of Irish Language Policy, 1922–2022 by John Walsh Peadar Kirby (bio) John Walsh, One Hundred Years of Irish Language Policy, 1922–2022 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2022), 384 pages. When welcoming the Irish language achieving full status in the European Union at the beginning of 2022, President Higgins made the following call to all Irish people: Now I say throw off all the inhibitions, the excuses, the laziness and as the language of our ancestors becomes at every level in daily usage in the European Union, let us go and make a resolution to give it a place in our daily lives at home – i lár an aonaigh, inár ngáthchaint. It is particularly appropriate that in the centenary year of the foundation of the independent Irish state, our native language achieves full status as an active working language of the EU. This can be regarded as one of the achievements of what was undoubtedly the most ambitious and far-reaching policy objective to which the young state committed itself – namely the revival of the Irish language. Yet, despite it remaining an objective of public policy, it often appears to the interested observer as the policy that dare not speak its name, a rhetorical commitment supported by severely insufficient policy measures and largely isolated from the rest of the state’s activities, with the exception of primary and secondary education. Even the lack of any central focus on language revival as part of the centenary celebrations of the state reveals its marginalised status, which I have little doubt would greatly surprise and sadden the leaders of our independence struggle were they to return to today’s Ireland. A timely resource John Walsh’s scholarly yet very accessible review and assessment of a century of revival efforts is therefore a very timely publication and deserves a wide readership. It is also an excellent resource for those of us who want to take seriously President Higgins’s call to reembrace the language. Walsh, an associate professor of Irish in the University of Galway and vice-dean (Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and People) in the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Celtic Studies in that university, is uniquely placed to give a broad assessment of not just the many efforts made to revive Irish but, just as important, the broader role of the language in Irish public life. His 2011 book [End Page 310] on the role of the Irish language in the country’s socio-economic development1 had already broken new ground in international socio-linguistics, and his research on languages such as Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Catalan, Basque and Galician, particularly on new speakers of these languages, gives him an unsurpassed ability to compare Ireland’s revival efforts with revival efforts elsewhere. Walsh very tellingly begins with the enactment of the Official Languages (Amendment) Bill passed by the Houses of the Oireachtas last December, which modestly strengthens measures to support the language, most especially the pledge to have 20% of recruits to public bodies competent in Irish by 2030. Juxtaposing this measure with a protest the same day outside the Dáil by schoolchildren about the Department of Education’s failure to provide a Gaelscoil in their area and a decision by the Minister of Justice the following day to weaken the status of the language in the recruitment of Gardaí, Walsh writes that ‘taken together, these three events illustrate some of the ideologies and contradictions in relation to policy on the Irish language, a century after the Irish state was founded’. The bill came about largely due to the ‘doggedness and persistence of activists and the support of a handful of politicians who are committed to promoting Irish as a living, spoken language and to improving public services for Irish speakers’. However, he highlights that it took ten years and three changes of government to achieve, and he concludes: Furthermore, the passing of almost a century between the foundation of the state and strengthened legislation to provide services in Irish is a telling illustration of the marginalised place of the language in the policy arena, despite its exalted constitutional status. Walsh sets himself the...

A landscape of words. Ireland, Britain and the poetics of space, 700–1250 by Amy Mulligan

Reviewed by: A landscape of words. Ireland, Britain and the poetics of space, 700–1250 by Amy Mulligan A. Joseph McMullen (bio) Amy Mulligan, A landscape of words. Ireland, Britain and the poetics of space, 700–1250. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1-5261-4110-1. xii + 251 pages. $120 (hardcover), $36.95 (paperback). The field of Celtic Studies has had to wait a long time for the next word on the medieval Irish ‘environmental imagination.’ With A landscape of words, however, Amy Mulligan has made that wait more than worth it. This scintillating book persuasively argues for an Irish poetics of space—a deep interconnection between landscape and words at the very core of place-making in the literature from and about medieval Ireland. It is this attention to ‘verbal topographies,’ as well as the various readers and audiences of these works, that separates A landscape of words from other studies. Mulligan digs deeply into a wide range of texts—from immrama to the dindshenchas, from vitae to ethnographies—to tell a new story about a well-known feature of early Irish literature. A landscape of words not only further excavates ‘one of the richest and most complex bodies of medieval topographical writing’ (3), it reveals how central the writing of these literary landscapes was to the poets, authors, and redactors of medieval Ireland. The first two chapters are connected by an interest in journeying and pathfinding. In Chapter 1, Mulligan puts Adomnán’s De locis sanctis and Vita Sancti Columbae in conversation with the Navigatio Sancti Brendani and Immram curaig Maíle Dúin. She explains how Adomnán ‘transmits an embodied, sense-based engagement with the Holy Land’ (26) that allows his audience to inhabit holy sites through their imaginations. This spatial practice is expanded in his Life of Columba, where closer (but potentially dangerous) places can be visited by the Iona community. Mulligan then argues for the presence of similar literary conventions at work in Irish voyage tales. Developing the concept of ‘boat as book’ (42), she examines how the audiences of the Navigatio and immrama might themselves ‘row-about’ in the narratives. Much like how the voyagers [End Page 255] must undertake spiritual journeys before reaching the promised land, readers of these texts can also undergo transformative experiences through contemplation. Chapter 2 moves inland to the Ulster Cycle and the figure of Cú Chulainn, ‘heroic Ireland’s most productive and conscientious place-maker’ (67). Rather than focusing solely on Táin bó Cúailnge, Mulligan considers how Ireland’s most famous hero is entwined with the natural world throughout his heroic biography. She examines, first, his ‘spatial precocity’ (69) in Compert Con Culainn and the Macgnímrada (from the Táin), especially in terms of wayfinding and border crossing/guarding, before considering topographical language and eroticism in Tochmarc Emire. The Táin itself suggests that Cú Chulainn is a successful warrior in large part because of his mastery of placelore. Through and because of this knowledge, Cú Chulainn becomes enmeshed in the landscape: the natural world, in turn, supports him (especially in the form of rivers) and he frequently uses inscriptions on stone and trees to communicate (this focus on textuality returns later in an analysis of Siaburcharpat Con Culaind). Furthermore, in the Táin and Mesca Ulad, the destruction of the landscape asks readers to consider the violence of war. The third chapter offers an important new study on the Dindshenchas Érenn collections of stories dedicated to how places got their names. Though the dindshenchas tales have begun to receive more attention recently, they remain still vastly underappreciated. Mulligan takes great strides in this chapter to rectify that, paying particular attention to the poets of the verse compositions and their audiences. It is also not a surprise that this chapter is at the core of her book, given its focus of the poetics of space via the construction of literary landscapes. Reading these poems as ‘verbalized topographies’ and ‘extensive virtual landscapes’ (110) which encourage a view of ‘landscape as literature and text as territory’ (114), Mulligan argues that the dindshenchas ‘became the national landscape as created, preserved and performed by the...

Studi celtici by Filippo Motta

Reviewed by: Studi celtici by Filippo Motta Joseph F. Eska (bio) Filippo Motta, Studi celtici, ed. Andrea Nuti. Pisa: Pisa University Press, 2020. ISBN 978-88-3339-275-2. xxiv + 518 pages. €32.00. This volume of collected papers by Filippo Motta (FM), Professor of Linguistics and Celtic Philology at the Università di Pisa, edited by his former student, Andrea Nuti, should have a place on the bookshelf of everyone interested in early Celtic philology and linguistics. Many of the 20 included papers (of the 90 that he has published through 2019) were originally published in journals and volumes not commonly found in North American libraries. Some are not found in North American libraries at all. A number of the papers included in the volume are among FM’s best known works, including ‘Per un’interpretazione della Faccia B del bronzo di Botorrita’ (1980), in which he identifies the onomastic character and structure of Face B of this most important of Celtiberian inscriptions. Other well known works include ‘I Leponti. La documentazione epigrafica e linguistica’ (2000), a collection and linguistic commentary, with excellent photographs, of the Lepontic epigraphic corpus as known at the time; ‘Sulla declinazione celtica dei temi in -ā’ (1988), occasioned by the discovery of novel ā-stem inflexional morphemes in the Transalpine Celtic inscription of Larzac; and ‘Tipologie dell’onomastica personale celtica nell’Italia antica’ (2009), which examines the types of idionyms, patronymics, and onomastic formulae found in the Celtic of ancient northern Italy. Others papers are not as well known (but should be), at least in North America, but this is a question of accessibility. These include ‘Brevi note sulle bilingui ogamico-latine di Britannia’ (1988) and ‘La sala del convivio dei fabbri gallici. Per l’etimologia di gall. celicnon’ (2001), in which FM convincingly demonstrates that the well known Transalpine Celtic forms celicnon (RIG L–13; acc. sg.) and celicnu (RIG L–13; dat. sg.) are to be connected to the Celtic stem */kheːljo/-attested in OIr. céile and MW kilyd ‘fellow, companion,’1 thus superseding an earlier proposal of my own and providing a ready explanation for the phonology of the Gothic borrowing kelikn (in which 〈e〉 represent /eː/). We should also be grateful for the inclusion of two papers on the rock inscriptions from Carona (Bergamo), ‘Val Brembana Golasecchiana. Nuove testimonianze epigrafiche da Carona’ (2008) and ‘Sulle ultime campagne di studio delle epigrafi preromane di Carona’ (2016), which originally appeared in the magazine Terra Insubre aimed at a non-academic audience, but which contain useful information on these understudied inscriptions. [End Page 261] Other papers by FM included in this collection touch upon issues pertaining to Celtic culture and anthropology, etymology, and the historiography of the Italian Celticists Tristano Bolelli and Graziadio Isaia Ascoli. This well produced volume also includes FM’s bibliography through 2019 and indices of cited forms and names. One only wishes that more could have been included. ABBREVIATIONS RIG L–1–16 Lejeune 1988 RIG L–18–*139 Lambert 2002 Joseph F. Eska Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University Joseph F. Eska Joseph F. Eska [eska@vt.edu] is Professor of Language Sciences in the Department of English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University. His research interests focus upon all aspects of the historical linguistics of the Celtic languages. He is the editor of the North American journal of Celtic studies and co-editor of Indo-European linguistics. References Lambert, Pierre-Yves. 2002. Recueil des inscriptions gauloises ii/2, Textes gallo-latins sur instrumentum. Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Google Scholar Lejeune, Michel. 1988. Recueil des inscriptions gauloises ii/1, Textes gallo-étrusques. Textes gallo-latins sur pierre. Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Google Scholar Russell, Paul. 2013. From compound to derivative. The development of a patronymic ‘suffix’ in Gaulish. In Continental Celtic word formation. The onomastic evidence, ed. Juan Luis García Alonso, 201–214. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca. Google Scholar Footnotes 1. Subsequently discovered independently by Russell 2013: 208–209. Copyright © 2022 The Ohio State University Press

Pangur Bán, Translation, Postmodernism, Paul Muldoon

«Pangur Bán» is probably the best know poem in Celtic studies, and a poem that tends to become increasingly more popular to audiences outside of Ireland. However, the anonymous, medieval poem has been cherished throughout history for a wide range of poetic, philosophical, intellectual and educational reasons. To inquire into the longevity and popularity of a marginal gloss on his cat by an Irish monk in a German monastery in the ninth century seems appropriate at a time when contemporary literature and applied hermeneutics of all kinds tend to dominate the literary discourses. This essay relates the historical poem to its many translations, for example by Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, and current literary discourses. Why has this enigmatic jeu d’esprit been translated so frequently and why are these translations important? This essay argues that «Anonymous: Myself and Pangur», Muldoon’s version of «Pangur Bán», can be read as a prismatic poem for postmodernist concerns, in his own poetry and in recent theories.

Основная проблематика кельтских исследований в современном британском языкознании

The aim of this work is to characterize the main problems of modern scientific research in celtology in the UK. The scientific originality of the article lies in a comprehensive analysis of the methodology of scientific works and the results obtained by the modern British linguists dealing with the Celtic linguistic problems. As a result, it is proved that Celtic studies at the present stage remain significant for science: they are devoted to the problems of field research, grammar, etymology, and have a great potential for further research among foreign and domestic philologists. In the conclusion of the article, the prospects for subsequent scientific research are outlined.

We Remember Maynooth: A College Across Four Centuries by Salvador Ryan John-Paul Sheridan (review)

Book Reviews Salvador Ryan and John-Paul Sheridan (eds), We Remember Maynooth: A College Across Four Centuries (Dublin: Messenger Publications, 2020), 512 pages. This book marks the 225th anniversary of the foundation of Maynooth College in 1795. The British government financed the establishment of the Royal College at Maynooth for the education of priests at a remove from the influence of revolutionary Europe, where Irish priests were trained at that time. The book’s objective is to provide, not a history of the college, but essays written ‘between the lines of history’.1 The editors have succeeded admirably with this handsomely produced and most enjoyable publication. Most of the one hundred short contributions, generally three to six pages, are recollections of students and teachers in Maynooth since the 1950s. The historian Terence Dooley highlights how the visit of Queen Victoria to Carton House in 1849 illustrated the ambiguous nature of the college’s relationship with the British administration. In 1845 the government had provided a grant of £30,000 towards the construction costs of the college, but the bishops differed as to the tenor of their proposed address of welcome to the queen. Archbishop MacHale of Tuam thought that it should emphasise the cruel neglect of the famine victims by Victoria’s ministers. Archbishop Murray of Dublin, who ran an impressive famine relief scheme, thought that more could be achieved by working with the British administration than against it. He drafted an address of warm welcome, which acknowledged that the thought of people’s woes ‘pressed already so severely on Your Majesty’s parental heart’. Murray hoped in vain that ‘the amiable little Queen’ might visit Maynooth, and the college president, Msgr Laurence Renehan, drafted an address of welcome which expressed gratitude for its endowment. In the event, Murray and Renehan were among those who dined with the queen in Carton House.2 The dominant themes in the recollections of former students and staff relate to the impact on the college of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s and the effects of the opening of the college to lay students shortly afterwards. Many of the reflections by priests who were students in the 1950s and 1960s emphasise the barren and sterile nature of much of their theological training, Spring 2021: Book Reviews Studies • volume 110 • number 437 102 coupled, however, with fond memories of the college itself. Joseph Duffy, the retired Bishop of Clogher who was ordained in 1958, recalls that the spark which enlivened his Celtic studies BA course was missing when he came to study theology. As a preparation for preaching, he found that the rigidities of the theology courses added little to the national school catechism.3 The theology students in the late 1960s rebelled against the system and managed to secure improvements in how the subject was taught and in its content. Two professors of theology, ‘Frankie’ Cremin (as he was affectionately known by generations of students) and Enda McDonagh, came to represent, respectively, the old and the new approaches to theology. McDonagh has spent seventy-plus years in Maynooth as student, professor, and retired resident. He was appointed Professor of Moral Theology and Canon Law in 1958. The linking of these two fields of study was the custom in many Catholic institutions and, in McDonagh’s view, had distorting effects on moral theology which, in many of the textbooks, came to be treated as a legal tract.4 Patrick Hannon recalls the shock when Cremin told his postgraduate student seminar in 1965 that his undergraduate students had interrupted his lecture to complain that Cremin’s courses showed no awareness of the renewal of moral theology then in train for more than a decade. Cremin was the Irish bishops’ peritus, or expert, at the Second Vatican Council. He was aware of the new trends in theology but remained an unrepentant exponent of the moral theology of the traditional manuals. Hannon concludes that only an old-fashioned loyalty prevented Cremin, a kindly and fair-minded man, from openly criticising McDonagh and other junior colleagues for exposing their students to the new thinking. Hannon considered that the Maynooth regime stunted growth and did not prepare students for...

The Magical Whiteness of Being Irish: Language and Song in American White Nationalism

The Magical Whiteness of Being Irish:Language and Song in American White Nationalism Sean Williams (bio) the use of "celtic"-themed imagery—in clothing, tattoos, and business logos—has a long history in the United States. Its usage has generally been a simplified identifier of affiliation with Irish and/or Scottish heritage, and it is often uncritically adopted at the same level by tourists who visit Ireland and tell Irish people, "We're Irish." While white supremacists have also periodically drawn from Celtic imagery to support a claim of Celtic "whiteness," that usage was fairly diffuse until recently.1 The public rise of white nationalism since the US presidential election of 2016, however, has led to adherents' more public usage of Celtic symbolism. Three statements from Irish/Celtic Studies institutions in the United States publicly reject such appropriation. In early 2020, members of the Harvard Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures posted these words on the home page of their website: "There is no essential genetic 'Celtic' identity, nor is any ethnicity or group of ethnicities entitled to a privileged position within the field. Certain symbols associated with medieval Ireland and loosely identified as 'Celtic' have been appropriated by groups asserting the supremacy of persons with white skin. We repudiate this appropriation in the strongest possible terms."2 Similarly, the Center for Irish Studies at Villanova University's "Anti-Racism Statement" includes the following language: "Too often have white supremacists [End Page 134] claimed Irishness as a veil for cruelty and oppression. As scholars and teachers of Irish Studies, we commit actively to expose such moves and encourage scholarship and learning that fosters equality, social justice, and respect for everyone. We are committed to exploring these issues and challenging white privilege and racism through our teaching, research and programming."3 Lastly, the Celtic Studies Association of North America stated that they "strongly oppose the appropriation of Celtic culture, history and symbols by those who promote discrimination or violence of any kind."4 That all three institutes felt compelled to post these statements on their websites speaks to a larger issue in Irish Studies in the United States: the appropriation of Irish culture to serve a social desire to appear more white. The whiteness in question is, however, a very specific kind of whiteness, and one associated with the seemingly inviolable whiteness of Irish people. In combination with pop cultural references to how white the Irish are—including the appearance of memes about the whiteness of Irish people—and confusion surrounding actual Irish American history, a contemporary notion of what constitutes whiteness has evolved so that "claiming Irishness often authorizes a location and a celebration of whiteness in ways that would otherwise be problematic."5 Irish heritage pride and a sense of American white ethnicity have led to the assertion that, for some, one's racial whiteness can be affirmed only through the magic of publicly and repeatedly proving one's Irishness. Even as Ireland itself has undergone a stunning sea change since 1990, becoming more willing to confront elements of its challenging past and take radical steps toward acknowledging its struggles to welcome new immigrants, parts of Irish America—in the larger American context—have experienced elements of division along political lines.6 Much of that division lies in the choice of some contemporary Irish [End Page 135] Americans to align themselves with white nationalism.7 And part of that division has resulted in the use of the Irish language, the Irish flag, Irish music, and Irish symbols, such as Celtic-themed crosses in tattoos, in connection with white nationalist ideology, together with the false promulgation of the myth of "Irish slavery."8 While not limited to Irish Americans, such usage has its home in the United States. This article focuses on the specific uses of sound—in the Irish language and in Irish-language old-style songs called sean-nós—as a tool for the larger nationalist emphasis of whiteness. The concept of home and heritage is often recognized as a means by which people can feel that they belong, and proving one's Irishness might actually be a way to point to something in one's own...

Scanning the Hypnoglyph: Sleep in Modernist and Postmodern Representation by Nathaniel Wallace

MLR, .,   den Nation strikes a delicate balance between breadth and depth of analysis in seven steps. An Introduction sets out theoretical contexts, for example in studies of Wales itself; travel writing and the tourist gaze, here related critically to minoritized cultures and languages; endotic travel; and perceptions of the Celtic and Celticism. e first chapter discusses Francophone writing –, and three successive focuses of interest: (Romantic) landscape, technical writing on world-leading industries , and religious revival. e second chapter focuses on the ‘Celtic’ in French texts (–), highlighting their complexity and ambiguity. Two chapters on German writing follow. Chapter  (–) observes, as foundations for travel itineraries and writing traditions are laid, tensions between appreciation of Romantic, sublime landscapes on one hand and social modernization, including tourism and industry, on the other. It registers, too, frequent critique of English hegemonic or colonial attitudes to Wales. e fourth chapter (–) examines interest in Welsh identity, language, and culture, which relates both to the contemporary importance of Celtic studies in the German-speaking lands, and to those lands’ own concerns with national identity and modernity. A comparative fih chapter surveys sparse inter-war and post-war writing, and the more productive period from the s onward. Paradoxically, even as Wales and writing about it become ever more accessible, most recent developments reflect fragmented views of the country and declining engagement with the Welsh language and cultures. e Conclusion draws attention, inter alia, to the importance for present and future research of ideas about micro-cosmopolitanism and relationships not only between cultural centres and peripheries, but between so-called peripheries, to better understand where Wales, and many other places, might be. is important book will be welcomed by and appeal to readers with interests in travel and technical writing, European, Breton, Welsh, Celtic, and archipelagic studies, as well as French, German, and comparative literature, minoritized cultures and languages, and critical debates about the supposed centres and margins of cultures. U C L M P D Scanning the Hypnoglyph: Sleep in Modernist and Postmodern Representation. By N W. Leiden: Brill Rodopi. . xxvi+ pp. €. ISBN ––––. In Scanning the Hypnoglyph Nathaniel Wallace sets out to demonstrate that the representation of human slumber in the visual and verbal arts ‘performs aesthetic functions, delineates the individual psyche, and reveals cultural values’ (p. xii). Wallace casts his net wide, providing detailed analysis of writers from North America (Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, Anne Sexton), France (Marguerite Duras, Marcel Proust), and Japan (Yasunari Kawabata) and no less detailed scrutiny of the work of visual artists from North America (Vincent Desiderio , Fran Gardner, David Yaghjian, Paul Cadmus, Andy Warhol, Mark Tansey),  Reviews Germany (Anselm Kiefer), and France (Gustave Courbet). e book is handsomely illustrated and Wallace reads visual texts as patiently and astutely as he reads literary ones. Wallace conducts his quest for ‘hypnoglyphs’—‘sleep-centred work[s] of art’ (p. )—via chapters on the figure of the vertical sleeper; on the sense of vastness or illimitability in sleep; on representations of nude or semi-dressed female sleepers; and on affinities between sleep and queer or ‘non-standard’ sexualities. e story he tells is a broadly chronological one. Modernism, exemplified by the writings and career of Proust, has powerful affinities with slumber and indeed uses sleep as a ‘discursive ground’ and ‘existential baseline’ (p. xii). Postmodernist culture, tossing and turning in a chronically ‘overawakened’ (p. ) state, can only dream of such ‘equilibrium in dormancy’ (p. xii). But summarized in this way the modernisminto -postmodernism story does not convey the richness of Wallace’s discussion. To read Scanning the Hypnoglyph is repeatedly to experience a concertina effect as Wallace’s text, through its labyrinthine range of cross-reference and strenuously busy footnotes, reveals within itself a kind of submerged magnum opus on the cultural history of sleep from antiquity to the present, one in which the author’s generous and searching intellectual curiosity takes him off in all directions. e extended discussion of Richard Wilbur’s ‘Walking to Sleep’, which Wallace reads via Shelley, Poe, Neoplatonism, Galen, Molière, Hopkins, Baudelaire, Wordsworth, T. S. Eliot, and Coleridge, is just one instance of Wallace’s Argus-eyed vigilance as a critic. It...

A Dictionary of Gaulish Nominal Stems. Review of the book: Delamarre X. Dictionnaire des thèmes nominaux du gaulois. I : Ab- / Iχs(o)-. Paris : Les Cent Chemins, 2019. 398 p.

This new book by Xavier Delamarre is the first volume of the dictionary of Gaulish nominal bases. Since onomastics is the source for most of its data, this book is of interest for the readers of this journal. Apart from Gaulish, the author considers data of other ancient Celtic languages such as Lepontic, Celtiberian, or British (Brittonic). The review surveys methodological aspects underlying this research, and particularly a number of questions related to suffixation in relation to the most recent research on Celtic morphology and word-formation. Undoubtedly, the book is the most complete collection of Gaulish onomastics up to date, although a number of missing forms can be brought forward, which is to be expected due to the amount of data at our disposal, and selection of several examples as Celtic should be questioned. The text contains etymological comments, and some of them appear in the book for the first time which deserves special attention. The dictionary is a very important contribution to Celtic studies in general, and to Gaulish onomastics in particular.

&lt;i&gt;Apgitir chrábaid&lt;/i&gt; in the context of an intertextual approach

This article is dedicated to methodological problems of intertextual relations studies which appear during the research of primary sources. The subject matter stands at the joint between several branches of knowledge: Religious studies, Cultural studies, Philology and Celtic studies. In this article, we make an attempt to find the most adequate methodological approach for the detection and description of intertextual relations. The source for our experiment would be an Irish primary source — Apgitir chrábaid, the earliest surviving Christian prose tract written in Old Irish. Moreover, the article contains a brief analysis of existing hypotheses which attempt to explain what exact Christian texts, written in Latin, influenced the structure and content of this treatise in particular: P.P. Ó Néill — John Cassian; T.O. Clancy and G. Márkus John Cassian and Basil the Great; A.A. Korolev — Isidore of Seville and John Cassian. Then we make critical remarks about the methodology of identification of said influences on Apgitir chrábaid chosen by those researchers and on the language of scientific description used by them. It is proposed to use methods developed within the theory of intertextuality as a more correct approach for marking and description of intertextual relations. The use of the intertextual description in working with primary sources is shown by the example of the analysis of the fragment from Apgitir chrábaid (§ 8). The result of the analysis is the hypothesis that the source of influence, the intertext, for the indicated fragment in addition to the text of the Holy Scripture, is the work «Homilies on Ezekiel» by Pope Gregory I the Great. As an additional argument in favor of this hypothesis, a brief review of the veneration of Pope Gregory I, recorded in Irish church literature, is given.

„Indo-European in Basis and Origin“. Das altirische Recht zwischen insularem Archaismus und europäischer Verflechtung

AbstractResearch on Old Irish law was from the very beginning related to specific epistemological and political contexts in which Celtic and Indo-European Studies emerged as scientific disciplines at the end of the 19th century. The premise of historical linguistics that the Indo-European languages derived from a common ‘origin’ had far reaching implications for studies on medieval Celtic law tracts. Since linguists had discovered significant parallels between Old Irish and Sanskrit, the legal traditions of Ireland and India were believed to preserve archaic Indo-European continuities as well. Against this background, and in a particular political context, Irish scholars of the 20th century argued for the autonomy and isolation of Old Irish law which was supposed to be unaffected by the Latin and Christian literature of continental Europe. However, later researches departed radically from this national perspective and emphasized the impact of Canon law, hagiography and the Bible on Irish written culture. This article takes up a different perspective by focusing on the persistence of a legal imagery that was by no means essentially Indo-European but still provided conceptual tools for the interpretation and ‘translation’ of texts, as they occur in vernacular adaptations of Latin literature.

Barry Cunliffe and John T. Koch. Exploring Celtic Origins: New Ways Forward in Archaeology, Linguistics, and Genetics (Celtic Studies Publications 22. Oxford &amp; Philadelphia: Oxbow Books, 2019, ix and 214pp., several illustrations and tables, hbk, ISBN: 978-1-78925-088-6)

Barry Cunliffe and John T. Koch. Exploring Celtic Origins: New Ways Forward in Archaeology, Linguistics, and Genetics (Celtic Studies Publications 22. Oxford &amp; Philadelphia: Oxbow Books, 2019, ix and 214pp., several illustrations and tables, hbk, ISBN: 978-1-78925-088-6)

John Carey, Magic, Metallurgy and Imagination in Medieval Ireland. Tree Studies. Celtic Studies Publications, XXI. Aberystwyth: Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, 2019, xi, 107 pp., 2 color ill.

<?page nr="397"?>John Carey, <i>Magic, Metallurgy and Imagination in Medieval Ireland. Tree Studies</i>. Celtic Studies Publications, XXI. Aberystwyth: Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, 2019, xi, 107 pp., 2 color ill.

Four Offaly saints. The Lives of Ciar�n of Clonmacnoise, Ciar�n of Slm�n of Lynally and F�on�n of Kinnitty by P�draig � Riain (review)

244 North American journal of Celtic studies The final chapter, ‘Dogs in the nighttime’, constitutes all of the third section of the book proper. Here the author invites us to pay attention to subjects where the lawbooks are particularly silent. In this case, it is noted that despite the fact that the medieval literature is full of graphic scenes of violence, the lawbooks are strangely reticent on the subject. This silence is even more striking when compared to the Welsh chronicles, such as Brut y tywysogion, and contemporary laws in England, which are very detailed in their descriptions of violent acts and the resulting compensation and/or punishment. This is not to say that the Welsh lawbooks do not have detailed schemas for compensation for various types of injuries; they do, the Value of Limbs, (183–185). But why the silence on violence? The author suggests that the silence is deliberate on the part of the redactors (201). The purpose of this silence seems to be a deliberate effort to contrast contemporary depictions of the Welsh as ruled by violence, and instead to depict the Welsh as strong, yet ‘ruled by law and grounded in agriculture’ (211). The conclusion reminds readers of the multiple realities depicted in the Welsh lawbooks and of the ways that symbolic interpretations, and not necessarily literal ones, can further our understanding of the Welsh legal material. Most of us who work with medieval legal texts are trained to approach the law with an eye towards a literal interpretation of what the texts say. Surely, what they say must be ‘true’. As Robin Chapman Stacey demonstrates, ‘true’ does not have to mean ‘literal’, although it sometimes can mean just that. ‘True’ can also mean metaphorical and symbolic . And the ‘truths’ presented in the lawbooks are never too far away from contemporary literary texts, or political events, or current intellectual trends within a wider European context. Only a scholar of Robin Chapman Stacey’s caliber could have produced such a scholarly work as this. She has broadened and deepened our understanding of not just the Welsh legal texts, but also the ways in which the literary texts interact with and inform our understanding of the laws. By combining both points of view, new ways of interpreting both types of texts emerge. The analytical model presented here will inform future generations of scholars both within and outside the field of Welsh law. Four Offaly saints. The Lives of Ciarán of Clonmacnoise, Ciarán of Seir, Colmán of Lynally and Fíonán of Kinnitty, comp. & trans. Pádraig Ó Riain. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2018. ISBN: 978-1-84682-704-4. xvii + 142 pp. $19.95 (paper). Gregory J. Darling Hostos Community College and Fordham University Gregory J. Darling [gregorydarling@msn.com] obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of English at the CUNY Graduate Center in 2003. His dissertation was based on a medieval Irish manuscript. He currently teaches in New York City at Hostos Community College and Monroe College. Reviews 245 In Four Offaly saints, Pádraig Ó Riain presents the reader with a masterpiece of hagiography —replete with photographs and maps—grounded in careful and thorough scholarship on the lives of St. Ciarán of Clonmacnoise, St. Ciarán of Seir, St. Colmán of Lynally, and St. Fíonán of Kinnitty—four early saints associated with the modern-day county of Offaly in the center of Ireland. Ó Riain notes that, after the publication of his Four Tipperary saints, he was asked to write on the saints of Offaly. He begins by pointing out in the Introduction the value of hagiography if it cannot be considered history per se: If hagiography is not history, as is now generally held, what value attaches to Lives of saints? Largely confined to patrons of substantial churches, Irish saints’ Lives can be of considerable value, not because they throw much light on their subjects but because they reveal how the traditions surrounding the saints might be used to protect and promote the interests of the communities that hold them in high regard (xiii). Hagiography, in other words, can highlight the ‘interests’ of groups holding traditions about the saints in...