Joseph Falaky Nagy

Handbook of Celtic Mythology

How does a written literature come into being within an oral culture, and how does such a literature achieve and maintain its authority? Joseph Falaky Nagy addresses those issues in his wide-ranging reading of the medieval literature of Ireland, from the writings of St. Patrick to the epic tales about the warrior Cú Chulainn. These texts, written in both Latin and Irish, constitute an adventurous and productive experiment in staging confrontations between the written and the spoken, the Christian and the pagan. The early Irish literati, primarily clerics living within a monastic milieu, produced literature that included saints' lives, heroic sagas, law tracts, and other genres. They sought to invest their literature with an authority different from that of the traditions from which they borrowed, native and foreign. To achieve this goal, they cast many of their texts as the outcome of momentous dialogues between saints and angelic messengers or remarkable interviews with the dead, who could reveal some insight from the past that needed to be rediscovered by forgetful contemporaries. Conversing with angels and ancients, medieval Irish writers boldly inscribed their visions of the past onto the new Christian order and its literature. Nagy includes portions of the original Latin and Irish texts that are not readily available to scholars, along with full translations.

Literary Myths of Medieval Ireland

Conversing with Angels and Ancients

Leslie Jones

Patrick K. Ford

This volume, a double issue of the CSANA Yearbook, containing articles from some of the leading scholars in Irish, Welsh, and medieval studies, honors Patrick K. Ford, the retiring Margaret Brooks Robinson Professor of Celtic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, and a founding member of the Celtic Studies Association of North America.

A Festschrift for Patrick K. Ford

Heroic Poets and Poetic Heroes in Celtic Tradition

Charlene M. Eska

Patricia Kelly

Rory McTurk

Anders Ahlqvist

Aidan Doyle

Barbara Hillers

Fergus Kelly

William Gillies

Kim R. McCone

Damian McManus

Ruairí Ó hUiginn

M. Katharine Simms

Liam Breatnach

Pádraig A. Breatnach

Morgan T. Davies

Hugh Fogarty

Sìm Innes

Aled Llion Jones

Catherine McKenna

Ollam (“ollav”), named for the ancient title of Ireland’s chief poets, celebrates the career of Tomás Ó Cathasaigh, Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Irish Studies at Harvard University, who is one of the foremost interpreters of the rich and fascinating world of early Irish saga literature. It is a complement to his own book of essays, Coire Sois, the Cauldron of Knowledge: A Companion to Early Irish Saga, also edited by Matthieu Boyd (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), and a sequel to his classic monograph The Heroic Biography of Cormac mac Airt (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1977) and as such it begins to show the richness of his legacy. The essays in Ollam represent cutting-edge research in Celtic philology and historical and literary studies. They form three clusters: heroic legend; law and language; and poetry and poetics. The 21 contributors are among the best Celtic Studies scholars of their respective generations, whether they are rising stars or great professors at the finest universities around the world. The book has a Foreword by William Gillies, Emeritus Professor at the University of Edinburgh and former President of the International Congress of Celtic Studies, who also contributed an essay on courtly love-poetry in the Book of the Dean of Lismore. Other highlight include a new edition and translation of the famous poem Messe ocus Pangur bán; a suite of articarticles on the ideal king of Irish tradition, Cormac mac Airt; and studies on well-known heroes like Cú Chulainn and Finn mac Cumaill. This book will be a must-have, and a treat, for Celtic specialists. To nonspecialists it offers a glimpse at the vast creative energy of Gaelic literature through the ages and of Celtic Studies in the twenty-first century.

Studies in Gaelic and Related Traditions in Honor of Tomás Ó Cathasaigh

Ollam

What are myths? Are there 'correct' and 'incorrect' versions? And where do they come from? These and many other related questions are addressed in Writing Down the Myths, a collection of critical studies of the contents of some of the most famous mythographic works from ancient, classical, medieval, and modern times, and of the methods, motivations, and ideological implications underlying these literary records of myth. While there are many works on myth and mythology, and on the study of this genre of traditional narrative, there is little scholarship to date on the venerable activity of actually writing down the myths (mythography), attested throughout history, from the cultures of the ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean to those of the modern world. By assembling studies of the major literary traditions and texts through a variety of critical approaches, this collection poses - and seeks to answer -key questions such as these: how do the composers of mythographic texts choose their material and present them; what are the diverse reasons for preserving stories of mythological import and creating these mythographic vessels; how do the agenda and criteria of pre-modern writers still affect our popular and scholarly understanding of myth; and do mythographic texts (in which myths are, so to speak, captured by being written down) signal the rebirth, or the death, of mythology?

Writing Down the Myths

The pursuit of â??mythâ?? has long been an important part of Celtic studies. Are there, in fact, waifs and strays of ancient mythology preserved in medieval Celtic texts? Do myths reflect a prehistoric world-view, history, or literary innovation? And how are old myths refitted, and new myths invented, by writers in medieval and modern times? These are some of the questions compellingly addressed in the studies collected in this issue of the Yearbook, featuring groundbreaking work on: the mythological underpinnings of names in the Welsh Mabinogi; the story of Branwen and the clash between Britain and Ireland; the figure of the â??holy mermaidâ?? in medieval Irish literature; horses, dogs, and King Arthur; and the ideological implications of â??insularityâ??. Contributors include Phillip Bernhardt-House, Ranke de Vries, Jessica Hemming, Catherine McKenna, and Thomas Oâ??Loughlin.

Myth in Celtic Literatures

Joseph Falaky Nagy

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