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Visiting Saints and Dragons

October 28, 2014, 4:40 am
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Over the next few days we'll be publishing some reports from this year's Festival of Ideas, which has been another big success for the department. Here's the first, from ASNC graduate student Julianne Pigott:

"Charting geographic and historical territory from St Columba’s defeat of the Loch Ness Monster to the dragon vanquished by St George, ‘Saints and Dragons’, a Festival of Ideas session presented by the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic on Saturday October 25th was created with an audience of under 10s in mind but ultimately attracted the attention of a selection of visitors of all ages. Designed by graduate student Julianne Pigott, as part of the Isaac Newton Trust funded Mapping Miracles project which examines miracle accounts from hagiographical texts composed across the regions of the medieval Insular world, ‘Saints and Dragons’ encouraged participants to explore the patterns, convergent and divergent, in miraculous animal encounters recorded in texts composed about saints associated with modern-day Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England. 
 
St Brigit of Ireland (image courtesy of Aidan Hart icons)
The subject of no fewer than eight hagiographical texts in Latin and Old/ Middle Irish, St Brigit, was the first of six saints to whom attendees’ attention was drawn. Drawing on accounts from the seventh century Latin text composed by Irish author Cogitosus, listeners were introduced to twelve Brigidine miracles, as they handcrafted crosses in accordance with a pattern attributed in modern folkloric tradition to the fifth-century nun. From the wondrous reproduction of meat she had previously fed to a stray dog, to her ability to calm wild horses and straying cattle, younger audience members were enthusiastic about the fantastical elements of the Brigit narrative.  Crossing the Irish Sea to Scotland, the audience was introduced to Adomnán’s Vita Columbae, a seminal source for historians of the period, but also the first literary account of the Loch Ness Monster. The holy man’s victory over his watery foe marks the only textual sighting of the monster before 1933 but this earliest identification of Nessie is often known only to medievalists and Latinate scholars; the adult participants in ‘Saints and Dragons’ certainly appreciated the value in familiarising themselves with the medieval roots of a modern legend. 

A St Brigit's cross created by a participant
In a further exploration of the connections between past and present, the younger cohort was presented with a brief introduction to the manuscript and textual history of these tales, with particular reference to the ninth century Irish poem Pangur Bánand its adaptation by contemporary filmmakers as a customised narrative for today’s Disney saturated audience. The account of the journey of this text, from ninth century European manuscript to twenty-first century animated movie replete with child-friendly musical accompaniment, provided an appropriate preface to a consideration of Welsh Saint Melangell’s position in popular lore as the saviour of hares. 


Tracing the ahistorical Melangell from a putative lifespan in the sixth century, through a text likely written in the twelfth, committed to vellum in the sixteenth and reports of a traveller to the region in the eighteenth, mature participants became more familiar with the particular challenges encountered by the historian seeking to disinter the truth of these tale. Meanwhile younger audience members were entranced by the vision of St Melangell sheltering the hares and rabbits under her voluminous skirts! 

The most popular storytelling section of the event was St George’s defeat of the dragon in Cappadocia, though listeners were taken aback to discover that the infamous victory by England’s patron saint occurred in modern Turkey rather than on local soil. The theme of 2014’s Festival of Ideas was ‘identity’ and the St George narrative challenged assumptions readily made by modern readers about the origin and reliability of narratives accepted in today’s popular culture as unassailable truths. Seeking to refocus attention on the sometimes very localised nature of identities, both medieval and modern, the final saint’s tale recounted was that of St Æthelthryth of Ely, whose association with the Cambridgeshire region is historically attested and confirmed in bountiful literary productions. 

‘Saints and Dragons’, though originally intended to serve only younger Festival attendees, evolved on the day of delivery to meet the expectations of a more diverse audience than anticipated. From the lively pictures and colourful crosses produced by the youngest participants to the probing questions raised by teenaged Classicists, the session exemplified the continued resonances of medieval saints’ stories for modern audiences, as narrative accounts in which certain aspects of identity are firmly implicated. The miracle accounts relied upon in the session explored how the relationship between place and people is neither fixed nor finite and challenged long, and often fondly held, assumptions about Insular patron saints and the intimacy of the connections upon which modern regional identities are, at least in part, founded. The work done by the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic lends itself exceptionally well to exploring and bridging the gaps, both perceived and real, between disparate Cambridge communities. Audience members in attendance at ‘Saints and Dragons’ cannot have failed to notice the universal themes, with personal relevance, which suffuse narratives composed in wildly different times and areas across the medieval Insular world. Those connections remain as relevant and requisite to good political and personal relationships today, as then."


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Festival of Ideas 2014: a visitor's impression

October 30, 2014, 2:49 am
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Sandra Leaton-Gray reports on the ASNC Festival of Ideas.

I was delighted to be able to visit ASNC during the Festival of Ideas recently to learn about all things Viking and more besides. Initially I was merely planning on going in a coat-holding capacity with my 16 year old son, Conrad, who has a passion for runes, Norse military tactics, and so on.  However I was soon swept along by the different talks and started to understand what all the fuss was about. First of all we attended a lecture on the beginning of writing. I had never really thought this through at all and had rather taken writing for granted, What baffled me was how I could not have realised people would initially be writing on wood with knives, as some vague part of my brain assumed it was all about ink and vellum, which with hindsight was a major and fairly obvious misconception. You can't just bump off a goat for its skin every time you want to write down something quickly, after all. I was also fascinated by the accounts of marginalia written by early scribes, who appear to have spent their days rather cold and damp, with errant pets and similar kinds of utilitarian concerns we share today. 

Next I heard all about Vikings in Cleveland, which was surprising as I had previously imagined Vikings to be horn-helmeted types, largely confined to the area immediately around the Jorvik centre, various Scottish and Northumbrian islands wherever monks did their thing, and most of Lincolnshire. This is on account of my embarrassingly patchy mental map of the Viking world that, prior to the ASNC visit, apparently embracing nearly all the popular myths in a manner wholly unfitting for someone whose ancestors came from the Viking village of North Thoresby.  I was particularly intrigued to hear about the various forms of impact Vikings had had on Cleveland, and that it was possible to track their language even still in local dialect (as it seems to be, to some extent, in Lincolnshire today). 

I then spent a bit of time surfing the Internet looking at Viking ships, with the help of someone from the department who had taken note of my horrified question about female sacrifices and who encouraged me to learn more about the context of this. I am still convinced I had a narrow escape, being born in the 20th century, although my son assured me that I shouldn't worry as the Vikings took the good looking ones home with them, which was diplomatic of him in the circumstances, I felt. 

Finally the high spot of the day for me was being invited to judge an Icelandic warrior, aka obvious psychopath, who was clearly not the kind of person that you should let loose with a sword after the consumption of mead. We were allowed to vote on the various moral dilemmas in the story, and consult with historical and legal experts in order to come to our decision, but whatever we did, the situation got worse and worse for the poor victims of the psychopath's crimes until they were left destitute and without issue. What was really lovely about this session however is that the children present took it incredibly seriously and asked some really astute questions that helped the debate along a great deal. Perhaps we should stick them in a time machine and get them to arbitrate in 10th century Iceland next time? 

All in all this was a terrific day out and I left a lot wiser.


Many thanks to Sandra for this report. We also are grateful, of course, to Dr Debby Banham, Ben Guy, Julianne Pigott, Jo  Shortt Butler and all of our undergraduate volunteers for putting on such a wonderful programme for our guests.
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The Seventh Bangor Colloquium on Medieval Wales, 7-9 November 2014

November 17, 2014, 1:17 am
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 ASNC MPhil student Rebecca Thomas writes:

The journey may have been somewhat tedious, and the sky menacingly dark on arrival, but such trivial matters were soon forgotten in face of a fantastic weekend of papers on medieval Wales, spanning the fields of history, literature and archaeology. Opening proceedings with the J. E. Lloyd lecture was Dr David Stephenson, examining ‘Empires in Wales: from Gruffudd ap Llywelyn to Llywelyn ap Gruffudd’. Despite paying tribute to him as one of the greatest historians of medieval Wales, Stephenson nonetheless sought to deconstruct Lloyd’s narrative through demonstrating the complexity of power relations in the ‘age of Princes’. His stimulating lecture pinpointed many avenues for future research, raising questions over the articulation of power, presentation of rulers, and ideological control. 

On Saturday morning Dr Alex Woolf attempted to relocate Gwynedd. Using a mixture of inscriptions and evidence from the Historia Brittonum he argued for the moving of the heartland of Gwynedd eastwards, in a paper which left many pondering the implications of his alternative map of Wales over their coffee. Dr Sue Johns and Dr Emma Cavell broached questions of identity and perception, with the former examining the way seals were used by noblemen and women to convey identity, and the latter looking at later depictions of Matilda de St Valery as a giantess and witch by the Welsh. An introduction to the ‘Seintiau Cymru’ project by Dr David Parsons drew morning proceedings to a close. 

As tempting as it was to linger over lunch, the afternoon promised to be as stimulating as the morning, with papers covering homage (Philip Fernandes), Welsh law (Dr Sara Elin Roberts), education (Dr Rhun Emlyn) and chronicles (Georgia Henley and Dr Owain Wyn Jones). In an exceptional analysis of the poetry of Llywarch Brydydd y Moch to Llywelyn ab Iorweth and Rhys Gryg, Dr Rhian Andrews examined the role of the poet as an ambassador, deconstructing every line of the poetry and placing it in its historical context. Her analysis of the purpose of the poetrywas fascinating, and her readings of the Canu i Rys Gryg so powerful and convincing as to recreate Rhys Gryg’s court in the Sir Ifor Williams Room in Bangor. 

An early start on Sunday morning saw two different approaches to the study of places, with Dr Philip Dunshea discussing the meaning of ‘Eidyn’ in insular texts, whilst Paul Watkins deconstructed charter evidence in an attempt to locate the land of the Abbey of Pendar in Senghennydd.  After a paper by Richard Suggett concluding that the high status hall was re-created in the peasant household, Professor Tim Thornton brought proceedings to a close and dragged us forward to the early modern period in an examination of English historiographies of medieval Wales. 

The breadth and depth of the papers on offer at the Seventh Bangor Colloquium on Medieval Wales was truly astonishing, and whilst Professor Ralph Griffiths joked that the organisers (Professor Huw Pryce and Dr Euryn Rhys Roberts) would not want to start thinking about the eighth colloquium for some time, I for one would already like the date for my diary.  
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A hitherto unknown manuscript of Rimbert’s Vita Anskarii in Kiel

November 20, 2014, 3:24 am
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by Dr Paul Gazzoli, British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow 

When modern people read a medieval text, they do so through a modern edition, which has been put together through consultation of the manuscripts. When there is more than one manuscript of a text, they will inevitably be different in some way, and it is the task of an editor to sort out which readings from which manuscripts to use in an edition – and even if a manuscript is in general good, we may find places where other, generally ‘worse’ manuscripts may offer better readings. When a text has been edited before, naturally editors want to have access to manuscripts their predecessors didn’t know about, so finding a ‘new’ manuscript is a bit of a dream come true.

For the past two years I have been working on a new edition of the ninth-century text the Life of Anskar, an account of one of the first Christian missionaries to Denmark and Sweden which provides us with our earliest descriptions of life in Viking-Age Scandinavia. It was last edited in 1884 by Georg Waitz for the Monumenta Germaniae historica (the Trillmich text that is often cited is a reprint of Waitz with an abbreviated critical apparatus). When I started, I was aware of two manuscripts of the text Waitz had not known about, one in the monastery of St Agatha near Cuijk in the Netherlands (which I refer to as F in my edition, from its provenance from Frenswegen in Germany) and one in Heiligenkreuz in Austria (which I refer to as N, from its previous location in Neukloster and origins in Bordesholm, the successor to the earlier monastic settlement of Neumünster – see discussion below and also the table of manuscripts at the bottom of this post). Both of these were discovered in the nineteenth century. I’m now pleased to report that I’ve come across another version of the text unknown to previous scholars.

When I sat down to write the section of my introduction that dealt with N, I wanted to learn as much about its history as possible: where and when it was written, where its copyist found the version of the Life of Anskar he copied. The first two questions were both fairly straightforward, as at the top of the contents-page, the scribe wrote: Liber sanctae Mariae uirginis in Bardesholm ordinis canonicorum regularium sancti Augustini Bremensis diocesis. Quem ego frater Johannes cum naso scripsi in diuersis annis. Oretis dominum pro me unum aue Maria. (This book belongs to St. Mary’s in Bordesholm, of the order of regular canons of St Augustine, in the diocese of Bremen. I, Brother John with the Nose, wrote it over several years. Say one Hail Mary for me.) And although he only tells us that he wrote the book in diuersis annis, he does write the year after some of the texts in it: he doesn’t do this for the Life of Anskar, but for the Life of Rimbert, which follows, he gives the year 1512. This Johann Ness or Johannes cum Naso copied numerous other volumes at Bordesholm and won the praise of nineteenth- and twentieth-century textual critics (such as Bernhard Schmeidler) not only for his prodigious output but also for his diligence as a copyist: for some later works, his text is clearly the best.

Thus it was clear that N was copied at Bordesholm. I set about to see if there was anything I could learn about its library, and found that there was, fortunately, rather a lot: not only had relatively many of the volumes survived (though only a fraction of what there was once), most of them now in the Kongelige Bibliotek in Copenhagen and the Universitätsbibliothek in Kiel – no mean feat as the Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War and other conflicts could completely destroy libraries – but among them was a medieval catalogue of the library, completed in 1488 (which you can see online here; a later catalogue is bound in front of it, the medieval portion begins on page 26). This allowed me not only to establish that Bordesholm had an earlier copy of the Life of Anskar, in a volume which bore the shelf-mark L ix, but also the other contents of that volume, among which were a life of Thomas Becket and Provost Sido of Neumünster’s Letter on the Church of Bremen, written in 1195 or 1196. This means that (if this volume was written as a whole, and did not have parts written at different dates stitched together) L ix could probably not be older than c. 1200, but was written sometime before 1488 when the catalogue was made.

With this established, I tried to find out just what had happened to L ix, or if (just possibly) it might still be out there somewhere. I found several works from the nineteenth century that dealt with the fate of the Bordesholm library between the secularisation of the monastery in 1566 and the foundation of the University of Kiel in 1665, when the remaining books were transferred to new library there. The single largest other destination for the books was Gottorf Castle in Schleswig, the ducal seat, from which they were later transferred to the Kongelige Bibliotek in Copenhagen. Copenhagen’s manuscripts have been thoroughly catalogued, but the Bordesholm manuscripts at Kiel, I found, had last been catalogued in 1863, in two pamphlets published to celebrate the birthday of the King of Denmark – the last time that date would be marked with any public festivities in Kiel, as in the following year the Duchy of Schleswig was incorporated into the Kingdom of Prussia.

The last person to write on the subject I could find was Steffenhagen (Die Klosterbibliothek zu Bordesholm und die Gottorfer Bibliothek. Kiel, 1884), who identified L ix with N– but I knew this could not be so, as not only had N not yet been written when the catalogue was made, but the two did not have the same contents. But the first person to print the medieval library catalogue of Bordesholm, Merzdorf (Bibliothekarische Unterhaltungen, Neue Folge. Oldenburg, 1850) tentatively identified L ix with no. 297 of a later catalogue of the Bordesholm library (made sometime in the mid-seventeenth century before the collection was transferred to Kiel). This meant that if Merzdorf was right, there was a possibility that L ix had made it to Kiel after all: indeed, Steffenhagen identified no. 297 with a manuscript at Kiel with the designation Cod. ms. Bord. 95.

What further ignited my curiosity was Steffenhagen’s description in which he denies the manuscript could be L ix: ‘Von Ratjen als Sermones bezeichnet und nicht identificiert. Mit L ix des alten Katalogs nicht identisch, welcher Codex jetzt in Wiener-Neustadt liegt.’ (Called Sermonesby Ratjen [author of the 1863 catalogue] and not identified. Not identical with L ix of the old catalogue, which is now in Wiener Neustadt.)

It was the words nicht identisch in particular that set me off – this suggested that the volume had not identical, but similarcontent – in other words, it could be L ix, which shared some content with N, but not all (and as I mentioned above, I knew Steffenhagen was wrong about L ix being N). I became even more curious when I turned to Ratjen’s 1863 catalogue and only found the description: ‘Sermones. 187 Bll. 4. Die Handschrift hat von Feuchtigkeit sehr gelitten.’ (Sermones. 187 pages, quarto. The manuscript has suffered badly from damp.) Evidently, it was in a bad condition and neither Ratjen nor Steffenhagen could be troubled to report its contents.

The only thing to do then was to see if someone at Kiel could give me further information. To my good fortune, an internet search revealed that only last year a project had begun to produce a modern catalogue of the Bordesholm manuscripts. I got in touch with Kerstin Schnabel of the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, who is working on the project and who has written a dissertation on the Bordesholm library.

She was able to tell me that, in fact, L ix is still lost, and it did not live on as Cod. ms. Bord. 95. But the latter did, among other things, contain a copy of The Life of Anskar! Although the manuscript (from the fifteenth century) is severely damaged by water and mildew (it seems Ratjen was understating things badly when he merely referred to Feuchtigkeit), she told me that the contents-page is at least still somewhat legible, and lists the Life of Anskar at folia 170 to 178. This indicates it must be a condensed version, notably shorter than the abbreviated version to be found in the manuscript I designate F in my edition (from Frenswegen in Germany, now just across the border in the Netherlands at Sint Agatha, Erfgoedcentrum Nederlands Kloosterleven, St Agatha C 13), but not to be confused with the short legend which only takes up a couple of pages (of which Kiel also has a copy in Cod. ms. Bord. 3).

Thus, this manuscript provides us with evidence of a hitherto unknown shortened version of the Life of Anskar, which although it may not be of the greatest value as a witness to the original text, will be able to tell us more about how the Life was known in later medieval northern Europe. I would suspect that the text may be related to F, which also shares some significant variants with a seventeenth-century copy of the text in Amiens (which I call m). But in any event I will have to wait to find out, as the manuscript needs to be restored first. Ms Schnabel told me that the pages are all badly mildewed (and moreover, are fragmentarily preserved and have come out of their proper place in the manuscript) and cleaning them and putting them in order again will be a time-consuming process, which will begin next year as part of the ongoing project to catalogue the Bordesholm collection – which, no doubt, will turn up other things of great value to medievalists interested in northern Germany and Scandinavia.

Table of manuscripts mentioned

F Sint Agatha (Netherlands), Erfgoedcentrum Nederlands Kloosterleven, St Agatha C 13. Fifteenth century, originally from Frenswegen in Germany. Contains a version of the Life of Anskar, abbreviated by the omission of several chapters. Discovered in 1894, ten years after the publication of Waitz’ edition.

N Heiligenkreuz (Austria), Stiftsbibliothek, Fonds Neukloster D 21. Late fifteenth/early sixteenth century, originally from Bordesholm, written by Johannes cum Naso. Discovered in 1853 but unknown to Waitz.

m Some seventeenth-century pages added to Amiens, Bibliothèque Louis Aragon, 461 (a Corbie manuscript from around 1300; the first few chapters of the Life of Anskar was removed at some point. The writer of these pages supplied the missing text from a manuscript which shares many variant readings with F, and added the note telling us the name of the cleric he thought had taken the missing leaves).

L ix the lost exemplar of N, from Bordesholm, probably written sometime between c. 1200 and 1488.

Kiel, Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. ms. Bord. 95. Fifteenth century, collection of saints’ lives, including Anskar. The full contents are still unpublished.

 

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'A Pamphlet Composed to Bolster a Fiction'? St Eadburg and Canterbury

November 28, 2014, 4:12 am
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Alumnae and alumni of the department who read CAM magazine will happily have absorbed the article by Dr Rosalind Love in this term's issue. For everyone else, we point you to the magazine's website, where the current issue can be read online or downloaded for free. In 'Wars of the Word' (pp. 35-37), Dr Love tells of her research into the deeply intriguing Life of Saint Eadburg, a Latin text preserved in a twelfth-century manuscript from the cathedral library at Hereford, but which shows tantalising similarities with the work of a much earlier writer.
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'Cake Class' Goes to the UL: medieval Welsh manuscripts in Cambridge

December 1, 2014, 1:46 am
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The Medieval Welsh Reading Group, affectionately known as Cake Class, took a trip this week across West Road and over to the University Library, where among the treasures of that institution reside a number of medieval manuscripts of interest to Welsh scholars.

Cambridge University Library

In two groups, organized by ASNC PhD student Silva Nurmio, we were guided by Prof Paul Russell through a selection of six manuscripts and a collection of papers, as kindly arranged for us by Prof Russell and University Librarian Suzanne Paul.  Though the papers (Add. MS 6425), the work of 19th century scholar Henry Bradshaw, were significantly later in date than the rest of the works arranged discreetly around the Manuscripts Reading Room table, they were perhaps one of the most fitting items on view for a group of budding Celticists.  As Prof Russell explained, Henry Bradshaw was responsible for laying much of the foundation for the editing of glossed texts in the field of Celtic Studies, and for transcribing texts such as the Juvencus englynion and all the glosses in the manuscript to be worked on later by Whitley Stokes and others.  The Juvencus englynion, the earliest examples of verse in Old Welsh, were themselves on display just across from Bradshaw’s papers. Found in the margins of a 9th century copy of the Juvencus Codex (MS Ff. 4. 42), we are extraordinarily lucky to have these just next door to us in the UL – not the least because some of them were once cut from the manuscript and removed from the Library before being returned!


A further example of Old Welsh was seen in the Computus Fragment (Add. MS 4543), two small fly-leafs purchased by the UL in the early 20th century.  Dating to the 10th century, these pages probably preserve the longest prose passage of Old Welsh extant, as well as two examples of early Insular art in the zoomorphic heads found on two capital letters.  An assortment of three other manuscripts (MS Ii. 1. 14, MS Ii. 4. 4 and MS Kk. 3. 21) not composed in Welsh nevertheless bear the marks of Welsh scholarship, as attested by what have been categorized as ‘Welsh scribbles’ inside their respective bindings; in fact these are probably notes by Edward Lhuyd telling his amanuenseswhere to re-shelve the manuscripts.  Finally, the latest manuscript on the table was a personal volume of some Welsh genealogies (MS Mm. 1. 3), copied by William Llyn in the 16thcentury.  In fact, Llyn helpfully provides the detail that he began his copying on the morning of Friday the 1stof October, 1566; attestations of any kind are rare in Welsh manuscripts, yet here we find a level of detail bordering on the extreme.   ASNC PhD student Ben Guy, who is currently working on the Welsh genealogies, illustrated just how valuable a resource like the UL can be, and how important it is to take advantage of it, as he incorporates his findings from this book into his dissertation.


When you live and work in a place like Cambridge, it can be easy to forget just how lucky you are to be surrounded by such amazing resources.  For a small group of Welsh students and scholars, this Cake Class excursion was a reminder of all the great things that the UL has to offer – a taster if you will.  Though the treat was not as buttery as our usual weekly fare, it was in fact very much sweeter.  Many thanks to the organizers and to the UL.

Myriah Williams 
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'Songs of Donegal and other places': A Performance of sean-nós by Lillis Ó Laoire

February 10, 2015, 8:07 am
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5 March 2015, ASNC Common Room, 5-6pm 

A session of traditional Irish music with former ASNC student Andrea Palandri and Irish harpist Colm McGonigle will follow the performance.

The Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic is pleased to announce a performance of Irish sean-nós singing by Dr. Lillis Ó Laoire, on Thursday, 5 MARCH, 2015, at 5pm. The event will take place in the ASNC COMMON ROOM, ENGLISH FACULTY (2ND FLOOR), SIDGWICK SITE, 9 WEST ROAD.  The performance will highlight songs in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, and will include pieces from Tory Island, Rathlin and the Isle of Skye.  The event is free of charge and open to students, staff and the public.

Lillis Ó Laoire, Ar Chreag i Lár na Farraige ('On a Rock in the Middle of the Sea')

Dr. Lillis Ó Laoire is an accomplished sean-nós singer from Gort an Choirce, Co. Donegal, and a highly respected scholar.  He is Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at National University Ireland, Galway, and has published widely in the field of Irish language, folklore and ethnography.  His book Bright Star of the West: Joe Heaney, Irish Song Man (co-authored with Sean Williams), was published by Oxford University Press (2011), and was awarded the 2012 Alan P. Merriam Prize presented by the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Mount Errigal, Gort an Choirce, Co. Donegal

Dr. Ó Laoire's monograph, On a Rock in the Middle of the Ocean: Songs and Singers in Tory Island (2007), first published in Irish as Ar Chreag i Lár na Farraige, explores the place and function of traditional song within this small island community on the north west coast of Co. Donegal. Ó Laoire won the prestigious 'Corn Uí Riada’  for his sean-nós singing in 1991 and 1994 and has performed widely in Ireland and internationally. 

The Scottish Highlands

We invite you to welcome him to this special performance at Cambridge University.  Dr. Ó Laoire’s related academic interests and contributions can be found here.

Following Dr. Ó Laoire’s performance,  former ASNC student Andrea Palandri, who is now pursuing a Masters degree in Modern Irish at University College Cork, will make a special visit to ASNC to perform  Irish fiddle music with Irish harpist Colm McGonigle.

Former ASNC student Andrea Palandri and Irish harpist, Colm McGonigle  (ASNC, 2014)

Drinks and light snacks will be provided in the ASNC Common Room following the performance.

The Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic extends special thanks to ASNC alumna Shelby Switzer, for her donation to support events relating to Modern Irish language and culture in 2014-15. Her generous gift, which was highlighted in the ASNC Alumni Newsletter 2014, has provided invaluable funding for this event. Shelby studied Medieval and Modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic during her years in ASNC, and has continued to share her deep interest in language and culture in many corners of the globe since her graduation in 2012, teaching English in a small village in the Himalayan foothills and pursuing a career in coding. We are grateful for Shelby's generous contributions to the ASNC community both as a student and as a valued alumna.

If you have any questions, please contact Dr Margo Griffin-Wilson: mg597@cam.ac.uk


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The Lenborough Hoard

February 11, 2015, 4:22 am
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Dr Rory Naismith writes:


This week, a selection of items from the Lenborough hoard goes on display at the British Museum. 

It is the largest coin hoard ever to be considered under the Treasure Act of 1996, consisting of 5,251 silver pennies (and two cut halfpennies). The find came to light on 21 December 2014, during a metal-detecting rally at Lenborough in Buckinghamshire. Part of its excavation was filmed by one of the detectorists present. Initial digging uncovered the coins inside a lead container, but they were removed from this in the course of excavation. They are currently being kept at the British Museum, awaiting the result of a coroner’s inquest to determine whether the find constitutes treasure. 

The Lenborough Hoard

The hoard consists largely of pennies of King Cnut (1016–35), of the so-called ‘Short Cross’ type. This was the last of three substantive coin-issues in his reign. However, the hoard also includes an earlier clutch of material from the time of Cnut’s predecessor, Æthelred II (978–1016). These span the second half of his reign, and include one specimen of the excessively rare and historically important ‘Agnus Dei’ type, probably issued in 1009 as part of a programme of prayer and penitence to ward off viking attack.

 Until full publication, it is difficult to evaluate the exact context of the hoard. It belongs to a period when recoinages were being undertaken frequently, recycling the bulk of the currency – though, as in this case, collections of earlier coinage could sometimes be held back as savings or for private usage. The Lenborough find may shed light on how and why some coin-users retained earlier currency. Unfortunately, there is no obvious clue to the identity of its owner, or to the context of its assemblage, concealment and non-recovery. It was no small sum, however. 5,252 pennies amounted to £21 17s 8d in the contemporary system of account. A single penny during this period had considerable buying power– probably tens of modern pounds sterling or Euros – and the total content of the Lenborough hoard was more than most estates recorded in Domesday Book would be expected to produce in a year. It is clearly a lot more than most of the population would ever have handled on one occasion. That said, for the elite of late Anglo-Saxon England the Lenborough hoard would not have been an exceptional sum. The king and leading earls in 1066 were bringing in several thousand pounds a year, and in around 1037, just a few years after the hoard was concealed, the archbishop of Canterbury bought land at Godmersham in Kent for 72 marks of silver by weight– that is, at least 11,520 pennies (the equivalent of two Lenborough hoards). A shrine made for the Old Minster at Winchester in honour of St Swithun under the patronage of King Edgar (959–75) was said in a detailed description written soon after to have contained 300 lbs in precious metal.

The Lenborough hoard is impressive in its scale, and provides a precious insight into the currency of the eleventh century; but at the same time, it is a sobering reminder of just how much silver and gold was available in late Anglo-Saxon England – and of just how much might yet await discovery.
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CCASNC 2015

March 2, 2015, 1:03 am
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Caitlin Ellis, a doctoral candidate in ASNC and president of the CCASNC committee, writes:

Our annual graduate-led conference, the Cambridge Colloquium in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (CCASNC), took place in the English Faculty on 7th February 2015.


This year was the largest, best-attended CCASNC—both conference and dinner—to date and our wonderful, engaged audience ensured that discussion never ebbed. Our popular bookstall with a range of publications from our Department, the University of Wales Press and the Viking Society for Northern Research provided another focal point. Selected proceedings of this conference itself will appear in a forthcoming edition of Quaestio Insularis.

CCASNC 2015 Committee: Ben Guy, David Callander, Nicholas Hoffman, Katherine Olley, Caitlin Ellis, Rebecca Shercliff

The theme of this year’s Colloquium was ‘Communication and Control’. We welcomed our keynote speaker Professor Stefan Brink and ten postgraduate speakers from several countries. Despite the breadth and variety of subject matter, common themes emerged from the papers: modes of contact between societies; the diffusion of cultural concepts; the intentions of authors, compilers and scribes.


The Department’s own Julia Bolotina kicked off proceedings with the first session of the day. Bolotina examined the Lacnunga,a compendium of Anglo-Saxon medical remedies, arguing that it was a deliberate and highly valued production: a suggestion with important implications for the study of other manuscripts. This was complemented by Ryder Patzuk-Russell of Birmingham’s lucid exposition of the influence of Latin grammatica, exemplified by Bede and Alcuin, on the Old Norse theory of language, as seen in the vernacular Málskrúðsfræði and the First Grammatical Treatise. In exploring this area, Patzuk-Russell thereby underscored acommon history of grammatical learning.


Having sated our appetites for beverages and biscuits, our second session focussed on sustenance of a more religious nature. Exequiel Monge-Allen of the National University of Ireland, Galway, considered the Céli Dé movement, especially the responsibilities and importance of the spiritual directors (the anmcharaid, more literally ‘soul-friends’) in penance and confession. Monge-Allen also drew interesting parallels with other Old Irish religious texts. We were then reminded of the great value of art history by Stephenie McGucken, Edinburgh, who discussed the imagery of the sumptuously illuminated manuscript the Benedictional of St Æthelwold in relation to the cult of St Æthelthryth, the seventh-century Northumbrian virgin queen turned saint. This highlighted concepts of femininity and royalty in Anglo-Saxon England.


Our keynote address was delivered by Stefan Brink, Chair in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Aberdeen, who presented us with a masterful overview of medieval Scandinavian laws, particularly the regional differences in various Swedish law codes, and a reflection on historiographical trends. Brink employed a various forms of evidence, including runic inscriptions, such as that on the intriguing Forsa ring. This talk was connected to the exciting international project on Medieval Nordic Law funded by the Leverhulme Trust and led by Brink himself. For more information on the project, which will produce translations and commentaries of all the Nordic provincial laws from the period, see here.


After we adjourned for an excellent lunch, Samuel Ottewill-Soulsby, from the neighbouring Faculty of History here at Cambridge, brought a more international perspective to proceedings. Ottewill-Soulsby considered the context of the eleventh-century Andalusian geographer al-Bakrī’s account of the Bretons, touching on the channels of communication between the Christian and Muslim worlds and relations between the Franks and Bretons. William Norman, ASNC, also centred on the contact between cultures, looking at thought-provoking episodes in the Íslendingasögur of interaction between Icelanders and Celts, both in Iceland and the British Isles, and how this was influenced by knowledge of each other’s languages. Next, we received an insightful comparative study of the poetic form of the list in the Old English Fortunes of Men and the Old Norse Rígsþula, from Alexandra Reider of Yale, who revealed the multiple possible functions of the list, in these instances elucidating the course of a human life and the different rungs of society.


Following further refreshments, we returned to the colloquium’s final session, which emphasised language and power. Albert Fenton, ASNC, outlined the role of Anglo-Saxon writs as distinctive documents, stressing their linguistic and diplomatic characteristics, especially the rights of sacu and socn (‘sake and soke’) which were granted by the king. This provided a timely reconsideration of Florence Harmer’s work on writs. Once this Anglo-Saxon legal background had been established, Jacob Hobson of Berkeley gave us a closer reading of the charters of Æthelstan A, adeptly analysing their theological and exegetical aspects, in particular through the proem, dispositive clause and anathema clause. Last but not at all least, Alexander Wilson of Durham evaluated the construction of monstrosity in Sverris sagaby drawing tantalising comparisons with more well-known outlaw narratives in the Íslendingasögur, looking at specific terminology for monstrous behaviour and applying theories of dehumanisation and super-humanisation.

CCASNC dinner, Gonville and Caius College

 At the close of the day, heartfelt thanks were offered to our speakers, organising committee, team of undergraduate helpers and the Department at large. We had gained an appreciation over the course of the Colloquiumof how individuals and institutions communicate their control of a particular sphere––whether political or ideological, whether real or imagined––and control communication through administration, composition, selection and transmission. After drinks in a local pub, the merriment continued with a delicious conference dinner in the medieval surroundings of Gonville and Caius College.

Members of the department in conversation with keynote speaker, Stefan Brink
 

In short, many thanks to all of the wonderful people involved in CCASNC 2015 - your time and enthusiasm is much appreciated. We hope to see you again soon!

[All photos courtesy of Myriah Williams]. 

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A Centenary: David Jones, Y Gododdin and the Great War

March 23, 2015, 2:58 am
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When Varsity finally get round to asking me about my favourite piece of art in Cambridge, I’ll say ‘Vexilla Regis, by David Jones’. It’s on the ground floor in the house at Kettle’s Yard, just behind Jim Ede’s bedroom door. It is an easy thing to miss. There’s barely room to turn around, so you can only see the picture up close, and you get it to yourself. Also in the room: a bed, an arrangement of pebbles on a table top, and a shelf with Henry Moore’s Head (which is like something dug up by an archaeologist: or ‘first and foremost a stone’, as Ede put it). Over the bed, pictures by Alfred Wallis and Ben Nicholson. Ede’s household gods, perhaps.

There are lots of things I like about Vexilla Regis. One is the title, taken from a hymn by a Merovingian court poet:

Vexilla regis prodeunt,
fulget crucis mysterium,
quo carne carnis conditor
suspensus est patibulo.

The standards of the king come forth,
the secret of the cross revealed:
there in flesh, the flesh’s maker
by the beam is hung.

Another is that it is secretive as well as secret. It’s done with graphite and water colour, and it’s pale and knotty. Once you make out the hills and trees, it starts to feel like a map. You spot bits and pieces of ruined masonry, overgrown pillars, wildness and wreckage but also things sprouting and running. Certainly it has something to do with the end of Roman Britain, but I’ll leave it at that.[1]

Mapmaking was a skill Jones had learned on the Western Front, mostly while crawling around no man’s land at night-time.[2] He was at the front for more than two years, far longer than most of his fellow war-poets, and had arrived there in time to see what had been a relatively ‘intimate, domestic life’ turn into relentless mechanical slaughter. Conscription plugged the gaps with strangers. The loss of companionship affected Jones profoundly.

Trench map by David Jones © National Library of Wales

This year marks the centenary of Jones’ entry into the Great War. Precociously aware of his father’s Welsh origins, Jones had been desperate to join a Welsh regiment. In the end, he enlisted with a ‘London Welsh’ battalion, and crossed to France in December 1915. The previous spring, during basic training near Llandudno, Jones recalled nights spent on guard duty, watching the sea from the Great Orme and pretending he was a lookout for the king of Gwynedd. 

On the Great Orme, Llandudno

Thoughts like this shaped Jones’ war. The idealism didn’t last long, but his connection with the past only grew deeper and more real. Aware that he was fighting in a new kind of war, Jones felt that being in battle was, for the private infantryman, essentially the same experience it always had been. Distinction between past and present, at times, virtually broke down. The battle honours of the regiment liturgised Namur, Blenheim, Salamanca, Sevastapol, but ringing in Jones’ head were Brunanburh, Camlann, Catraeth, and ancient, vaguer ‘border antipathies’. Most of the soldiers around him had their own versions, the result not of propaganda or jingoism, but the simple fact of being there. 

Battle Honours of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Jones' regiment

All through his time in the trenches, Jones carried, alternately, the Oxford Book of English Verse and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury in his pack. Reading them almost constantly, he grew frustrated that the ‘greats’ of Quiller-Couch and Palgrave now felt remote, too comfortable, for ‘they knew no calamity comparable with what we knew’. Thomas Dilworth, in his excellent David Jones in the Great War, argues that literature predating the canonised poetry of the anthologies had more resonance for Jones in this strange, particular reality.

Jones didn’t start writing In Parenthesis until the end of the 1920s. (On finishing All Quiet on the Western Front he reportedly responded with ‘Bugger it, I can do better than that. I’m going to write a book.’[3]) The poetry in In Parenthesis is intensely vivid, and allusions to Jones’ private world are integral to its sense of reality. No man’s land is recalled asa place of ‘enchantment’, like Pennant Govid or Annwn; explosive upheavals in the earth bring Twrch Trwyth to mind; men asleep in trench corners are ‘like long-barrow sleepers’. The allusions are not there to romanticise, but to present the Great War as Jones himself experienced it, and to align this catastrophe, symbolically, with other, older ones.
 
Christopher Williams, Battle at Mametz Wood (1918)

Jones furnished each of In Parenthesis’ seven parts with lines from Y Gododdin (a poetic compendium of war and disaster from medieval Wales). Y Gododdin has been praised for its realism: Gwynn Jones thought the soldier’s advance gan wyrd wawr, ‘with the green dawn’, the phrase of a man who had seen first faint morning ‘with a poet’s eye’. In Parenthesis finds matching lyrical detail amidst devastation. On the title page, Jones used what he took to be the most significant line of all: Seinnyessit e gledyf ym penn mameu, ‘his sword rang in mothers’ heads’. The deaths of Britons at Catraeth and at Mametz Wood, where Jones’ battalion suffered one hundred and eighty causalities and he himself was badly wounded, were to him rehearsals of the same ‘loveless’ defeat.  

David Jones
The author wrote simply that In Parenthesis is ‘about some things I saw, felt, and was part of’. Eliot, Auden, Greene, Yeats and Stravinsky all counted it among the greatest of any Modern poetry.

*****

Last October I met Colin Wilcockson, former ASNC and Emeritus Fellow of English at Pembroke, for lunch at his college. Colin had been friends with Jones and, like everyone else who had met him, described him as the warmest and kindest of men. Afterwards, in the SCR, Colin unsheafed a portfolio he had with him and carefully spread the contents over a table. Unexpectedly, each bundle was a handwritten letter from Jones, glossed and re-glossed, sometimes illuminated, bursting with marginalia. In one of them, I glimpsed a mischievous return address, ‘Saes Canol’. Jones had rented a room in Harrow, Middlesex, in the 1950s. It was, he said, ‘his dug-out’. He died in 1974. 





[1] Kettle’s Yard closes for refurbishment on 21st June 2015, and will not reopen until 2017: see it now!
[2] Jones sometimes thought of himself as ‘Walter Map’ (Walter being Jones’ rapidly-discarded Christian name, and Walter Map the name of a twelfth-century Welshman who served Henry II).
[3] Incidentally Jones writes delightfully on swearing: ‘Private X’s tirade of oaths means no more than “I do not like this Vale of Tears”… the “Bugger! Bugger!” of a man detailed, had often about it the “Fiat! Fiat!” of the Saints’.

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Undiscovered poems in the Black Book of Carmarthen?

March 31, 2015, 10:24 am
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Exciting news from the National Library of Wales, where ASNC doctoral student Myriah Williams, and her supervisor Professor Paul Russell, have been working a thirteenth-century manuscript, the Black Book of Carmarthen. By scanning the manuscript with ultraviolet light, they have revealed that its sixteenth-century custodian may have erased one or two things. The great hope is that, by using photo editing software, some of the 'vanished' text may still be recovered. For more information, read the this post on the National Library of Wales website.
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Modern Irish events in ASNC, March 2015

April 1, 2015, 5:50 am
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'Songs of Donegal and other places': A Performance by Dr. Lillis Ó Laoire

As part of the international celebration of Seachtain na Gaeilge (1-17 March), Dr. Lillis Ó Laoire, an accomplished sean-nós singer and Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages and Literatures at National University Ireland, Galway, gave a memorable lecture (4 March) and song performance (5 March) in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic.  Both events were enriched immeasurably by Ó Laoire's extensive study of sean-nós performances in his native Co. Donegal, and by scholarly research, fieldwork and insightful analysis of oral traditions in Ireland and Scotland.  Ó Laoire’s beautifully expressive voice, quiet concentration and distinctive interpretation of the nuances of each song gave added depth to his performance.

Lillis Ó Laoire

Events began with an engaging preliminary lecture on the songs of Tory Island, in which Dr. Ó Laoire described traditional life on the island and added personal recollections of his own life in the Irish-speaking village of Gort an Choirce, on the neighbouring mainland.  Selected songs from Tory were sung in the moderately ornamented or ‘plain’ style of sean-nóstraditionally practiced on the island.  As Dr. Ó Laoire noted, singers in Donegal place a high value on the clear articulation of the ‘story’ (scéal) within the song.  The vivid language of such stories was evident in the images of islanders plying rough seas in Bádaí na dTrí Seoil, and French ships coursing the coast of Tory Island during the rising of 1798, an historical event recalled in Úna Bheag na hÁite.

Language and performance combine to express a song’s underlying ‘meaning’ or brí, an Irish word which, Ó Laoire noted, also has the sense ‘vigour’ and ‘life’.  The songs of Tory were certainly brought fully to life in Ó Laoire’s sean-nósperformance, which echoed beautifully in a classroom full of attentive ASNC and Modern Irish language students, faculty and guests.  Pausing frequently between story and song, Dr. Ó Laoire invited his audience to raise questions.  The open discussion touched upon the importance of song within Irish-speaking community, a subject treated in Dr. Ó Laoire's monograph, On a Rock in the Middle of the Ocean: Songs and Singers in Tory Island (first published in Irish as Ar Chreag i Lár na Farraige) and his most recent book, Bright Star of the West: Joe Heaney, Irish Song Man (co-authored with Sean Williams), which was awarded the 2012 Alan P.Merriam Prize in Ethnomusicology.

On 5 March Dr. Ó Laoire gave a public performance of ‘Songs from Donegal and Other Places’, which highlighted songs in both Irish and Scottish Gaelic and ranged farther afield to Rathlin and the Isle of Skye.  A rhythmic lullaby from the Isle of Skye, Tàladh Dhomhnaill Ghoirm, reputedly composed by the foster-mother of the infant Dòmhnall Gorm Mòr (Donald ‘Gorm’ MacDonald) in the late sixteenth century, honoured the famed chieftain of Clan Mac Donald of Sleat.  Medieval themes were woven into the performance with a stirring rendition of the the Arthurian lay Am Bròn Binn (The Sweet Sorrow), and the beautifully chanted verses of the Seacht Súáilcí na Maighdine Muire'Seven Joys of the Virgin Mary’, including the birth, the flight into Egypt and the miraculous turning water into wine (which becomes beoir'beer' in the Irish). In a final linking of the song traditions of Ireland and Scotland, the audience joined in singing the well-known Fear an Bháta, versions of which show a linguistic mix of Scottish Gaelic and Irish and demonstrate the exchange of oral tales, poems and songs in Ireland and Scotland.

Following Dr. Ó Laoire's performance, former ASNC student Andrea Palandri, who is now pursuing a Research Masters in Modern Irish at University College Cork, made a special visit to ASNC to perform Irish music on the fiddle with fellow musicians Colm McGonigle (harp) and Conor Healy (flute).  The three performed reels and laments, and joined Lillis Ó Laoire in a performance of the well-known Connemara song, Cailleach an Airgid.  

Andrea Palandri (centre), with Colm McGonigle and Conor Healy

The Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic extends special thanks to ASNC alumna Shelby Switzer, for her generous donation to support the events relating to Modern Irish language and culture in 2014-15.  When informed of the invitation extended to Dr. Lillis Ó Laoire Shelby responded with delight:  'This is all fantastic.  Dr. Ó Laoire is a wonderful choice, and I'm glad Andrea will be able to return to Cambridge.’  Her gift made it possible for Palandri, her former classmate, to participate in the event.

Modern Irish Recordings of tales and songs from Donegal

As part of an ongoing effort to create an archive of traditional Irish tales and songs from various dialects of Irish, Dr. Lillis Ó Laoire accompanied Dr. Margo Griffin-Wilson (ASNC Teaching Associate, Modern Irish) to the Cambridge University Language Centre and recorded a selection of sean-nós songs from Donegal and Irish prose tales from fiannaíocht, which celebrate the deeds of the hero Fionn Mac Cumhail.  Students in the Modern Irish classes will have access to the recordings on the Modern Irish ‘Moodle’ site.  The recording was made with generous assistance and expertise of Saimon Clark, Media Editor, whose time and efforts on behalf of the Modern Irish classes is greatly appreciated.

Oíche Ghaelach‘An Irish Evening’

As part of the widespread ceremonies during Seachtain na Gaeilge 2015, Irish Ambassador Daniel Mulhall (a native of Co. Waterford), warmly welcomed Irish language teachers, students and musicians from various community organizations and universities throughout the United Kingdom to the Embassy of Ireland in London for the Oíche Ghaelach on 2 March.  Dr. Margo Griffin-Wilson, who represented Cambridge University at the event, met with Ambassador Mulhall and had the unexpected pleasure of meeting fellow Irish lecturers Dr. William Mahon (University of Aberystwyth) and Dr. Kaarina Hollo (Sheffield University).  The three studied Old and Modern Irish together in the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and now teach Modern Irish in the United Kingdom.

Dr Margo Griffin-Wilson and ambdassador Daniel Mulhall
The events of March closed with the annual H. M. Chadwick Lecture, which was delivered by Professor Catherine McKenna, the Margaret Brooks Robinson Professor of Celtic Languages and Literatures, at Harvard University.  Professor Mac Kenna presented an insightful analysis of terms for poets and poetry in the works of medieval Welsh poets and was an honoured guest at the Departmental dinner at St. John's College—a fitting finale to the variety of lectures on poetry and performance during the closing weeks of Lent Term. 

Dr Margo Griffin-Wilson
 


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Announcement and Invitation: Scannáin Gaeilge / Irish Films

April 27, 2015, 1:36 am
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This is an open invitation to students, staff and members of the public who would like to view a few Irish language (subtitled) / bilingual films during Easter Term.  The films will be shown in the English Faculty, Sidgwick Site, 9 West Road, Room G-R 05.  All are welcome.

Fear na nOileán        

30 April, 4 pm

English Faculty, Room G-R 05                      
Duration: 55 minutes

Following upon the engaging lecture and memorable performance of  'Songs from Donegal' (and Tory Island) by Dr. Lillis Ó Laoire, Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages and Cultures at University College Galway, there will be a viewing of the Irish documentary Fear na nOileán (Man of the Islands) on 30 April in the English Faculty, Room G-R 05 at 4pm.  The award winning film, directed by Loic Jourdain and filmed on location in Tory Island in 2006, charts the efforts of the islanders and a Jesuit priest (during the 1980’s) to improve water and electricity supplies and educational opportunities for the inhabitants of Tory Island. The islanders took their cause to the European Parliament and the United States Congress and petitioned for houses, jobs, a secondary school and a harbor. Parallels to the struggle of other island communities in Europe are considered, including the evacuation of Scotland’s St Kilda. Fear na nOileán won the Celtic Media Festival Award in 2007.  The film is in Irish (with subtitles) and English.


Toraigh

Kings 

14 May  5pm 

English Faculty, G-R 05 
Duration:  88 minutes  

Kings is a 2007 award-winning Irish film (bilingual) based on the play The Kings of the Kilburn High Road.  A group of young Irish men who leave the Connemara Gaeltacht and emigrate to England meet  thirty years later for the funeral of their youngest friend.  Flashbacks to Connemara and their youthful hopes for a better life are set against the harsh realities of their lives in England in the 1970s: sporadic work on building sites, unemployment, alcohol addiction, fragile relationships, loneliness. The film won numerous awards, including Best Irish Language Film. Irish actor Colm Meaney was nominated for Best Actor and Tom Collins won the Director's Guild of America / Ireland New Finders Award.  

Colm Meaney in Kings
Conamara, Co. na Gaillimhe


MáirtínÓ Cadhain sa gCnocán Glas  /  + Gearrscannáin (short films)
18 May,  5pm

English Faculty, Room G-R 05

Duration: 30 minutes  (+ 30 minutes for optional Irish 'short-films')

This black-and-white film was produced by RTÉ in 1967 and was restored by the RTÉ Libraries and Archives in 2007.  The script is by Máirtín Ó Cadhain (1906-1970), one of Ireland's most prolific and accomplished writers in Irish, perhaps best known for his novel, Cre na Cille, published in 1949. The film presents a personal portrait of Ó Cadhain, who is filmed in his native village, An Cnocán Glas, in Connemara.  Ó Cadhain introduces the viewer to the places of his youth and the ruins of the house where he was born.  He recalls the native the Irish tales and European literature which influenced his life and work. Ó Cadhain was a political activist, writer, lecturer and Professor of Modern Irish at Trinity College Dublin. The film is in Irish with English subtitles.  A selection of short Irish language films will follow.
 
Máirtín Ó Cadhain, scríbhneoir

 

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Mission, Empire and the North: The Archdiocese of Hamburg-Bremen, c. 830–c. 1200

May 14, 2015, 9:32 am
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Dr Paul Gazzoli writes:

In connection with my British Academy-funded research project to produce a new edition of Rimbert’s Life of Anskar, I and Dr Erik Niblaeus of Durham University are hosting a conference this summer, on the 4th of July 2015 (the Saturday before the Leeds International Medieval Congress). This will focus on Hamburg-Bremen not only in Anskar’s day but through the time of the great chronicler Adam of Bremen up through the end of the twelfth century.

Bremen cathedral

Hamburg-Bremen, and the written sources it produced in the middle ages, are essential to Scandinavian historians: history-writing only began in Scandinavia in the 12thcentury, and the Icelandic sagas were not written until the 13thcentury. But Adam of Bremen wrote in the 1070s, and had the Danish King Svend Estridsen (1047–76) as his informant, while Rimbert wrote the Life of Anskarin the 860s or 870s (Anskar was the first Archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen and worked as a missionary among the Danes and Swedes from the 820s through the 850s, and his Life records much about Scandinavia during that time). Thus both sources provide extremely valuable evidence for Scandinavia during the Viking Age.

Part of Anskar’s legacy was Hamburg-Bremen’s enduring claim to supremacy over all the Church in Scandinavia. The creation of the archdiocese of Lund in 1104 mostly ended this, but Hamburg-Bremen did try to regain Scandinavia through the twelfth century. As part of this struggle, documents were forged, and sorting out truth from falsehood has many important implications for the history not only of Hamburg-Bremen but of Scandinavia. Scholars have also seen distortions in Adam of Bremen’s work, and recently Eric Knibbs has argued that the falsification of history goes back to the ninth century with Anskar and Rimbert themselves.

Against this difficult background, the conference will be looking at a variety of types of evidence: Dr Britta Mischke (of the University of Cologne) will look at the evidence of diplomas, while Prof. Matthias Hardt (Leipzig) and Morten Søvsø (Sydvestjyske Museer) will be discussing the archaeological traces of Christianisation among the Baltic Slavs and southern Scandinavia respectively. Prof. Hans-Werner Goetz (Hamburg) will be discussing Hamburg-Bremen’s claim on Scandinavia through the 11thcentury, while Prof. Michael Gelting (Aberdeen/Danish National Archives) will address Hamburg-Bremen’s struggle to control the Nordic church in the 12thcentury. Dr Erik Niblaeus (Durham) will situate Hamburg-Bremen in its Salian context, while Dr John-Henry Clay (Durham) will set Anskar against the background of earlier missionaries in Germany. I (Paul Gazzoli, Cambridge) will be talking about the transmission and re-writing of the Life of Anskarat Bremen in the twelfth century. All papers will be followed by discussion. 

We hope you can join us to help make for a lively and valuable conference! More information (including the schedule) will be available at https://hamburgbremen2015.wordpress.com/ while you can register here. Registration is £18 (£13 for students) and includes morning and afternoon tea/coffee, lunch and a wine reception. There will be a conference dinner at St Catharine’s College, priced £35 (with wine £10 extra).


St Anskar, painting from the old Cathedral (torn down in the 19thcentury) in Hamburg
 
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Oxford-Cambridge Celtic Colloquium

June 3, 2015, 1:48 am
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Myriah Williams writes:

Established in 1996, the Oxford-Cambridge Celtic Colloquium celebrated its 20th meeting on May 16th at Jesus College, Oxford.  A postgraduate conference, the Colloquium is intended to foster ties between Celticists at these two institutions, and it provides an atmosphere in which budding academics may feel at ease presenting their work, perhaps for the first time.  There were an especially large number of Celticists in Oxford this year, as the O’Donnell Lecture had been held the day before, May 15th, in the St Cross Building.  The lecture, titled ‘Between Ogam and Runes: the so-called Alphabet of Nemnivus’, was presented by Prof Paul Russell of the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic.

Celticists relaxing, Jesus College, Oxford

Having enjoyed the festivities of the O’Donnell Lecture the previous evening, the contingent for the Oxford-Cambridge Celtic Colloquium was primed for a day of papers and discussion.  The speakers, four each from Cambridge and Oxford, were spread across three sessions.  The first was devoted to topics of Welsh interest, and included papers from Catrin Williams (Oxford), Rebecca Thomas (Cambridge) and Ben Guy (Cambridge).  Following lunch in the hall of Jesus College, the focus was shifted to Irish subjects in the second session, with talks from Kristyna Syrova (Oxford), Sara Lackner (Cambridge) and Harold Flohr (Cambridge).  The third and final session saw a return to Wales, with Angela Grant (Oxford) and Sarah Ward (Oxford) presenting.  As a special treat, Prof Thomas Charles-Edwards lead a small tour through the Fellows’ Library, where we saw a selection of books including Plummer’s editions of Annals and Saints’ Lives, an Irish primer and a Breton phrase book.  The day was concluded with a lovely dinner in the Mansell Room of the College.

Professor Charles-Edwards leads a tour of the Fellows' Library

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COLSONOEL conference report

June 4, 2015, 7:43 am
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From ASNC doctoral students Rebecca Merkelbach and Caitlin Ellis:

This year, it was Cambridge’s turn to host the annual Cambridge Oxford London Symposium in Old Norse, Old English and Latin on Friday, 29th May. This postgraduate conference seeks to provide a friendly forum for doctoral and masters’ students at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and University College London in the fields of medieval Germanic and Latin studies to present their research. This year, in addition to lecturers from the three institutions, Prof Margaret Clunies Ross (Sydney) and Prof Heide Estes (Monmouth) also attended the symposium and contributed to the discussions.

The first session, chaired by Pete Sandberg (UCL), began with Jonathan Hui (Cambridge) discussing killer’s regret in Gautreks saga and Ásmundar saga kappabana. Next, Caroline Batten (Oxford) explored different types of shape-shifting across Old Norse literary texts. Finally, Simon Thomson (UCL) examined the creative interactions between words and images in the Old English Wonders of the East.

Following refreshments, Rebecca Merkelbach (Cambridge) chaired the second session, in which David Callander (Cambridge) convincingly argued for the Englishness of Laȝamon’s Brut based on the poem’s narrative style. Afterwards, Harriet Soper (Cambridge) investigated the depiction of birth (or the absence thereof) and infancy in the Old English Exeter Book Riddles.

After an excellent lunch, the third session – chaired by Timothy Bourns (Oxford) – featured papers both on Old English and Old Norse literature. Nicholas Hoffman (Cambridge) noted the poetic as well as pragmatic qualities of the Old English charms in comparison to heroic poetry. Turning to Old Norse eddic material, Katherine Olley (Cambridge) considered different versions of the Hildr legend and their exploration of marital and familial ties as well as the social realities underlying them. Brian McMahon (Oxford) closed the literary section of the day with a discussion of tense and person in Vǫluspá with regards to its performative potential.

The final session, chaired by Caitlin Ellis (Cambridge), turned towards more historical matters. Samuel Cardwell (Cambridge) analysed the advice offered to kings by Aldhelm, Bede and Boniface and their underlying practical concerns for edification. Next, Benjamin Allport (Cambridge) effectively challenged the historiographical consensus regarding the formation of Norwegian national identity. Last but not least, Louisa Taylor (UCL) evaluated the evidence for the participation of bishops and religious men in warfare in medieval Norway.

The day was closed by drinks at a local pub and a convivial dinner at La Margherita. We would like to thank all speakers, respondents and chairs for their contributions as well as the Scandinavian Studies Fund for its generous support. We look forward to seeing everyone in London next year.

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A ‘new’ manuscript of the Life of Anskar in Stockholm

June 18, 2015, 1:19 am
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Dr Paul Gazzoli writes:

Following up from my previous announcement of a new manuscript, I can now report on another manuscript of Rimbert’s Life of Anskar, this one the first Latin manuscript of the text from Scandinavia.

Last month I went to Stockholm in order to have a closer look at the medieval Old Swedish translation of the Life, which is in the Royal Library (Kungliga Biblioteket) with the shelf-mark A 49. While there, I decided also to take a look at K 92:2, which was listed by Sven Helander in his work on Anskar’s cult in medieval Scandinavia (Ansgarkulten i Norden, 1989) as an abbreviated version of the Life. From his description (on p. 38), I had expected the very short version of only a few pages which circulated in the later middle ages, which I have seen in manuscripts from Hamburg and Bordesholm.


Kungliga Biblioteket, Stockholm

I was very pleasantly surprised then, to find that this version of the text occupies folia 30v–49v, and although it is indeed abbreviated, leaving out several chapters and longer passages as well as sentences and individual words in places, it does nonetheless belong among manuscripts of the Life rather than the few-page abbreviation. Its readings show a similarity to Cuijk, St Agatha C 13, which has similar (but not always the same) omissions, and once the ‘new’ Bordesholmmanuscript has been restored, I suspect that too will have similar readings (as the number of pages the Life takes up in it indicate that it too was a version with omissions).

Another pleasing realisation was that K 92:2 had belonged to Stephan Hansen Stephanius (1599–1650), a Danish philologist and historian who produced an edition of Saxo Grammaticus. In the latter, he references in a note a manuscript of the Life of Anskar, which previous editors believed lost. That manuscript does indeed seem to be lost – but K 92:2 contains what must be a transcript of it, in an elegant and legible seventeenth-century hand. Anna Wolodarski of the Royal Library has informed me that the manuscript came to Stockholm from the Kalmar Gymnasiebibliotek in 1919, and it is not known how they acquired it. It is a collection of texts that Stephanius copied or had copied at various times, mostly relating to Danish history, saints and the Churches of Lund and Aarhus.

Over the past three years I have been working on manuscripts of the Life, I have been able to develop a fuller picture of its transmission throughout northern Europe, and this new manuscript, even though it is the furthest removed from the original text, as the only known Latin manuscript from Scandinavia, does much to complete that picture.

If you want to hear more about this (and the other) manuscripts, my work on a new edition of Anskar, and much else about Hamburg-Bremen and its mission besides, come to Mission,Empire and the North in ASNC on 4 July 2015! Click on the link to register by 25 June.
 
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Out of the Margins and Into the Media

June 22, 2015, 3:43 am
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Waiting to be interviewed on BBC Radio Wales.

Myriah Williams writes:

The last link I added to my list was on the 25thof May.  It was to a Wordpress blog which had been published on the 19th of that month, nearly seven weeks after Paul Russell and I had given our lecture on the Black Book of Carmarthen at the National Library of Wales (NLW).  I remember the day before the talk, either around the time that he had spoken with the journalist at The Independent, or perhaps as I was waiting to speak to someone from the BBC News website, that Paul told me everyone would have forgotten about the story in two days.  Or maybe it was just after Maredudd ap Huw, the Manuscripts Librarian at NLW, had spoken to us about the possibility of an interview with Welsh television channel S4C.  In the stress and adrenaline and excitement of the day, I think I probably looked a bit green and this was meant to be comforting.  But they didn’t forget.

Being interviewed by Dafydd Wiliam Morgan for S4C

The story began, incidentally, on my birthday.  I don’t normally ‘bound’ anywhere, but I was bounding down Penglais Hill, trying not to tumble over in my excitement to spend the afternoon with the Black Book of Carmarthen, a manuscript which not only preserves the oldest collection of Medieval Welsh verse, but which is also the only compilation from South Wales to survive from its period.  It is also the subject of my PhD dissertation, so the opportunity to spend time with it was sweeter than any birthday cake could have been.  Paul had come over from Cambridge in part for the occasion, as this would be such a vital component of my research.  In particular, I was interested in examining the margins and gaps of the manuscript, because these were the spaces which had suffered ‘cleansing’ at the hands of some misguided individual around the end of the sixteenth century.  While it is possible to see evidence of erasure in the digital images provided on the NLW’s website, the hope was that some of what lay beneath them might be visible to the naked eye either under natural or ultraviolet light.

This is how we came to be standing in the dark room, carefully wedging ourselves over the book but out of the way of the beam shining purple from the UV lamp.  Turning the pages, some scraps of text and bits of annotation – the work of readers primarily of the fifteenth or sixteenth century – would make themselves visible, but individually these were not terribly remarkable; rather, as a group they add to a picture of the Black Book which might have been in wider circulation than previously thought.  And then we saw the faces.

Folio 39v under UV light
(Courtesy of the National Library of Wales)

My gaze had rested on the two sets of eyes staring up from the bottom margin of the page when Paul asked, ‘Is that what I think I’m seeing?’.  They had a creepy look about them, glowing as they did under the ultraviolet light, but they also possessed a charm that would only grow as we eventually deciphered the accompanying text, serch a chariad at vy anhrydyddusaf gar (‘affection and love to my most honourable kinsman’).  On the basis of the script, the inscription appears to have been made in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, somewhat on the earlier side of the erased marginalia.  There is inherent interest in this text and its implications for the manuscript, but our immediate excitement (and, we would later come to find, the excitement of others) was centred on the faces.

Detail of the faces on fol. 39v
(Courtesy of the National Library of Wales)

We were not expecting to find images.  Although the scribe of the Black Book included some of his own drawings in his work, images are relatively rare in Medieval Welsh manuscripts.  Since the story broke, however, a couple of people have pointed out other instances of faint or faded marginal figures in Welsh manuscripts that have been recovered in the last decade or so through the use of modern imaging and digital enhancement.  The accumulation of these discoveries begins to hint at what else might be concealed in the margins, and demonstrates what is possible both with the use of new technologies and, sometimes, simply by ‘minding the gaps’.


The erased verse of fol. 40v, partially restored
(Courtesy of the National Library of Wales)


It was a year and a half later, back in Cambridge, that Paul and I were seated in his office with Stuart Roberts from the University’s Communications Office; Paul had floated them the idea of running a piece on new discoveries in a 750-year-old book, and they were interested.  Craning over facsimiles and images on Paul’s computer, we talked Stuart through what would be the stars of our upcoming lecture at the NLW: an entire page of erased thirteenth or fourteenth century verse that I had partially recovered using image editing software, and, of course, the faces.  This would be the first of a few meetings and many emails as Stuart developed the story, which was to be released in conjunction with press from the NLWahead of the lecture.  The hope was that it might also be picked up by another news outlet or two, bringing not only an awareness of the Black Book and these particular finds to a wider audience, but also hopefully drawing attention to the importance of this type of research.The fear was that, with the impending press release shaping up to go out on April 1st there would be a not-so-comical misinterpretation that this was all an April Fools’ joke.

At one stage the Black Book news was the most popular item on Live Science

Having now been published – either digitally or in print – in twenty-eight countries and in twenty-one different languages (that I am aware of), the story was, by and large, not mistaken for an April Fools’ joke.  It was interesting, however, to watch it grow and change and take on a bit of a life of its own as it spread from outlet to outlet. Like a game of telephone, elements of the story would become blurred; how many poems were discovered and where (one or two, filled into a blank verso), and the relationship of the faces to the verse (none), sometimes became less clear the more distant a given report was from one of the original sources. Titles containing the adjective ‘ghostly’ began to appear with increasing frequency, culminating perhaps in the sensationalist headline from the Daily Mail, ‘Thebook of GHOSTS: Eerie faces and messages discovered in ancient medievalmanuscript of King Arthur and Merlin’.  Indeed, Arthur’s name was invoked a number of times (‘“Ghosts of Camelot” Arthur, Merlin found in ancient “Black Book”’, insisted the Bayou Buzz of Louisiana), and a small subset of readers went one step further and on their own websites and blogs began circulating the idea that the faces were in fact extraterrestrial (one youtube videoon this topic has even garnered over one thousand six hundred more views than its counterpart for the popular yoda-in-a-medieval-manuscript story). It was an odd feeling to see this happen – aliens were certainly not anything I ever expected to appear in conjunction with my research – but despite the discomfort caused by some of the more minor inaccuracies or misrepresentations, it was an extremely gratifying experience to see that people were interested. They were interested in France, Germany and Spain, and farther afield in China, Brazil and India. They were even interested in my own home town.

USA Today counted the story in its top five discoveries of the week

The way in which the story spread may be indicative of heightened pop-cultural enthusiasm for things medieval; the recent success of television programmes such as Game of Thrones and Vikings are surely signs of this, and ITV must be hoping that it doesn’t abate any time soon as they enter production for their small-screen adaptation of Beowulf. Stories similar to my own, however, demonstrate that this enthusiasm is not restricted to the medieval period simply as a realm for fantasy. On the same day that the news of the Black Book broke, another (non-April Fools’) story was run about a medieval graveyard found under the grounds of St John’s College, Cambridge; this too spread over Britain and across the Atlantic. At about the same time, the report of an Anglo-Saxon remedy capable of curing MRSA was making the rounds.

Hopefully, the interest generated by the Black Book research may also be indicative of a rising profile for the digital humanities and the fantastic outcomes that can be achieved by applying modern technology to the study of the past. One of my favourite pieces of coverage of the Black Book discoveries appeared on the US science and sci-fi blog io9, but it is not so much for the article itself that I prefer this piece as it is for the comments. There, I could read as people discussed, questioned and joked about both the findings and the Black Book more generally, and extraordinarily, nestled among the posts one commenter had added three pictures of his or her favourite manuscript: the Cambridge Juvencus (MS Ff.4.42). That manuscript had only gone online on the Cambridge Digital Library at the end of March, and yet there they were, images from the digitisation in a post from April 4th. It was striking to see how quickly these images could and had been shared across the globe, and examples such as this demonstrate the importance of continuing to make these texts available online.

A surreal moment: finding the Black Book set as the University of Cambridge's facebook cover photo

On a more personal level, this whole experience has been as surreal as first seeing those eyes staring up and out of the vellum. I never thought I would be talking to the Washington Postabout my research, nor could I imagine that part of it would inspire the composition of a poemby a winner of the bardic chair at the Welsh National Eisteddfod. Now that some time has passed, however, I have been able to take everything in and to appreciate the impact that the story has had, not only in terms of the promotion of this type of study, but also on my research and on myself. The experience has been one of the highlights of my academic career thus far, and has given me tools which I can only hope to have need of again some day. In the end, I am glad that they didn’t forget.



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North Britons on BBC Radio 4

July 8, 2014, 9:36 am
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Those of you familiar with the northern reaches of the M6 will doubtless have seen signposts to the Rheged Centre. In this afternoon's edition of Making History, historian Tim Clarkson (author of Men of the North) is asked for his thoughts on where Rheged really was; you can listen on Iplayer here (Rheged from 12 minutes in).
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Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru/A Dictionary of the Welsh Language goes online

July 22, 2014, 7:46 am
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Silva Nurmio writes:

26 June 2014 saw the long-awaited launch of Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru/A Dictionary of the Welsh Language (GPC) online. The GPC is the standard historical dictionary of the Welsh language. Entries include a definition in Welsh and English; if known, an etymology and cognates from other languages are also given. These are followed by a list of attestations from texts from all periods of the language, and common collocations and phrases are listed for most words. The first edition of the dictionary was published in four volumes between 1967 and 2002 (you can read more about the history of GPC here). In 2002 work was begun on a second edition which has so far progressed to the word brig and has been published in twelve booklets. In the online version, clicking ‘first edition’ at the top takes you to a PDF view of the entry in the first edition, allowing comparison of the first and second edition entries.

The greatest advantage of the online version is that it is free; the print version of the first edition at £350 is a serious investment. GPC online opens up the dictionary to a wider audience, including students and people with a general interest in Welsh who have not had access to a print copy or who may have found it a bit challenging to use. The online version allows you to search by English definition as well as the Welsh headword and you can search for full phrases in both languages, making the dictionary more searchable than before.

The GPC is an invaluable source for students of Welsh, and the Celtic languages in general, and the new online version means it is now accessible from anywhere.

Links: see herefor the main website; follow GPC on Facebook and Twitter. Both feature Gair y Dydd/Word of the Day (in Welsh only, so good for practice if you’re a learner).
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