The rare penny of Ætheberht II reported here last month has now been given on long-term loan to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, by a private collector. It will go on display to the public shortly.
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Important New Anglo-Saxon Coin: Update
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The Welsh Chronicles: A Symposium
From ASNC graduate student and symposium organiser Ben Guy:
On Saturday 9th August, Bangor University hosted the first of what will hopefully be a series of small symposia dedicated to the study of the numerous chronicles written in Wales during the Middle Ages. As is the case with so many attempts to further the ASNC cause, the idea for the symposium was conceived in the back seat of a car that had recently escaped from the international medievalist conference at Kalamazoo, during a conversation between myself and Owain Wyn Jones (former ASNC, latterly a member of Bangor’s history department). We were both struck by the quality and quantity of recent work on Wales’s medieval chronicles, and decided that it might be useful for the perpetrators to meet one another and discuss the state of the field. We teamed up with Georgia Henley (another former ASNC, currently undertaking a PhD in Harvard’s Celtic department) and set about creating a programme that would showcase new approaches to the whole range of extant chronicles produced in medieval Wales.
The result was an outstanding day of papers and discussion that bore a great deal of intellectual fruit. Alongside the three organisers, speakers included David Stephenson, Barry Lewis and Henry Gough-Cooper. The sessions divided themselves neatly into three groups: Latin chronicles, both early and late; vernacular chronicles, both well-known and rarely-read; and new editions, all sorely needed. The presentations covered a wide range of topics, including textual history, historiography, editing and the tribulations of those embroiled with certain publishing houses. David Stephenson opened the floor with a masterly discussion about the trickiest section of the Annales Cambiae B-text, the section for 1204–1230. He was followed by my (rather less masterly) talk on the sources of the tenth-century St David’s chronicle. Barry Lewis then enlightened the group with his discovery of a probable textual connection between the chronicle Brenhinoedd y Saeson and Bonedd y Saint, a genealogical text concerned with the saints of Wales. Owain Wyn Jones discussed the little-known vernacular chronicle Brut y Saeson, suggesting in particular the cultural milieu for which the text was constructed in the late fourteenth century. Finally, we were indulged by Henry Gough-Cooper with details about his forthcoming editions of the Breviate and Cottonian chronicles (the erstwhile Annales Cambriae B- and C-texts) and by Georgia Henley with a similarly exciting glimpse of her forthcoming edition of Chronica ante aduentum Christi. Proceedings ran smoothly from the startto the terminus ante quem of 4:30pm, aided especially by the generosity of Bangor University’s School of History, who kindly provided the day’s lunch and refreshments.
Perhaps the most useful part of the day was the hour’s discussion session held at the end. In addition to a detailed (and minuted - thanks Myriah!) discourse on the nitty-gritty of chronicle study, a conversation about the future of the symposium group took place in which it was decided that the group should continue and seek to make its endeavours available to a wider audience. We are thus looking into the possibility of starting a website in which can be deposited the various scholarly resources produced by the group, from the definitive lists of Latin and vernacular chronicles and their editions circulated at the event to new editions of the chronicle texts themselves. It was also suggested that further symposia with the same premise should be organised for the future, Glasgow being mooted as a possible venue for next year in order that the event may take place in conjunction with the 2015 International Celtic Congress. At that event we would hope to hear updates from those who spoke at the last symposium in addition to new ideas from new participants – so put your chronicle thinking-cap on and gird your annalistic belt, and please get in touch!
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Festival of Ideas, October 22‒25
One week into the new term, it's time to announce the first big ASNC event of the year. This is our now traditional involvement with the University of Cambridge Festival of Ideas, an annual exploration of the arts, humanities and social sciences where we take the opportunity to share some of our interests with the public. In keeping with this year's theme ('Curating Cambridge: our cities, our stories, our stuff'), several of the events will have a local focus.
On the evening of Wednesday 22nd October, Philip Dunshea will get things up and running with a talk, 'A tour of Cambridge and its surroundings before the University'. Dr Dunshea will try to get from London to the centre of Cambridge at the beginning of the seventh century, looking along the way at how early medieval authors wrote about the surrounding landscapes, and introducing some traces which survive out in the fields of South Cambridgeshire today. 22nd October, 6‒7 p.m., Room G-R06/07, Faculty of English, 9 West Road
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Then on Saturday afternoon, Dr Debby Banham will pick up where Dr Dunshea left off, with a Walking Tour of Early Medieval Cambridge. Dr Banham's tour comes highly recommended, and will cover some of the exciting finds archaeologists have made in Cambridge in recent years.
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We look forward to welcoming you to the department!
On the evening of Wednesday 22nd October, Philip Dunshea will get things up and running with a talk, 'A tour of Cambridge and its surroundings before the University'. Dr Dunshea will try to get from London to the centre of Cambridge at the beginning of the seventh century, looking along the way at how early medieval authors wrote about the surrounding landscapes, and introducing some traces which survive out in the fields of South Cambridgeshire today. 22nd October, 6‒7 p.m., Room G-R06/07, Faculty of English, 9 West Road
Then on Saturday afternoon, Dr Debby Banham will pick up where Dr Dunshea left off, with a Walking Tour of Early Medieval Cambridge. Dr Banham's tour comes highly recommended, and will cover some of the exciting finds archaeologists have made in Cambridge in recent years.
Saturday 25 October: 1:00pm - 3:00pm
25 October, 1‒3 p.m., Meeting in Foyer of English Faculty, 9 West Road. Please wear appropriate footwear and clothing suitable for the weather!Saturday 25 October: 1:00pm - 3:00pm
Please wear appropriate footwear and clothing suitable for the weather. - See more at: http://www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/events/walking-tour-early-medieval-cambridge#sthash.g4toabbx.dpuf
Please wear appropriate footwear and clothing suitable for the weather. - See more at: http://www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/events/walking-tour-early-medieval-cambridge#sthash.g4toabbx.dpuf
On the same day, the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic will host a series of talks and interactive sessions, many of them aimed at children. These will run the whole day from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., beginning and ending with some medieval story-telling performances. In between, there will be an introductions to medieval writing, the world of the vikings, crime and punishment in medieval Iceland, and the role of genealogies in the early middle ages. It looks like a rich and very entertaining programme; for full details, see the Festival of Ideas guide which you can download here.We look forward to welcoming you to the department!
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| Faculty of English, 9 West Road |
Meet in Foyer of English Faculty Building, 9 West Road, CB3 9DP - See more at: http://www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/events/walking-tour-early-medieval-cambridge#sthash.JJzme3oT.dpuf
Meet in Foyer of English Faculty Building, 9 West Road, CB3 9DP - See more at: http://www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/events/walking-tour-early-medieval-cambridge#sthash.JJzme3oT.dpuf
Saturday 25 October: 1:00pm - 3:00pm
Saturday 25 October: 1:00pm - 3:00pm
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Visiting Saints and Dragons
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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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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
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
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
by Dr Paul Gazzoli, British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow
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.
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
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
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.
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| 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
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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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
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.
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| 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
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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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
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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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?
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
'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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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
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
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.
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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.
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| Colm Meaney in Kings |
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| 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.
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| Máirtín Ó Cadhain, scríbhneoir |
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Sutton Trust Summer School 2015
From 18 - 21 August, the Department will be hosting its annual Sutton Trust Summer School in Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic. The Summer School is held in association with the Sutton Trust, a philanthropic organisation which seeks to promote social mobility through education. Ten teenagers from non-privileged backgrounds will be spending a week in the Department, experiencing lectures, seminars and classes in the whole range of ASNC subjects.
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Sagas and Space: the 16th International Saga Conference, Universities of Zürich and Basel
Every three years the Old Norse community descends upon a city (or two) for the International Saga Conference. This summer brought us to the universities of Zürich and Basel for a week’s worth of papers and discussion on a variety of subjects across the field, from 9–15 August. The title given to this year’s conference was ‘Sagas and Space’, inviting submissions to thematic strands ‘Constructing Space’, ‘Mediality’, ‘Textuality and Manuscript Transmission’, ‘Reception of Old Norse-Icelandic Literature’, ‘Continental Europe and Medieval Scandinavia’, ‘Literatures of Eastern Scandinavia’, ‘Bodies and Senses in the Scandinavian Middle Ages’ and a wide range of other topics. Between Cambridge scholars present and past, representatives of the ASNaC department could be found in every one of these thematic strands.
Monday saw doctoral student Maria Theresa Ramandi present on the Legend of St Agnes in Old Icelandic translation as well as a roundtable discussion on eddic poetry led by Dr Judy Quinn and featuring Dr Brittany Schorn. In Basel on Tuesday both presented additional papers on eddic material (on the artifice of intimacy in eddic dialogues and modes of poetry in prosimetric sagas) and doctoral students Rebecca Merkelbach and Joanne Shortt Butler represented the Íslendingasögur with papers on mediality and monstrosity, and on characterisation in Eyrbyggja saga respectively. On Wednesday Dr Elizabeth Ashman Rowe presented her current research on the Icelandic annals, offering a tantalising glimpse of forthcoming publications on these neglected texts. After a day off for trekking in the Alps, exploring the manuscript collection of Saint Gallen abbey, cruising on Lake Lucerne or just getting better acquainted with Zürich, the conference wrapped up on Friday. Doctoral student Caitlin Ellis mapped out the political geographies of eleventh-century kings Knútr Sveinsson (Cnut the Great) and Óláfr Haraldsson, whilst Dr Paul Gazzoli explained the manuscript tradition and re-interpretations of the Latin Life of St Anskar, a missionary saint associated with the conversion of Scandinavia.
ASNaC alumni from around Europe added to the representation of the department, with papers and contributions by Drs Rosalind Bonté (Brepols publishers), Eleanor Heans-Glogowska, Emily Lethbridge (Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, Reykjavík) and Jeffrey Love (Stockholm University). Doctoral students Katherine Olley, Jonathan Hui and Victoria Cribb also swelled the ranks of Cambridge delegates, partaking of discussions, developments and opportunities to meet colleagues old and new. The week was a fantastic opportunity to catch up with friends and peers from all around the globe, as well as those from collaborative projects such as the Languages, Myths and Finds network, Árni Magnússon Institute Manuscript Master Classes, Skaldic Poetry Project — and even to form brand new research networks! Rebecca Merkelbach led the formation of an Old Norse Network of Otherness (ONNO), comprised largely of early-career scholars from around the world whose work focusses on the marginal and medial aspects of Old Norse literature. The interests of the network include “the breaking-down of binaries, the development of spectrums and continuities [and] the de-marginalisation of otherness”. This is but one example of how the conference successfully fostered enthusiasm, creativity and new ideas amongst everyone who attended.
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Saga Conference 2015 |
At this, the 16th International Saga Conference, we also received reminders of conferences past and of the important legacy of these academic gatherings that were begun by Professor Hermann Pálsson at Edinburgh in 1971. Under the enthusiastic guidance of Judy Quinn, the first coffee-break in Basel was taken up by delegates participating in a series of sixteen photographs recording the history of the saga conference since its inception. From the cheers of support, it was worth forgoing coffee to see how important this meeting has been to the field, ensuring contact and discussion between members of the community (both senior and junior) throughout the years. Appropriately, this year’s photoshoot coincided with the launch of a website archiving all available saga conference papers and abstracts. It will doubtless prove an invaluable asset to the ongoing research of many of us.
Finally, Friday afternoon confirmed the location and date of the next meeting in 2018: Reykjavík, Iceland, 12–18 August. Previous conferences have focussed on many genres of saga, but never yet on the genre that has perhaps contributed most to bringing people to the field: the Íslendingasögur. How appropriate that we should return to Reykjavík for this theme. Roll on 2018 and the 17th International Saga Conference!
Joanne Shortt Butler
With thanks to Judy Quinn for additional information.
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Further Developments in the Black Book of Carmarthen Research
Myriah Williams writes
Interest generated in research on the Black Book of Carmarthen (NLW MS Peniarth 1) resulted last week in an international collaboration between Dr Gregory Heyworth, director of The Lazarus Project, the National Library of Wales and myself. The Lazurus Project specializes in multispectral imaging, a process in which a series of photographs is taken of an object lit with numerous colour bands spanning from ultraviolet to infrared. A specialised lens made of quartz is used in the imaging, as it allows for much better transmission of ultra violet light than standard glass.
Over the course of three days we captured images of select pages in the Black Book, as well as some of the fourteenth-century Peniarth 20, a manuscript whose outer pages suffered damage significant enough to render their texts illegible. The processing of the images is fairly labour-intensive, so the full results of the endeavour will not be known for some weeks or longer. Initial results, however, look promising. I look forward to seeing what comes to light from this work (pun intended), and am delighted to have taken part in it.
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Old Norse Postgraduate Symposium in Bergen
Jonathan Hui writes
The 10th Bergen-UK Old Norse Postgraduate Symposium was held in Bergen, Norway, between Tuesday 12th and Saturday 16th April 2016. The symposium featured thirty-one graduate speakers from eight universities across three busy days, with papers spanning a range of disciplines, including archaeology, history, religion, literature and linguistics.
Led by Dr Judy Quinn and Dr Brittany Schorn, seven ASNC graduate students travelled to Bergen to participate in the symposium. On a first day which began with Professor Else Mundal's opening keynote lecture on knowledge in the poems of the Poetic Edda, two ASNC papers followed in the mythological vein: Amelia Herridge Ishak analysed the terminology used in the construction of mythological place-names, before Tom Grant offered a fascinating interpretation of the tenth-century skaldic poem Þórsdrápa.
On Thursday, my paper on the localised legends underlying Bósa saga was followed by Katherine Olley's wide-ranging exploration of the dynamics of uncle-nephew relations in legendary poems and sagas, before Caitlin Ellis' examination of the historical factors behind the youthful exploits of Norwegian kings ended both the day and a delightfully cohesive session on representations of age. Friday saw Francesco Colombo combine textual and literary evidence to challenge some of the common editorial assumptions about Reginsmáland Fáfnismál, while Ben Allport employed statistical analysis to examine the usage of terms for Norwegian regional identities in Heimskringla.
After three full days, all that remained was to enjoy the excursion day in the Bergen sunshine, with visits to Gamle Bergen, the Fisheries and Hanseatic Museums and Mount Fløyen rounding off a productive and enjoyable trip. A final word of thanks must go to Dr Jens Eike Schnall and Dr Helen Leslie-Jacobsen for their hard work and hospitality in organising the symposium.
On Thursday, my paper on the localised legends underlying Bósa saga was followed by Katherine Olley's wide-ranging exploration of the dynamics of uncle-nephew relations in legendary poems and sagas, before Caitlin Ellis' examination of the historical factors behind the youthful exploits of Norwegian kings ended both the day and a delightfully cohesive session on representations of age. Friday saw Francesco Colombo combine textual and literary evidence to challenge some of the common editorial assumptions about Reginsmáland Fáfnismál, while Ben Allport employed statistical analysis to examine the usage of terms for Norwegian regional identities in Heimskringla.
After three full days, all that remained was to enjoy the excursion day in the Bergen sunshine, with visits to Gamle Bergen, the Fisheries and Hanseatic Museums and Mount Fløyen rounding off a productive and enjoyable trip. A final word of thanks must go to Dr Jens Eike Schnall and Dr Helen Leslie-Jacobsen for their hard work and hospitality in organising the symposium.
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