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

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

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

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

A series of general and case studies by Karen Burgess (UCLA), Patrick Ford (Harvard U), Philips Freeman (Washington U), William Gillies (Edinburgh U) and Maria Tymoczko (U Massachusetts).

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to the Fenian (Ossianic) cycle, centred on the great Irish hero Finn mac Cumail and his band of heroes (the fian).

It took Celtic people thousands of years to rise (or fall) from oral tradition to written literature. It has taken the Celtic Studies Association of North America less than a quarter century since its founding in 1976 to begin an annual series of essays. Each will focus on a theme and draw from pres

"Presenting work by some of the most distinguished scholars in their fields, Memory and the Modern in Celtic Literatures explores how Celtic literary traditions were both preserved and reconfigured in a post-medieval world. Poets and patrons engaging in fashionable poetic conceits; antiquarians rediscovering a literary heritage; bards defeating time itself with the language of utopia; satirists countering cultural hegemony with their sharp weapons of words; and writers revising tales of olden heroes to suit modern times and tastes - these are some of the protagonists in a complex drama of cultural preservation and change that plays out in the five case studies featured in this issue of the CSANA Yearbook."--BOOK JACKET.