Linguistics
Textual translations
De gestis Giraldi is a narrative of the deeds of Gerald of Wales (c. 1146-1223), written in the third person but actually by Gerald himself, and framed as the biography of a bishop although Gerald never became a bishop. Gerald was born in south-west Wales of mixed Norman and Welsh descent and educated at Gloucester and in Paris. He worked for Henry II and Richard I, by whom he was valued as an intermediary between the king and Gerald's relations, who included the leading Welsh king, Rhys ap Gruffudd, and many of the first English settlers in Ireland. When elected bishop of St Davids, Gerald was sent by his fellow-canons to Rome to secure his own consecration and metropolitan status for St Davids; ultimately, both cases failed, defeated by the combined power and resources of the English state and church. Near the beginning of this final part, the single MS breaks off, but the chapter-headings show that much of the substance is preserved in another work by Gerald. His career spanned Wales, Ireland, and England, Paris and Rome, and De gestis Giraldi offers a vivid and personal view of them all.
This volume has been prepared from a critical study of the extant manuscript, and features an accompanying English translation. The edition supports the translation and text with an authoritative introduction, extensive historical notes, and critical study of the work.
The death tale of the early medieval Irish warrior hero Cú Chulainn features a taut narrative interwoven with stunningly complex poetry. This revised critical edition with introduction, text, translation, textual notes, and glossary provides linguistic, literary, and metrical analyses of the tale, as well as a brief discussion of early Irish poetics.
The stories in Tales of Merlin, Arthur, and the Magic Arts deal with well-known figures from medieval Britain who will be familiar to many readers—though not from the versions presented here. These freshly translated tales emerge from the remarkable and enormous sixteenth-century Chronicle of the Six Ages of the World by the Welshman Elis Gruffydd.
Tales of Merlin, Arthur, and the Magic Arts revives the original legends of these Welsh heroes alongside stories of the continued survival of the magical arts, from antiquity to the Renaissance, and the broader cultural world of the Welsh. These stories provide a vivid and faithful rendering of Merlin, Arthur, and the many original folktales left out of the widespread accounts of their exploits.
An Introduction to Middle Welsh: A Learner’s Grammar of the Medieval Language and Reader presents a complete course in reading Middle Welsh. The course is intended both for those who are working with a teacher and for self-learners, and assumes no prior knowledge of any Celtic language. A Learner’s Grammar introduces the grammatical constructions and vocabulary required for the person who wishes to read medieval Welsh prose, with exercises from authentic Welsh texts in each unit. The Reader in the second part presents long excerpts from texts from medieval Welsh literature and history. A full Glossary is included.
Medieval Wales was a land of saints. All over the country, churches, relics, images and wells kept the memory of holy men and women alive in the landscape. But the saints were also remembered in people’s view of the past, as the sons and daughters of kings, long-dead warriors of the heroic age and other figures of legend. This book presents an edition, translation and analysis of the main collection of saints’ genealogies, Bonedd y Saint. Each pedigree is individually edited, translated and provided with copious notes. Full attention is paid to the development of the pedigrees over time and the many additions that were made in the medieval and early modern periods. Two introductory essays survey the manuscript tradition and the text’s origin, history and cultural significance. This new edition will make Bonedd y Saint accessible to students of the cult of saints and the medieval church as well as early Welsh literature.
Charlene M. Eska presents in this book a critical edition and translation of a newly discovered early Irish legal text on lost and stolen property, Aidbred. Although the Old Irish text itself is fragmentary, the copious accompanying commentaries provide a wealth of legal, historical, and linguistic information, thus presenting us with a complete picture of the legal procedures involved in reclaiming missing property. This book also includes editions of two other texts concerning property found on land, Heptad 64, and at sea, Muirbretha. The three texts edited together provide a complete picture of this aspect of the early Irish legal system.
This book examines medieval Irish sources on the cities of Jerusalem and Babylon; reworkings of narratives from the Hebrew Scriptures; literature influenced by the Psalms; and texts indebted to Late Antique historiography. It argues that the conceptual framework of salvation history, and the related theory of the divinely-ordained movement of political power through history, had a formative influence on early Irish culture, society and identity. Primarily through analysis of previously untranslated sources, this study teases out some of the intricate connections between the local and the universal, in order to situate medieval Irish historiography within the context of that of the wider world. Using an overarching biblical chronology, beginning with the lives of the Jewish Patriarchs and ending with the Christian apostolic missions, this study shows how one culture understood the histories of others, and has important implications for issues such as kingship, religion and literary production in medieval Ireland.
This book will appeal to scholars and students of medieval Ireland, as well as those interested in religious and cultural history.The Stowe Missal is one of the earliest surviving documents of the Early Irish church and is a key witness to the Early Irish liturgy, as well as one of the few manuscripts dating back to the Old Irish period to contain a number of continuous texts in the Irish language. This thesis investigates the origins and history of the Stowe Missal by means of a close study of the manuscript and its scribes. Chapter 1 sets out the manuscript’s contents and the makeup of its quires, and offers a detailed discussion of the Stowe Missal’s scribes. The relative order of their activities is of particular concern and it is shown that the manuscript’s Irish language texts were added to the Stowe Missal by (one of) its original scribe(s). The original purpose for which the manuscript was made is also considered. Chapter 2 examines the available evidence for the Stowe Missal’s dating and its place of origin, before considering the manuscript’s early travels. It is argued that the manuscript’s traditional dating must be reconsidered and that there are strong signs that the manuscript did not long remain where it was made. In Chapter 3, the circumstances of the Stowe Missal’s early nineteenth century rediscovery are explored by reviewing both the contemporary evidence and the more recent hypotheses for the manuscript’s history in the centuries leading up to its rediscovery. Basic editions consisting of a diplomatic transcription and normalised text of the Stowe Missal’s incomplete copy of the Gospel of John, as well as the manuscript’s Irish Tract on the Mass are presented in Appendix 1 and Appendix 2, respectively. For the latter, a new translation and full vocabulary are also included. A third appendix contains an overview of the abbreviations found in these texts.
This is a new edition and translation of Chwedleu Seith Doethon Rufein, the Middle Welsh version of the popular medieval tales known as ‘The Seven Sages of Rome’. The text found in J MS 111 has already been published in modern Welsh, which limits its usefulness for those who are not fluent in that language. The only English translation available is an archaic, nineteenth century version which needs updating. This has been addressed here. Certain concepts are questioned, such as Lewis’s suggestion that the tales were the original work of a Welsh cleric and therefore constitute the first Welsh novel His opinion that J MS 20 is the oldest extant Welsh version of the tale is also investigated. The Welsh redaction itself is characterised by the usual medieval Welsh practice of abbreviation and concision. Here the translation of French Sept Sages is curtailed by the omission of direct speech and extraneous detail. Any deviation, such as borrowings from traditional Welsh tales, is therefore the more noteworthy. The pointed use of native literary tradition suggests that the author was an educated man, one not only fluent in French, as evidenced from his adaptation of the Sept Sages, but one well-versed in his own literary heritage. His exclusion of the scatological elements present in the French parent version may point to his religious calling but could also indicate that he was writing for a mixed audience: not only for men but also for women and children. The base text used here is the one found in Jesus MS 20, housed at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, though the two other manuscript witnesses, Jesus MS 111 (Llyfr Coch Hergest) and NLW Llanstephan MS 2, are also discussed. This present edition includes a brief history of the transmission of the tales from their Eastern origins to the West: to France and then on to Wales. This is followed by an overview of the cultural and historical background of the period, placing the tales in context. The conclusion drawn is that, though Chwedleu Seith Doethon Rufein, the Welsh redaction of the Sept Sages Romae, is but one small part of the international corpus of this literary tradition, it is a highly individual and therefore invaluable member of the genre.
Pre-existing digital databases that have been incorporated into CorPH include the following. ChronHib has acquired their respective authors’ authorisation to copy, modify, display and distribute the Work as part of the database ‘Corpus Palaeo-Hibernicum’, or CorPH:
Barrett, Siobhán (2017), A Lexicon of the poems of Blathmac Son of Cú Brettan, as part of an unpublished PhD Thesis, accessible at http://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/10042/
Bauer, Bernhard (2015), The online database of the Old Irish Priscian glosses, originally published at http://www.univie.ac.at/indogermanistik/priscian/
Griffith, Aaron and David Stifter (2013), A Dictionary of the Old Irish Glosses in the Milan MS Ambr. C301 inf., originally published at https://www.univie.ac.at/indogermanistik/milan_glosses/
Lash, Elliott (2014), The Parsed Old and Middle-Irish Corpus, originally published at https://www.dias.ie/celt/celtpublications-2/celt-the-parsed-old-and-middle-irish-corpus-pomic/.
This article presents an edition and translation of a short memorandum found in RIA MS 23 N 29 (Cat. 467). The text records the assassination of Mág Raghnaill, chief of Muintear Eólais, by rival members of his family on Easter Sunday 1502, and describes the assassins’ journey from Lough Ree to Lough Key with the slain chief’s ship.
John Scottus Eriugena’s Carmina reflect not only his central philosophical and theological ideas, but also his literary education and his life at the court of Charles the Bald. This corpus of Eriugena’s poetry includes recent discoveries of new items. Works laid under contribution by the poet have also been expanded.
De Imagine represents the Latin translation of Gregory of Nyssa’s treatise on the creation of man (De opificio hominis), a text that had already attracted the attention of Dionysius Exiguus in the sixth century. Probably a juvenile work, it witnesses to Eriugena’s interests for translating Greek texts and in this respect can be paralleled to major texts like the translation of Maximus the Confessor and of Dionysius the Areopagite. Moreover, large portions of the text were paraphrased or directly employed in the Periphyseon and, later on, were used by William of St Thierry in his De natura corporis et animae.
This new critical edition is based on the collation of the two extant manuscripts, compared against the Greek text, and is accompanied by a source apparatus that also highlights the reprises in Periphyseon and the parallel passages in De natura corporis. The introduction outlines the contents of the work, situating De imagine in Eriugena’s speculation, and offers a thorough reconstruction of the manuscript tradition, which also includes the thorny question of the Greek exemplar employed by Eriugena.
De origine Scoticae linguae (also known as O’Mulconry’s glossary) is a text originating in seventh-century Ireland that provides etymologies for c. 880 Irish words, mostly drawn from Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Its Latin prologue declares its affiliation to the Graeco-Roman linguistic tradition, claiming an origin for the Irish language in the Greek dialects Attic, Doric and Aeolic. The glossary attests to the transmission and reception of the Latin grammatical tradition in Ireland and shines light in particular on the Irish knowledge of Greek and Hebrew. The text also represents a milestone in the history of European linguistics, as the earliest etymological study of a European vernacular language.
The glossary was published once before, by Whitley Stokes in 1898. This new edition provides the first translation and textual commentary, clarifying the sense of difficult entries and discussing sources. The introduction analyses the structure and contents, origins and development, linguistic issues, and relationships to other texts. The text is edited here along with a shorter related glossary of 232 entries, entitled Irsan, which includes shared material and sheds further light on its development.
Amrae Coluimb Chille is a complex and fascinating Old Irish text. A unique tour de force of linguistic inventiveness, the Amrae laments the death of Colum Cille and praises equally his monastic perfection and his intellectual achievements, his asceticism and his pastoral leadership, his rejection of the secular world and his descent from a noble lineage.
This book provides the first ever complete critical edition of Amrae Coluimb Chille. The introduction offers a full study of the text’s manuscript transmission, language and style, as well as a discussion of its historical context. The Old Irish text is accompanied by a new English translation and is followed by a detailed commentary, a glossary and several appendices.
The purpose of this article is to provide transcriptions and translations of the twenty-seven miracles recorded in Oxford, Exeter College, MS 158 and Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Cod. Lat. 4015 relating to Wales. The miracles occurred through the invocation of St Thomas de Cantilupe, bishop of Hereford (1275–82), and were recorded by the custodians at the shrine in the north transept of Hereford Cathedral between 1287 and 1312. This article examines both the Oxford and Vatican manuscripts and their significance. The collection is useful for study of the context and aftermath of King Edward I's conquest of Wales in 1283 and the subsequent Anglo-Welsh conflicts and rebellions.
The aim of my research has been to edit to modern standards the important Old and Middle Irish king-tale Cath Cairn Chonaill. The editorial work is accompanied by full transcripts of the manuscript witnesses on which it is founded, critical apparatus, detailed linguistic and critical analysis, textual annotation, and complete glossary and bibliography. An attempt has also been made to place the text in its appropriate historical, literary and cultural context.
The present volume is based on the full critical edition of The Ever-new Tongue, including detailed linguistic analysis and textual notes, which appeared in 2009 in the Corpus Christianorum, Series Apocryphorum (CCSA 16). The aim here is to offer to a broader readership a translation of the oldest (and most conservative) version of the text, preserved in the Book of Lismore, together with such other parts, fully updated, of the larger study as may be of interest to non-Celticists.
Table of contents:
Abbreviations; Bibliography; Introduction; I. Recensions and manuscripts; II. Synopsis; III. Background and sources; IV. Theology; ‘The ever-new tongue’ (Translation); Appendix: Dating the text; Glossary.
Transcription and normalised edition of a fragment of an early bardic poem on Díarmait mac Murchada (7 qq, beg. Easbach díth Diarmata Duirgean) attested in a late addition to the Book of Leinster (p. 178); with discussion, notes and English translation; also includes a brief discussion of other verse pointing to Díarmait Mac Murchada as patron of the Book of Leinster.
According to medieval (from a modern perspective entirely fictional) Irish tradition, Tuathal Techtmar is a pre-Christian king of Ireland, grandfather of Conn Cétchathach and thus ancestor of Leth Cuinn.
Two major traditions are associated with this legendary figure: his recon-quest of Ireland through a series of battles, and eventual restoration of the legitimate kingship, after a revolt of the provincial kings; and the imposition of the bórama tribute upon the Laigin, subsequently to be levied by Tuathal Techtmar's successors over a period of several generations.
The best-known sources for these traditions are the réim rígraide paragraph dealing with Tuathal Techtmar included in R.A.S. Macalister's edition of Lebor Gabála and the Bórama tale as preserved in the twelfth-century Book of Leinster (Dublin, Trinity College MS 1339).
This book adds to the available source material in providing a first edition, with translation and commentary, of the three anonymous Middle Irish poems Augaine ar n-athair uile, Teamair teach Tuathail trēin intech, and Cid toīseach dia·roibi bōroma Laigen.
The poems are solely preserved in the Book of Lecan (Dublin, Royal Irish Academy MS 23 P 2), a manuscript produced in the scriptorium of Clann Fhir Bhisigh in the early fifteenth century, there forming part of a version of the réim rígraide which is interwoven with a copy of the Bórama tale.
Both Augaine ar n-athair uile and Teamair teach Tuathail present versions of the list of Tuathal Techtmar's battles. They are complemented by a diplomatic edition of two copies, found in the same manuscript, of the hitherto unedited Old Irish poem Fland for Ērind, which also contains a version of the battle list. Cid toīseach dia·roibi bōroma Laigen and the final part of Augaine ar n-athair uile deal with the bórama matter. The texts published here bear witness to the variance of medieval traditions, differing in detail, displaying peculiarities and treating of aspects not found in the better-known sources.This paper presents a new translation of a text found in the Laud collection of genealogical material that is here called “The Cíarraige Chiefdom Alliance.” This translation is complete and hews as closely as possible to the language of the original text, rendering social nuances more precisely. The discussion that follows proposes that the tale presents a wishful alternative reality to the ninth century political circumstances of the Cíarraige composite chiefdom with regard to their foes, the Iarmumu of Loch Léin. Whereas there is geographical and historical evidence from the annals that suggests that the Cíarraige had lost territory to an invasion by Iarmumu in the eighth century, the text situates their adversarial relationship in the sixth century and shows the Cíarraige gaining a measure of autonomy. The tale provides valuable insights into how relationships between dominant and subordinate complex Irish chiefdoms were negotiated in the early Middle Ages.
