1 Prose

Classical Antiquity and Medieval Ireland, ed. by Michael Clarke, Erich Poppe, and Isabel Torrance, is an invaluable resource. The work pairs critical essays with translations, exploring how the Medieval Irish literati engaged with the Classical inheritance. The volume explores topics such adaptations of Latin epic and the production of synthetic histories and will be of interest to a range of Celtic scholars.

Joanne Findon, Bound and Free: Voices of Mortal and Otherworld Women in Medieval Irish Literature (2023) offers a wide-ranging and highly readable literary analysis of Otherworldly women in Irish texts. The chapter on Aided Derbforgaill is an especially thought-provoking intervention.

In Technology in Irish Literature and Culture, ed. by Margaret Kelleher and James O’Sullivan (Cambridge: cup, 2023), 137–153, Máire Ní Mhaonaigh’s contribution, ‘Technology, Writing, and Place in Medieval Irish Literature’, explores place, authority, and the technology of writing in Dindshenchas Érend (‘History of the notable Places of Ireland’).

The first half of Myth and History in Celtic and Scandinavian Traditions, ed. by Emily Lyle, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023), is devoted to the Celtic tradition. The essays trend toward the examination of synthetic history, but from a variety of perspectives. These range from postcolonial literary theory in Ina Tuomala, ‘Exploring Cath Maige Tuired through the Concept of Hybridity’ (pp. 71–94), to a historicist reading of hagiography in Ksenia Kudenko, ‘Hagiography as Political Documentation: The Case of Betha Beraigh (The Life of St Berach)’ (pp. 151–170).

Marie-Luise Theuerkauf, Dindshenchas Érend, Cork Studies in Celtic Literatures (Cork: University College Cork, 2022; reissued 2023), provides a multifaceted account of the Dindshenchas Érend corpus, outlining its history, anatomizing its structure, and analysing its connection to saga literature.

Ralph O’Connor, The Music of What Happens: Narrative Terminology and the Gaelic and Norse-Icelandic Saga (Cambridge: Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge, 2023), the Cambridge Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic’s annual Quiggin Memorial Lecture, provides an analysis of modern scholarship’s use of the Scandinavian word saga for Medieval Irish prose narratives. This comparative study of the Scandinavian and Irish vernacular prose narrative traditions is both a helpful overview, introducing challenging questions of genre and form, and a call to further comparative study between the two corpora.

2 Poetry

Katharine Simms, ‘Retiring Bards: The Motives Behind the Professional Bards’ Religious Compositions’ in Ériu, 73 (2023), 97–103, considers the motif of divine praise in bardic poetry. Grounding the religious content in historical context, she offers several possible explanations for why praise poetry would invoke not only a patron, but God.

3 Manuscript Studies

C. C. Ostrander, ‘Three Short Poems in Acallam na Senórach: Poetry as an Indicator of the Relationship between the Manuscript Witnesses’, North American Journal of Celtic Studies, 7.1 (2023), compares the verse sections in the thirteenth-century prosimetric work Acallam na Senórach. Ostrander’s work sets out how and why the poetry differs more greatly than the prose between witnesses and uses this to infer information about the relationships between the manuscript witnesses.

4 Language

Essays in Memory of Eleanor Knott, ed. by Christina Cleary and Chantal Kobel, Léann na Tríonóide/Trinity Irish Studies 3 (Dublin: Trinity College, 2023) provides a diverse and bilingual collection of essays on topics including philological analyses of early Irish poetry and prose.

Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh, ‘An Old Gaelic Conjunction Rediscovered: Old Gaelic ceni, Scottish Gaelic gar an and Related Concessive Conjunctions in Gaelic’, North American Journal of Celtic Studies, 7.1 (2023), 1–87, explores the history of the Scottish Gaelic negative concessive conjunction gar an, ‘although not’, and posits its descent from the Old Gaelic ceni, ‘although not’. Along the way, he explores a variety of semantically related conjunctions, including mani, ‘if not’, and its descendants, muna and mura. These reflexive survivals from Old Gaelic into modern Scottish Gaelic have, so far, gone undetected, and help to highlight the importance of Scottish Gaelic for gaining a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the historic development of the Goidelic languages.

Riccardo Ginevra, ‘The Irish Myth of Balar’s Killing by Lug, the Norse Myth of Baldr’s Killing by Loki, and the Indic Myth of the Wounded Sun’, Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie, 70 (2023), 67–90, re-examines the story of Balar’s killing by Lug, first attested in the Cath Maige Tuired (619–645). Though long suspected to have been influenced by the biblical story of David killing Goliath, it is also suspected to have an older mythological source, suspected to be an analogue to the Norse Myth of Baldr’s killing by Loki, told most fully by Snorri Sturluson (d. 1241) in Gylfaginning 49, which is also thought to have elements of Christian influence. In this article, Ginevra builds on his own previous work, noting that Baldr and Balar likely share the PIE root *b^hólH-r̥/b^hélH-n- ‘light’ or ‘splendour’, that Loki and Lug likely share the root *luǵ, and that both Baldr and Balar are slain by projectiles. Drawing on Stephanie W. Jamieson’s studies of the Vedic ‘wounded sun’ myth, Ginevra uses linguistic and structural parallels to suggest shared Indo-European origins for the three myths.

Ariana Malthaner, ‘The -o/-u Vocalism of Particles and Preverbs in the Old Irish Glosses’, Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie, 70 (2023), 109–130, observes the constant variation between the vocalism of prepositions and preverbs ending in -o and -u in the pretonic position (e.g., do-, fo-, ro-, and no-), examining the contexts in which they are interchangeable, especially in the glosses of Würzburg, Milan, and St Gall, and exploring the possibility that lost particles caused the high vowels. She also suggests that the Milan glosses’ preference for representing -o as -u might be a stylistic decision.

Kim McKone, ‘Bringing Up Boys: Four Old Irish Terms, Cú Chulainn’s Two Early Birth-Tales, and Celtic Pederasty’, Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie, 70 (2023), 131–180, delineates the meanings of four early Irish terms and the social categories they denote, which were based upon the upbringing of boys or bachelors: comaltai, ‘co-fosterlings’, comaís, ‘co-evals’, gor(-mac), ‘dutiful (sister’s son)’, and (mac)cóem, ‘dear (son/boy)’. He examines the uses of these words in two early versions of the Compert Con Culainn (Cú Chulainn’s Birth-tale) and suggests that our understanding of mac gor be revised to mean the son of a stranger raised by his mother’s clan. He then explores the uses of mac cóem and its etymological descent from Celtic *koi-mo/a, ‘dear’ or ‘beautiful’, and its possible pederastic dimensions through a relationship to various Indo-European cognates meaning ‘to lie’.

Dauvit Broun, ‘Latin Charters and the use of Gaelic in Scotland in the Twelfth Century’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 86 (2023), 1–28, explores the contributions that Latin charters make to our understanding of Scottish Gaelic’s slow retreat from prominence and replacement by Inglis/Scots, especially that occurred alongside a series of cultural changes beginning with the reign of David I in the twelfth century. Broun gives clues about scribes’ familiarity with Gaelic, such as whether Latinized spellings of Gaelic names reflect intermediary Anglicization or approximation directly from Gaelic (e.g., Malcolmus versus Malcolvm for Máel Coluim) or the varying uses of mac versus filius. The study sheds further light on role of Latin in the process of Scotland’s literary homogenization with the rest of Western Europe.

Liam Breatnach, ‘Varia: 1. Proclitic mis. 2. Fírad. 3. Further to In Coire Érmae, “The Caldron of Poesy” ’, Celtica, 35 (2023), 66–77, considers three research questions raised by In Coire Érmae, ‘The Caldron of Poesy’: (1) Proclitic mís-: Breatnach reconsiders and supplements the evidence for a contested mis- variant of the well-attested pejorative prefix and preverb mí-, providing examples of the mis- in both Old and Middle Irish, especially before verbs beginning with vowels. His examination covers variations between mis- and mí- across different time periods, before different parts of speech, before different letters, and in conjunction with infixed pronouns. Breatnach also proposes emmendations to his 1981 edition and translation of In Coire Érmae; (2) Fírad: Rolf Baumgarten suggested to Breatnach that an appearance of firta in the MS be emended to fírthu. Here, Breatnach supports this change with uses of the verb fíraid from the commentary tradition, in which the verb is used to mean ‘confirm’ or ‘corroborate’. He emends his 1981 edition and translation of ‘Caldron’ accordingly; (3) Further to In Coire Érmae: Breatnach makes further emendations to In Coire in light of newer linguistics evidence.

Lionel S. Joseph, ‘Old Irish námae “enemy” and the Celtic nt-stems’, Ériu, 73 (2023), 1–28, presents a collection of Celtic nt-stems to determine the most probable pre-form of Old Irish námae ‘enemy’ and its Gaulish cognates.

Mícheál Hoyne, ‘Paradigm Splits and Hiatus Forms: The Origins of Modern Irish sceach and Scottish Gaelic sgitheach “thorn tree”, and the Old Irish Precursor of Scottish Gaelic dìthean “flower” ’, Ériu, 73 (2023), 105–121, advances two arguments. The first is that both Scottish Gaelic sgitheach and Modern Irish sceach descend from plural forms of Old Irish scé ‘thorn tree’, whose paradigms feature the variation between iä and e necessary to lead to both forms. Secondly, he posits a relationship between Scottish Gaelic dìthean ‘flower’ and Early Modern Irish dithan or dithen ‘corn marigold’, arguing that these go back to an Early Irish díán.

Christopher Lewin, ‘Preocclusion in Manx’, Journal of Celtic Linguistics, 24 (2023), 125–166, surveys and reassesses past theories on the origins of sonorant preocclusion—the insertion of a homorganic stop element before stressed final nasals and laterals—in Manx, one of the features distinguishing it from many other Gaelic dialects. He contextualizes this development within Gaelic dialectology and within the wider sprachbund of other north-western European languages. He notes similar developments in Norse-Icelandic and Cornish, positing that these are more likely the product of convergent evolution than of contact, but not excluding the possibility of contact, especially with Norse.

Victoria Krivoshchekova, ‘Early Irish Grammarians and the Study of Speech Sound’, Language and History, 66.1 (2023), 1–32, explores some of the most prominent items of seventh-ninth-century Irish phonological terminology. Following an overview of Late Antique approaches to phonetics and phonology, she offers a discussion of Latin vox and its vernacular counterpart guth, as well as of the specialized uses of two Irish words for sound, fogur and son, in the St Gall glosses. The paper offers an excellent study of the Irish glossators’ uses and creations of sound terminology to gloss, approximate, and adapt Latin concepts into Irish.