Matthieu Boyd - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Books by Matthieu Boyd
The Essential Táin Bó Cúailnge and Other Stories from the Ulster Cycle
Broadview Press, 2025
COMING SOON (around 1 July 2025). A translation of the Táin and other stories from the early Iris... more COMING SOON (around 1 July 2025). A translation of the Táin and other stories from the early Irish Ulster Cycle of heroic legend, as an alternative to Thomas Kinsella's translation especially for undergraduate teaching, with more of the prequels and sequels than available before in one package and extensive annotation based on the latest research. Some sections of the Táin are presented in summary but nothing is silently omitted. Maps by Paul Gosling. Contents include:
The Unveiling of the Táin
The Ulstermen’s Paralysis and the Twins of Macha
The Birth of Conchobor and The Story of Conchobor mac Nessa
Maeve’s Series of Husbands, or The Battle of the Boyne
The Story of Mac Da Thó’s Pig
The Birth of Cú Chulainn
The Wooing of Emer
The Death of Aífe’s Only Son
The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu
The Pig-Keepers’ Feud
The Body of the Táin
The Death of Cú Chulainn
The Death of Conchobor
The Death of Fergus
The Death of Ailill and Conall Cernach
The Death of Maeve
Other texts presented in summary include The Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulainn, Emer's Elopement, The Intoxication of the Ulstermen, Bricriu's Feast, The Battle of Rosnaree on the Boyne, Da Coca's Hostel, Cú Chulainn's Ghostly Chariot, etc.
Last updated 15 September 2024.
The Medieval French Ovide moralisé: An English Translation
Boydell & Brewer, 2023
The official blurb: * The first ever translation of an influential monument of medieval lit... more The official blurb:
*
The first ever translation of an influential monument of medieval literature and thought.
The anonymous Ovide moralisé (Moralized Ovid), composed in France in the fourteenth century, retells and explicates Ovid's Metamorphoses, with generous helpings of related texts, for a Christian audience. Working from the premise that everything in the universe, including the pagan authors of Greco-Roman Antiquity, is part of God's plan and expresses God's truth even without knowing it, the Ovide moralisé is a massive and influential work of synthesis and creativity: a remarkable window into a certain kind of medieval thinking. It is of major importance across time and across many disciplines, including literature, philosophy, theology, and art history.
This volume offers an English translation of this hugely important text - the first into any modern language. Based on the only complete edition to date, that by Cornelis de Boer and others completed in 1938, it also reflects more recent editions and numerous manuscript readings. The translation is accompanied by a substantial introduction, situating the Ovide moralisé in terms of the reception of Ovid, the mythographical tradition, and its medieval French religious and intellectual milieu. Notes discuss textual problems and sources, and relate the text to key issues in the thought of theologians, such as Bonaventure and Aquinas.
*
Translated and edited by K. Sarah-Jane Murray and Matthieu Boyd, with contributions from William W. Kibler, Glyn S. Burgess, Cristian Bratu, Raymond Cormier, Anne-Hélène Miller, Ed Ouellette, Valerie Wilhite, and Monica Wright.
The Four Branches of the Mabinogi (Broadview Press, 2017)
The Mabinogi, a classic of Welsh literature, is a suite of four stories in Middle Welsh. They wer... more The Mabinogi, a classic of Welsh literature, is a suite of four stories in Middle Welsh. They were composed, or at least put into their current form—it is hard to say which, because we do not know who the author was—in the late eleventh or early twelfth century, and they survive in two fourteenth-century manuscripts and two thirteenth-century fragments. Set in a primal past, the Mabinogi bridges many genres; it is part pre-Christian myth, part fairytale, part guide to how nobles should act, and part dramatization of political and social issues. This new translation, specially commissioned by Broadview Press, is by a Celtic Studies scholar (Matthieu Boyd) working with a contemporary American playwright (Stacie Lents); its primary purpose is to make the text accessible and engaging for twenty-first-century readers (and especially, undergraduate students).
Ollam: Studies in Gaelic and Related Traditions in Honor of Tomás Ó Cathasaigh (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016)
Ollam (“ollav”), named for the ancient title of Ireland’s chief poets, celebrates the career of T... more 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 articles 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.
Coire Sois, The Cauldron of Knowledge: A Companion to Early Irish Saga (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014)
"Coire Sois, The Cauldron of Knowledge: A Companion to Early Irish Saga brings together thirty-on... more "Coire Sois, The Cauldron of Knowledge: A Companion to Early Irish Saga brings together thirty-one previously published essays by Tomás Ó Cathasaigh, which together constitute a magisterial survey of early Irish narrative literature in the vernacular.
Ó Cathasaigh has been called “the father of early Irish literary criticism,” with writings among the most influential in the field. He pioneered the analysis of the classic early Irish tales as literary texts, a breakthrough at a time when they were valued mainly as repositories of grammatical forms, historical data, and mythological debris. All four of the Mythological, Ulster, King, and Finn Cycles are represented here in readings of richness, complexity, and sophistication, supported by absolute philological rigor and yet easy for the non-specialist to follow. The book covers key terms, important characters, recurring themes, rhetorical strategies, and the narrative logic of this literature. It also surveys the work of the many others whose explorations were launched by Ó Cathasaigh's first encounters with the texts.
As the most authoritative single volume on the essential texts and themes of early Irish saga, this collection will be an indispensable resource for established scholars, and an ideal introduction for newcomers to one of the richest and most under-studied literatures of medieval Europe.
Tomás Ó Cathasaigh is the Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Irish Studies in the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.
Matthieu Boyd is an assistant professor in the Department of Literature, Language, Writing, and Philosophy at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
“Tomás Ó Cathasaigh is that rare scholar in Celtic studies whose work has much to say not only to advanced scholars in the field but also to specialists dealing with other literatures, comparative mythologists, and undergraduates. Our understanding of medieval Irish epic and saga is immeasurably enriched by his elegant writing style, his erudition, and his wide-ranging critical eye. It is indeed a bounteous blessing, then, to have collected in this volume Ó Cathasaigh’s best, most representative, and most useful work.”
—Joseph Nagy, University of California, Los Angeles""
Some of the long-term projects I am working on include:
- a monograph based on my dissertation, with the working title "Translatio Mirabilium/The Transla... more - a monograph based on my dissertation, with the working title "Translatio Mirabilium/The Translation of Marvels: Celtic Influence on Medieval Francophone Literature after Chrétien";
- a book co-authored with Barbara Hillers, "The Man Who Never Slept: The Irish Merman Legend and the Lai de Tydorel";
- a translation of François-Marie Luzel’s Gwerziou Breiz-Izel (The Ballads of Western Brittany);
- and a companion to the Breton legend of the drowned city of Ys, which has been a passion of mine for many years.
I am the editor (with Tina Chance, Aled Llion Jones, Edyta Lehmann, and Sarah Zeiser) of Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 26/27 (2006-07) (ISBN: 9780674053434; distributed by Harvard University Press).
Papers by Matthieu Boyd
In Epic and Romance: A Guide to Medieval European Literature, ed. Leonard Neidorf and Yang Liu (N... more In Epic and Romance: A Guide to Medieval European Literature, ed. Leonard Neidorf and Yang Liu (Nanjing: Nanjing University Press, 2021), 346-373.
Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 41, 35-81, 2024
North American Journal of Celtic Studies 6.2, 216-235, 2022
The poems of Youenn Gwernig (1925–2006), originally translated for the benefit of Jack Kerouac, a... more The poems of Youenn Gwernig (1925–2006), originally translated for the benefit of Jack Kerouac, are ultimately presented in a Breton-English collection that resists circulation outside the 'tribe' affiliated with Breton culture. It includes poems that are not translated, or that are translated only with images, and in various ways the English and the Breton do not quite match. What is not translated seems important to Gwernig’s themes and productive to explore by way of beginning to appreciate his trilingual œuvre and considering its potential to circulate more widely.
Le Cygne: The Journal of the International Marie de France Society (third series) 7.2, 1-28, 2020
Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 39, 2020
Back into Breton: on Laeoù Marie de France
Le Cygne: The Journal of the International Marie de France Society (third series) 5, 2018
Breton Lay
The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain
Cynfeirdd
The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain
15.06.38, Ó Boill, et al., eds., Saltair Saíochta
The Medieval Review, 2015
Arthur in the Celtic languages. The Arthurian legend in Celtic literatures and traditions ed. by Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan Erich Poppe
North American journal of Celtic studies
Review Essay: Gwerzioù for all! A look at the field
North American journal of Celtic studies
Neophilologus, Jul 7, 2009
When the werewolf protagonist of the Old French lay of Melion recruits a band of other wolves in ... more When the werewolf protagonist of the Old French lay of Melion recruits a band of other wolves in order to lay waste to Ireland, this activity-unique to Melion-is informed by the medieval Irish view of dı´berg '(wolf-like) brigandage'. These aspects of Melion's setting and plot are major developments in the medieval werewolf tale most famously attested in Marie de France's Bisclavret. The case of Melion has profound implications for understanding Celtic influence on Francophone literature in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Keywords Arthurian Á Bisclavret Á Ireland Á Lai/lay Á Melion Á Werewolf/werewolves The Old French lay of Melion 1 has the same basic plot as Marie de France's Bisclavret, 2 ''but significant alterations in plot and tone suggest the working of other
Columba, Saint (c.521-597)
The Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization, 2011
The Essential Táin Bó Cúailnge and Other Stories from the Ulster Cycle
Broadview Press, 2025
COMING SOON (around 1 July 2025). A translation of the Táin and other stories from the early Iris... more COMING SOON (around 1 July 2025). A translation of the Táin and other stories from the early Irish Ulster Cycle of heroic legend, as an alternative to Thomas Kinsella's translation especially for undergraduate teaching, with more of the prequels and sequels than available before in one package and extensive annotation based on the latest research. Some sections of the Táin are presented in summary but nothing is silently omitted. Maps by Paul Gosling. Contents include:
The Unveiling of the Táin
The Ulstermen’s Paralysis and the Twins of Macha
The Birth of Conchobor and The Story of Conchobor mac Nessa
Maeve’s Series of Husbands, or The Battle of the Boyne
The Story of Mac Da Thó’s Pig
The Birth of Cú Chulainn
The Wooing of Emer
The Death of Aífe’s Only Son
The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu
The Pig-Keepers’ Feud
The Body of the Táin
The Death of Cú Chulainn
The Death of Conchobor
The Death of Fergus
The Death of Ailill and Conall Cernach
The Death of Maeve
Other texts presented in summary include The Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulainn, Emer's Elopement, The Intoxication of the Ulstermen, Bricriu's Feast, The Battle of Rosnaree on the Boyne, Da Coca's Hostel, Cú Chulainn's Ghostly Chariot, etc.
Last updated 15 September 2024.
The Medieval French Ovide moralisé: An English Translation
Boydell & Brewer, 2023
The official blurb: * The first ever translation of an influential monument of medieval lit... more The official blurb:
*
The first ever translation of an influential monument of medieval literature and thought.
The anonymous Ovide moralisé (Moralized Ovid), composed in France in the fourteenth century, retells and explicates Ovid's Metamorphoses, with generous helpings of related texts, for a Christian audience. Working from the premise that everything in the universe, including the pagan authors of Greco-Roman Antiquity, is part of God's plan and expresses God's truth even without knowing it, the Ovide moralisé is a massive and influential work of synthesis and creativity: a remarkable window into a certain kind of medieval thinking. It is of major importance across time and across many disciplines, including literature, philosophy, theology, and art history.
This volume offers an English translation of this hugely important text - the first into any modern language. Based on the only complete edition to date, that by Cornelis de Boer and others completed in 1938, it also reflects more recent editions and numerous manuscript readings. The translation is accompanied by a substantial introduction, situating the Ovide moralisé in terms of the reception of Ovid, the mythographical tradition, and its medieval French religious and intellectual milieu. Notes discuss textual problems and sources, and relate the text to key issues in the thought of theologians, such as Bonaventure and Aquinas.
*
Translated and edited by K. Sarah-Jane Murray and Matthieu Boyd, with contributions from William W. Kibler, Glyn S. Burgess, Cristian Bratu, Raymond Cormier, Anne-Hélène Miller, Ed Ouellette, Valerie Wilhite, and Monica Wright.
The Four Branches of the Mabinogi (Broadview Press, 2017)
The Mabinogi, a classic of Welsh literature, is a suite of four stories in Middle Welsh. They wer... more The Mabinogi, a classic of Welsh literature, is a suite of four stories in Middle Welsh. They were composed, or at least put into their current form—it is hard to say which, because we do not know who the author was—in the late eleventh or early twelfth century, and they survive in two fourteenth-century manuscripts and two thirteenth-century fragments. Set in a primal past, the Mabinogi bridges many genres; it is part pre-Christian myth, part fairytale, part guide to how nobles should act, and part dramatization of political and social issues. This new translation, specially commissioned by Broadview Press, is by a Celtic Studies scholar (Matthieu Boyd) working with a contemporary American playwright (Stacie Lents); its primary purpose is to make the text accessible and engaging for twenty-first-century readers (and especially, undergraduate students).
Ollam: Studies in Gaelic and Related Traditions in Honor of Tomás Ó Cathasaigh (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016)
Ollam (“ollav”), named for the ancient title of Ireland’s chief poets, celebrates the career of T... more 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 articles 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.
Coire Sois, The Cauldron of Knowledge: A Companion to Early Irish Saga (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014)
"Coire Sois, The Cauldron of Knowledge: A Companion to Early Irish Saga brings together thirty-on... more "Coire Sois, The Cauldron of Knowledge: A Companion to Early Irish Saga brings together thirty-one previously published essays by Tomás Ó Cathasaigh, which together constitute a magisterial survey of early Irish narrative literature in the vernacular.
Ó Cathasaigh has been called “the father of early Irish literary criticism,” with writings among the most influential in the field. He pioneered the analysis of the classic early Irish tales as literary texts, a breakthrough at a time when they were valued mainly as repositories of grammatical forms, historical data, and mythological debris. All four of the Mythological, Ulster, King, and Finn Cycles are represented here in readings of richness, complexity, and sophistication, supported by absolute philological rigor and yet easy for the non-specialist to follow. The book covers key terms, important characters, recurring themes, rhetorical strategies, and the narrative logic of this literature. It also surveys the work of the many others whose explorations were launched by Ó Cathasaigh's first encounters with the texts.
As the most authoritative single volume on the essential texts and themes of early Irish saga, this collection will be an indispensable resource for established scholars, and an ideal introduction for newcomers to one of the richest and most under-studied literatures of medieval Europe.
Tomás Ó Cathasaigh is the Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Irish Studies in the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.
Matthieu Boyd is an assistant professor in the Department of Literature, Language, Writing, and Philosophy at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
“Tomás Ó Cathasaigh is that rare scholar in Celtic studies whose work has much to say not only to advanced scholars in the field but also to specialists dealing with other literatures, comparative mythologists, and undergraduates. Our understanding of medieval Irish epic and saga is immeasurably enriched by his elegant writing style, his erudition, and his wide-ranging critical eye. It is indeed a bounteous blessing, then, to have collected in this volume Ó Cathasaigh’s best, most representative, and most useful work.”
—Joseph Nagy, University of California, Los Angeles""
Some of the long-term projects I am working on include:
- a monograph based on my dissertation, with the working title "Translatio Mirabilium/The Transla... more - a monograph based on my dissertation, with the working title "Translatio Mirabilium/The Translation of Marvels: Celtic Influence on Medieval Francophone Literature after Chrétien";
- a book co-authored with Barbara Hillers, "The Man Who Never Slept: The Irish Merman Legend and the Lai de Tydorel";
- a translation of François-Marie Luzel’s Gwerziou Breiz-Izel (The Ballads of Western Brittany);
- and a companion to the Breton legend of the drowned city of Ys, which has been a passion of mine for many years.
I am the editor (with Tina Chance, Aled Llion Jones, Edyta Lehmann, and Sarah Zeiser) of Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 26/27 (2006-07) (ISBN: 9780674053434; distributed by Harvard University Press).
In Epic and Romance: A Guide to Medieval European Literature, ed. Leonard Neidorf and Yang Liu (N... more In Epic and Romance: A Guide to Medieval European Literature, ed. Leonard Neidorf and Yang Liu (Nanjing: Nanjing University Press, 2021), 346-373.
Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 41, 35-81, 2024
North American Journal of Celtic Studies 6.2, 216-235, 2022
The poems of Youenn Gwernig (1925–2006), originally translated for the benefit of Jack Kerouac, a... more The poems of Youenn Gwernig (1925–2006), originally translated for the benefit of Jack Kerouac, are ultimately presented in a Breton-English collection that resists circulation outside the 'tribe' affiliated with Breton culture. It includes poems that are not translated, or that are translated only with images, and in various ways the English and the Breton do not quite match. What is not translated seems important to Gwernig’s themes and productive to explore by way of beginning to appreciate his trilingual œuvre and considering its potential to circulate more widely.
Le Cygne: The Journal of the International Marie de France Society (third series) 7.2, 1-28, 2020
Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 39, 2020
Back into Breton: on Laeoù Marie de France
Le Cygne: The Journal of the International Marie de France Society (third series) 5, 2018
Breton Lay
The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain
Cynfeirdd
The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain
15.06.38, Ó Boill, et al., eds., Saltair Saíochta
The Medieval Review, 2015
Arthur in the Celtic languages. The Arthurian legend in Celtic literatures and traditions ed. by Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan Erich Poppe
North American journal of Celtic studies
Review Essay: Gwerzioù for all! A look at the field
North American journal of Celtic studies
Neophilologus, Jul 7, 2009
When the werewolf protagonist of the Old French lay of Melion recruits a band of other wolves in ... more When the werewolf protagonist of the Old French lay of Melion recruits a band of other wolves in order to lay waste to Ireland, this activity-unique to Melion-is informed by the medieval Irish view of dı´berg '(wolf-like) brigandage'. These aspects of Melion's setting and plot are major developments in the medieval werewolf tale most famously attested in Marie de France's Bisclavret. The case of Melion has profound implications for understanding Celtic influence on Francophone literature in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Keywords Arthurian Á Bisclavret Á Ireland Á Lai/lay Á Melion Á Werewolf/werewolves The Old French lay of Melion 1 has the same basic plot as Marie de France's Bisclavret, 2 ''but significant alterations in plot and tone suggest the working of other
Columba, Saint (c.521-597)
The Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization, 2011
Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 2019
Early Middle English 1.1, 2019
In Early Middle English 1.1 (2019), 3-16. Recent work on multilingualism in the Early Middle Eng... more In Early Middle English 1.1 (2019), 3-16.
Recent work on multilingualism in the Early Middle English period justifies thinking in terms of the total linguistic and cultural ecosystem of Britain and Ireland. The Celtic-speaking peoples are an integral part of this ecosystem and should be treated as such, not just as a source of raw material for literary developments in the English, French, and Latin of “trilingual England.” This article suggests some basic principles for engaging with Celtic languages and literatures in this broader context and offers specific advice for our teaching practice.
North American Journal of Celtic Studies, 2017
The early Irish tale Fled Bricrenn 'Bricriu's feast' is set at an impossible time relative to the... more The early Irish tale Fled Bricrenn 'Bricriu's feast' is set at an impossible time relative to the centerpiece of the Ulster Cycle, the epic Táin Bó Cúailnge. Key characters, including Bricriu himself, are not available after the Táin, while the integral episodes involving Ailill and Medb would make no sense before the Táin. The embarrassing behavior of the heroes Lóegaire and Conall is also inconsistent with the way they are portrayed in other texts. Although there are limited parallels with other kinds of medieval literature, such as the verse tradition of French Arthurian romance, these problems are most helpfully addressed by recourse to contemporary Fan Fiction studies in conjunction with the medieval concept of glossing. Even if it does contain authentic lore, Bricriu's Feast comes into focus as a comically distorted but serious-minded reflection on the rest of the Ulster Cycle, including the Táin. The major themes of this reflection include the devaluation of fame through excess of praise, and the worthiness of the hero's community to benefit from him, even as the hero's own status depends on serving their interests and enacting their values.
HEL [History of the English Language] and the K-12 Curriculum: The Common Core State Standards
In Teaching the History of the English Language, edited by Colette Moore and Chris C. Palmer, in ... more In Teaching the History of the English Language, edited by Colette Moore and Chris C. Palmer, in the MLA Options for Teaching Series (MLA, 2019), 269-79.
This chapter considers how college HEL courses can stay relevant to preservice teachers, an important constituency, by addressing the Common Core State Standards for K-12 education, which affect most teachers in the U.S. The Standards make many demands regarding traditional concepts in formal grammar and usage, and very few regarding HEL, which could endanger enrollments in HEL courses. This chapter identifies Standards related to grammar and usage where a historical perspective would be valuable, and suggests ways of integrating them with HEL instruction, as well as potential payoffs of such an approach.
New translations of "The Four Branches of the Mabinogi: First and Second Branches"
In the Broadview Anthology of British Literature. Volume 1: The Medieval Period. 3rd ed. (Peterbo... more In the Broadview Anthology of British Literature. Volume 1: The Medieval Period. 3rd ed. (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press). 187-209.
New translations of "Early Irish Lyrics"
In the Broadview Anthology of British Literature. Volume 1: The Medieval Period. 3rd ed. (Peterbo... more In the Broadview Anthology of British Literature. Volume 1: The Medieval Period. 3rd ed. (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press). 31-38.
“What is a Lay? I: Celtic Lays”
Le Cygne: The Journal of the International Marie de France Society (third series) 1 (2014), 23-28.
Medieval Models and Multilingualism in Higher Education
The Axis of Enchantment: Romance Alliances of Marvels of the East and West
The Rule of the Fairies in Ireland
Scholars [=some but not all!] have argued that this powerful tale is based on the tragic myth of ... more Scholars [=some but not all!] have argued that this powerful tale is based on the tragic myth of Hippolytus, son of king Theseus, and Phaedra, his lustful stepmother (cf. Euripides, Hippolytus). Like Theseus, Rónán, king of Leinster, has unwisely married a young wife. He has a handsome and beloved son, Mael Fothartaig, from a previous union. Like Phaedra, Rónán's young wife solicits Mael Fothartaig with tragic results for all. The Irish tale is naturalistic: Mael Fothartaig seeks in vain to avoid his own dishonour, and the shame of others. 1 The headnote to the translation in The Celtic Heroic Age (presumably also by Ní Dhonnchadha?), which sums up the story as "There is no fool like an old fool and none as quick to exploit him as Woman," adds that for the son, "the truly awful consequence of hearing out his step-mother's declaration [of sexual interest] may not be the threat posed to his own honour, but rather the exposé of the king's sham marriage, the publicisation of his failure to satisfy his wife, a shame intolerable to so loyal a prince."
Or you can use the translation by Jeffrey Gantz in Early Irish Myths and Sagas (Penguin, 1981), 6... more Or you can use the translation by Jeffrey Gantz in Early Irish Myths and Sagas (Penguin, 1981), 60-106. This has O'Connor's endorsement. I like Stokes. Stokes rolls in like storm-clouds, lofty, dire, and portentous. For example: "Lo, my son, great the news. Weary are the steeds we ride. We ride the steeds of Donn Tetscorach from the elfmounds. Though we are alive we are dead. Great are the signs: destruction of life: sating of ravens: feeding of crows, strife of slaughter: wetting of sword-edge, shields with broken bosses in hours after sundown. Lo, my son!" Now, Stokes uses language like kine and quoth and "no rapine shall be wrought in thy reign": unless your students can do without No Fear Shakespeare, proceed with caution. The Celtic Heroic Age paraphrases the most archaic archaisms and makes useful corrections, but loses some of the flavor. Gantz is uninspired, but his book is useful; also, cheap. When it isn't being pointlessly awkward ("A name with nothing to spare, that"; Stokes: "That is not much of a name"), the language is modern ("Indeed, I have many other names"; Stokes: "Lo, many are my names besides"), and your No Fear students should be fine with it.
These thoughts on aspects of the Mabinogi wouldn't merit formal publication, but they deal with q... more These thoughts on aspects of the Mabinogi wouldn't merit formal publication, but they deal with questions that get asked in class, so I am writing them up in case they are helpful to teachers.
Books in the Broadview Editions series don't include a bibliography. For many readers this remove... more Books in the Broadview Editions series don't include a bibliography. For many readers this removes a distraction. Others, students and professors alike, may want to have a reading list, and so I have assembled this one. Books in the Broadview Editions series don’t include a bibliography. For many readers this removes a distraction. Others, students and professors alike, may want to have a reading list, and so I have assembled this one.
This list is not exhaustive. It focuses on works consulted when preparing the translation, and on recent publications. Many items here are not for everyone, but may be helpful for working on papers and theses. Sources for the supporting documents (Welsh Laws, Triads, Gerald of Wales) are not repeated here.