The poetry of Celtic places.pdf (original) (raw)
Related papers
Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2019
The place of Celts and Celticity in the French imagination shifts radically during the course of the nineteenth century. 1 It is widely accepted that Ernest Renan's essay "La poésie des races celtiques" (Poetry of the Celtic Races) of 1854 is key in this development. Renan is often referred to as the point of departure in any investigation of the dominant images that we have of Brittanyindeed of Celticnesstoday. Along with Matthew Arnold's On Celtic Literature (1867), which is indebted to Renan's text, "La poésie des races celtiques" occupies a key position in the development of Celtic Studies as an academic discipline, and has colored views of Celtic lands and people ever since. The discourse inaugurated by Renan and Arnold has been described as a "Celticism," modeled on Edward Said's "Orientalism" (Mc Cormack 1985, 220; Kiberd 1996, 6), and Arnold's work in embellishing and interpreting Renan has been described as "arguably the most influential piece ever written in the field of Celtic studies" (Chapman 1992, 25). However, it is notable that, despite the mention of "race" in the title of Renan's essay, the discussion of poetry contained within seems to be just as much about place, as a passage near the opening demonstrates: "Le sommet des arbres se dépouille et se tord; la bruyère étend au loin sa teinte uniforme; le granit perce à chaque pas un sol trop maigre pour le revêtir; une mer presque toujours sombre forme à l'horizon un cercle d'éternels gémissements" (The treetops lay themselves bare and writhe; the heather extends its unchanging hue into the distance; at every step granite breaks through a topsoil too thin to clothe it; at the horizon an almost-always somber sea forms a circle of eternal sighs) (1928, 375-376). 2 In what is ostensibly a study of literature, we find a landscape conjured up by a vocabulary of human suffering called on to express a psychological state. 3 The present article explores descriptions of Celtic places that foreground the question of poetry and poeticness, with a focus on travel writing about two Celtic places, Brittany and Wales, by Jules Michelet (1798-1874), the foremost historian of his generation in what was a golden age of French history. Michelet's Breton pages are well known, since the notes in his travel journal for August 1831 were reworked to form the Breton section of his Tableau de la France (1833), before being taken up again in La Mer (1861), to be finally published posthumously as part of his Journal ([1828-1848] 1959). 4 His Welsh pages, on the other hand, have been overlooked, but repay close attention, not least
Celtic fairytale or Cardiff comic opera? The 1899 Eisteddfod through Breton eyes.
Conference paper given at ‘Borders and Crossings’/’Seuils et traverses’, Belfast 21-23 July 2015 Abstract: Writing on the eve of the 1899 pan-Celtic National Eisteddfod held in Cardiff, the Breton journalist, poet and art critic Jean le Fustec hailed the ‘triomphant exemple’ offered by the Welsh ‘aux frères celtiques’ in revitalising their language and culture. Le Fustec travelled to Wales as part of a twenty-strong official delegation from Brittany, invited following the foundation of the cultural/political Union Régionaliste Bretonne in August 1898. Travel accounts by his fellow delegates writer Charles le Goffic and U.R.B. president and ‘Bard of Brittany’ Anatole le Braz both begin by affirming their admiration for Wales’s ability to adapt to modernity whilst preserving their traditions. Such constructions of Wales as a dominant and dynamic modern cultural force to be emulated by other stateless nations, could be perceived as an inversion of the Romantic and antiquarian sensibilities, exoticism and major-minor dichotomies found in most other contemporary travel narratives on Wales. Yet this paper will consider to what extent the Breton accounts of this major cultural festival also reveal underlying tensions regarding national and class identities, and suggest a more complex set of dynamics at play in these periphery-periphery relationships. Whilst MP Marquis Régis de l’Estourbeillon delights in the official receptions and initiation ceremonies feting the Breton delegation, Le Goffic and Le Braz are far more sceptical observers, experiencing linguistic alienation and comic contempt for pageantry ‘in the worst possible taste’. This paper will therefore explore the ways in which these portrayals of Wales also serve as vehicles to assert Brittany’s geographical distinctiveness and Breton cultural identity.
Travelling Ideas Between Wales and Brittany
VTU Review: Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences , 2018
This article asks what uses two minoritized cultures, Brittany and Wales, make of each other. Travel writing provides a privileged point of access to the issue, and the motif of mutual understanding between the two cultures is a key way in. Analysis of this motif in Welsh-language travel accounts to Brittany by O.M. Edwards, Tro yn Llydaw [A Tour in Brittany] (1888), Ambrose Bebb, Llydaw [Brittany] (1929), Pererindodau [Pilgrimages] (1941), and Dyfnallt, O Ben Tir Llydaw [From the Headland of Brittany] (1934) sheds light on the issues of cultural translation, periphery-periphery relations and Wales's Europeanness. The motif of mutual understanding investigated in this article ranges from claims that the two Celtic languages-Breton and Welsh-are one and the same, to affirmations of kinship, and is found across texts in different languages from Romanticism onwards. The incidence of such claims in French-language travel writing about Wales rises, following the French Revolution, and its positive valorization of Gauls, and therefore Celts, over France's Frankish ancestors. So whereas the novelist and educationalist Mme de Genlis (1746-1830), whose visit to Wales in 1792 is described in her memoirs of 1825, has recourse to Scottish and Irish points of reference (in this case Walter Scott, Ossian and Irish harps) in order to convey the Celtic otherness of Wales, more and more French writers during the course of the nineteenth century draw explicit comparisons between Brittany and Wales. 1 Historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874), for instance, who travelled through north Wales en route for Ireland in summer 1834, is transported right back to Brittany by his experience of the Welsh landscape. 2 In the case of Breton-born travellers to Wales, such as the poet and song collector Hersart de la Villemarqué (1815-1895) who visited an Eisteddfod in Abergavenny in 1838, along with a delegation of fellow-Bretons, investigating and subsequently exploiting this Celtic kinship, was the main motivation for travel. At the end of the nineteenth century, the heyday of pan-Celticism, another delegation of Bretons attended an Eisteddfod held in Cardiff, and the travel writing that resulted from their visit shows a new generation of Bretons putting the idea of Celtic connections to the test sur place. 3 The motif appears in various guises, ranging from the linguistic myth of mutual comprehension to assertions that the Welsh and Bretons are cousins or siblings separated either by a geographical feature such as the sea, or indeed by time, as when one Celtic branch is referred to as the ancestors of the other. The precise form that the motif takes gives an indication of the writer's agenda, from those who exaggerate the connection by manipulating or even fabricating evidence (like La Villemarqué), to those who strive to demystify and to downplay it (like Ambrose Bebb).
English Romanticism and the Celtic World
2003
The growth of 'four nations' British literary history in the last decade has brought with it new approaches to the 'Celtic' idea in eighteenth-century and Romantic studies. Yet there is a danger of losing sight of the extent to which Celticism was used as a tool in the construction and expansion of the post-1745 British state. This is one of the central concerns of this volume. We can see the British use and abuse of the Celtic in its starkest, most jingoistic form in a song by the patriotic English songwriter, Charles Dibdin. At the height of the Napoleonic wars, he writes: Fra Ossian to Bruce, The bra deeds to produce, Would take monny and monny a long hour to scan; For mickle were the bairds Sung the feats of Scottish lairds, When the swankies in array, The canty pipes did play-'There never was a Scot but was true to his Clan.'. .. From Egypt's burning sands, Made red by Scottish hands, The invincible Skybalds fled, aw to a man; For the standard that they bore From the keeper's grasp we tore, And the French were all dismay'd, 'There never was a Scot but was true to his Clan.' 1
New Perspectives in Celtic Studies
This volume provides accounts of well-established themes of general Celtic inquiry from new theoretical perspectives, in addition to addressing new areas of research that have remained largely unexplored. The collection includes contributions by both established and young scholars on diverse aspects of culture, literature and linguistics, reflecting the multidisciplinary character of current trends in Celtology. The linguistic section of the book includes chapters dealing with Welsh phonology and possible areas of influence of the Brittonic language on English, as well as with the issues of translating culture-specific aspects of medieval Welsh texts and the problems of standardising Irish orthography and font. The second part of the volume is devoted to literature and considers neglected, and heretofore unexplored, aspects of Welsh-language poetry, fiction and children’s literature, the work of John Cowper Powys, and Scottish film in the theoretical context of post-humanism. Approaching these issues from different angles and using different methodologies, the collection highlights the connections between long-established academic areas of interest and popular culture, broadening the horizon of Celtic scholarship. Chapter One Prolegomena to a Study of Welsh Vocalism Sabine Asmus and Cormac Anderson Chapter Two Diphthongs in the North of Wales PawełTomasz Czerniak Chapter Three Translating or Mistranslating Celtic Law in the Polish versions of the “Four Branches of the Mabinogi” Katarzyna Jaworska-Biskup Chapter Four Revision of the Most Known Celtic Features of English Ireneusz Kida Chapter Five An Irish Solution to an Irish Problem: The (Neverending) Issue of Standardising Irish Mark Ó Fionnáin Chapter Six Hiraeth as Allegorical Form: Fflur Dafydd’s Atyniad Aleksander Bednarski Chapter Seven Is this Machine Alive? Machine-like, Biotic, Autopoietic Systems in Contemporary Cinema Maciej Czerniakowski Chapter Eight A Postcolonial Traveller? A Take on the Poetry of Iwan Llwyd Siôn Pennar Chapter Nine Barti Ddu: A Welsh Colonial Hero in a Post-colonial Text? Awen Schiavone Chapter Ten “History is not to be trifled within this way”? Re-contextualising John Cowper Powys’ Owen Glendower (1940) Angelika Reichmann
This is a first draft of a paper on Welsh industrial landscapes in French travel writing. It considers French attitudes towards regional differences and the environment.
Proceedings of the second European symposium in Celtic Studies: Abstracts
Raimund Karl & Katharina Möller (Hrsg. / Eds): Proceedings of the second European symposium in Celtic Studies, held at Prifysgol Bangor University from July 31st to August 3rd 2017, 2018
Contents Elisa Roma: Old Irish pronominal objects and their use in verbal pro-forms . . . 7 Alistair J. P. Sims; Celtic obsession in modern fantasy literature . . . 21 George Broderick Prof. Sir John Rhŷs in the Isle of Man (1886–1893): Linguistic material and texts . . . 35 Tatyana A. Mikhailova: Geneta Viscara: the element caro- in Gaulish compound names and inscriptions . . . 71 Marcel Bubert: Transcultural history and early medieval Ireland. Some reflections on European diversity, cultural transfer, and the history of knowledge . . . 87 Mary Leenane; Character creation in the Ulster Cycle . . . 103 James January-McCann; ‘Y gwsanaeth prydwysaidd yn y gwledydd yma’: Portrayals of Continental and English catholicism in sixteenth century Wales . . . 119 Doris Edel: What did Ailill and Medb really quarrel about? A legal approach to the ‘Pillow Talk’ . . . 131 Marco Budassi: The development of Insular Celtic double system of inflection . . . 141 Raimund Karl: Social changes in Late Bronze and Early Iron Age Wales: The beginning of Celtic Wales? . . . 159