Myriah Williams, a doctoral student in ASNC, writes:
As we gathered on the patio of Stephens Hall at the
University of California, Berkeley, flying champagne corks and a cake aptly
decorated with the Welsh draig goch reminded attendees of the California
Celtic Conference (March 15–17, 2013) that this year marked the event’s
thirty-fifth birthday. Giving a small
speech, organizer Dr Eve Sweetser remarked that as a student assisting at the
first annual meeting of the conference back in 1979, she never expected to be
running the show thirty-five years later.
Yet she was, and this is a testament to the passion for Celtic Studies
felt by the staff and students of UC Berkeley, and equally of UCLA, where the
conference is held on alternate years.
It is also a testament to the success of the conference itself, which
this year hosted speakers not only from California but from Massachusetts,
Canada, England, Wales and Ireland; no small feat for a program so far removed
from the native homelands of its subject.
Festivities began earlier in the morning not with champagne,
however, but with tea, coffee and an engaging paper by Dr Brynley Roberts,
Emeritus National Librarian of Wales. In
‘A Web of Welsh Bruts’, he illustrated his attempts at untangling the
transmission of Brut y Brenhinedd, and reminded us all of the difficulty
of such a task. Transmission of a
different sort was also highlighted by Roberts’ presence at the conference, for
he had been a mentor to Berkeley’s own Dr Annalee Rejhon during her time in
Aberystwyth, and it was his method of teaching Medieval Welsh that she passed
on to her own students. Among these
students was Georgia Henley, currently a PhD student at Harvard University and
a former ASNC, whose paper ‘The Origin of the Welsh Chronicle Brut y
Tywysogion: Questions of Translation, Transmission and Adaptation’ arose
from a conversation that she once had with Roberts. In her paper Henley presented us with a
comparison of several Welsh versions of the Brut, as well as a Latin
chronicle, and inspired a lively question session regarding issues of variant
textual traditions as opposed to editing at the scribal level.
Following the Bruts, a wide and varied array of
topics was presented over the course of the long weekend. We heard about issues of narrative, from the
nature of description and characterization in medieval Celtic tales, to
considering the origins of the Arthurian legend, to the waning tradition and
preservation of storytelling in Doolin, County Clare, Ireland. ASNC Dr Máire Ní Mhaonaigh
explained ‘How Máel Sechnaill mac Domnaill was Formed’, and, despite using
terms seemingly borrowed from particle physics, Jim McCloskey of UC Santa Cruz
told us ‘How to Make an Inflected Verb’ in a way clear enough to be understood
by the non-linguist (or non-particle physicist). Dr Roberts was invoked again on Saturday in
ASNC PhD candidate Myriah Williams’ discussion of the Medieval Welsh poem Ymddiddan
Myrddin a Thaliesin, this time for his views on the classification of Welsh
dialogue poetry. This same poem was also
analysed by Stephanie Ranks, an undergraduate in the Celtic Studies Program at
Berkeley who adopted a metrical approach and concluded that it is possible that
the second half of the poem was composed according to the older stress-based
metre and not the later rules of syllable count.
Dr Joseph Nagy of UCLA began the day
Sunday by exploring the role of seditious figures in medieval Irish literature,
and then brought them to life with a Bollywood-style dance number (not
performed live). Inter-cultural
connections of a different sort were made by Dr Thomas Walsh of UC Berkeley,
who drew attention to parallels between the laments of the female narrators of
the Irish poem ‘The Old Woman of Beare’ and a Greek poem attributed to Sappho
(No. 58). Swansea University’s Dr
Jasmine Donahaye, on the other hand, considered the nature of the relationship
between Wales and Palestine and nineteenth-century Welsh views on colonialism
and conversion in ‘A Welsh Colony in Palestine?’. We also learned from Leslie Jacoby of San
Jose State University that the art of falconry has been little changed since
the days of Hywel Dda, despite the much altered state of the world. Indeed, it was the current state of the earth
in comparison to its situation during the time of the events of the Mabiniogion
that formed the topic of a paper given by Dr Kathryn Klar and Elizabeth Tolero,
graduate of the Celtic Studies Program in Berkeley. The pair’s argument that, due to climate
change, the coast lines and weather patterns of Britain and Ireland would have
been very different at that time than what they are today was convincing, as
was their assertion that scholarly analysis and mapping of medieval texts
should reflect these differences.
The conference concluded fittingly with
a series of presentations from current Berkeley undergraduates working on a
project initiated and run by Dr Klar to edit an unpublished book of twenty-four
Old Irish tales translated by Dr Brendan O’Hehir, a founding member of the
Celtic Studies Association of North America and the first chair of the Celtic
Studies Program at Berkeley. The
project, which has been in the pipeline for several years, is providing the
students with valuable research skills as well as editorial experience that
they might not normally receive at the undergraduate level. Once finished, the work will be a suitable
tribute to the late Dr O’Hehir, whose influence continues to be felt by many in
the Celtic Studies Program and who is still so fondly remembered by many of its
faculty.
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