Conference report: 35th California Celtic Conference 2013

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.

Report of H. M. Chadwick Lecture 2010

Ronni Phillips writes:

On Thursday, 11^th March the ASNC Department held the 21^st annual H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lecture.  The lecture was delivered by Professor Joseph F. Nagy of the University of California Los Angeles.  Its topic was "Merchants of Myth in Ancient and Medieval Celtic Traditions".  Professor Nagy began his lecture with reference to H. M. Chadwick’s work The Heroic Age, which argued that the Celtic literary ‘heroic milieu’ – like other heroic literatures – was peopled only by royal or noble families and their households, but depicted no representatives of merchants, farmers or artisans.  These mercantile figures were thus defined as representing a more cosmopolitan ‘medieval’ era, set in opposition to an ancient ‘heroic’ age.

Professor Nagy argued for a more nuanced understanding of representations of merchants and mercantile behaviour in medieval Celtic literature. Drawing on texts ranging widely from the early Irish glossary Sanas Chormaic to the twelfth-century Middle Irish Acallam na Senórach, he noted various depictions of characters engaging in mercantile behaviour, such as negotiating, bargaining and exchanging.  He argued that these examples reflected networks of trade, cultural and intellectual exchange that existed prior to Viking – and indeed Roman – settlement.  This was not to say that such representations of mercantilism depicted it in an entirely positive light.  Rather, Professor Nagy explained that the ambivalence with which negotiating and bargaining for goods and wealth was portrayed in some texts, and the fact that liminal figures such as the Fenians in Acallam na Senórach were often portrayed as displaying mercentile behaviour may have reflected unease about such behaviour.  In projecting it onto the marginal Fenians, it kept mercantilism safely Other, while still engaging with it on an intellectual level. 

This argument draws on some of Professor Nagy’s earlier research from his book of 1985, The Wisdom of the Outlaw.  In that book he noted that fénnidi occupy an uneasy position in medieval Irish literature as ‘social outcasts forever denied adult status’, but whose position as outsiders allows them to gain wisdom not available to fully integrated members of society and bring the benefits of this wisdom back to society.  Mercantile behaviour, perhaps, was another such marginal activity – at least within literature – and depicting fénnidi as engaging in it allowed writers to reflect on the benefits of trade and exchange while keeping it safely confined to marginal figures. 

Professor Nagy’s Chadwick Lecture will be published by the ASNC Department.

H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lecture 2010

The 2010 H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Prof. Joseph Falaky Nagy (UCLA) on Thursday 11th March, at 5pm, in Room GR.06/07, in the English Faculty Building, 9 West Road, Cambridge. Prof. Nagy will be speaking on 'Merchants of Myth in Ancient and Medieval Celtic Traditions'. This is a public lecture - all are welcome - and it will be followed by a wine reception.

(Nagy, Conversing with Angels and Ancients)

Hector Munro Chadwick (1870-1947) was the Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Cambridge (1912-41). Through the immense range of his scholarly publications, and through the vigorous enthusiasm which he brought to all aspects of Anglo-Saxon studies -- philological and literary, historical and archaeological -- he helped to define the field and give it the interdisciplinary orientation which characterises it still. The Department of ASNC, which owes its existence and its own interdisciplinary outlook to H. M. Chadwick, has wished to commemorate his enduring contribution to Anglo-Saxon studies by establishing an annual series of lectures in his name. The H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lecture (established in 1990) is delivered by a scholar who is invited to Cambridge for the occasion, on a subjected calculated to be of interest to the whole Department.