Irish Songs from Connemara: A Concert by Saileog Ní Cheannabháin

Dr Margo Griffin-Wilson writes:

The Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic was honoured and delighted to welcome the Irish singer Saileog Ní Cheannabháin, who performed a selection of songs from the Connemara Gaeltacht in a traditional style of singing known as sean-nós (‘old-style’). The concert took place in the ASNC Common Room before an attentive and appreciative audience, which included students, faculty, staff, ASNC alumni and members of the Cambridge community. The Common Room was filled to capacity, but there was absolute silence as Ní Cheannabháin captivated listeners throughout her memorable and moving performance. The songs were sung in Irish, and Ní Cheannabháin conveyed the thematic range of sean-nós singing in a selection of Irish laments and love songs, witty verses reputedly composed by a local poet and the enchantments of Seachrán Sí ‘The Fairy Wandering’, a song included in the recent publication The Otherworld: Music and Song from Irish tradition (Dublin, 2012). Ní Cheannabháin concluded the concert by inviting members of the audience to join in singing the refrain of Bean Pháidín ‘Páidín’s Wife’ and Na Ceannabháin Bhána ‘The fair Canavans’, songs well-known in Connemara. Inspired by her beautifully articulated performance, the audience sang (in Irish) in full voice.

Saileog's performance in the ASNC Common Room (photo: Dr Margo Griffin-Wilson)

The concert included versions of several songs from a region of Connemara known as Iorras Aithneach. Ní Cheannabháin has been influenced by singers from this region (among them, her father, Peadair Ó Ceannabháin), and yet her sean-nós style is very much her own. She was awarded the Seán Ó Riada Prize from the Department of Music at University College Cork (2009) for her study of the songs and singers from Iorras Aithneach. Consulting original manuscripts housed in University College Dublin (Ionad Uí Dhuilearga), Ní Cheannabháin researched songs which the Irish musician Séamas Ennis collected in Iorras Aithneach between the years 1942-45, many of which had since disappeared from the local repertoire. With the aim of bringing these songs back into the living tradition, Ní Cheannabháin recovered lyrics and tunes from various manuscripts, interpreted the ornamentations noted by Ennis, and arranged and recorded several of these rare songs on the recently produced CD I bhfíor-dheiriú oídhche. 

Saileog and Andrea in the Red Bull after the performance (photo: Dr Margo Griffin-Wilson)

Saileog Ní Cheannabháin has made a significant contribution to the Irish song tradition, and the ASNC Department extends its thanks and appreciation for a wonderful concert. It is particularly appropriate to commend the work of this young, talented musician during the weeks of Seachtain na Gaeilge (4-17 March), an international celebration of Irish language and culture. Thanks are also extended to ASNC Modern Irish student Andrea Palandri, who helped to bring Saileog Ní Cheannabháin to Cambridge University, Dr Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, Fellow of Clare Hall, who kindly assisted with arrangements, and Charlotte Watkinson, Secretary of the ASNC Department, who offered generous assistance throughout the event. The concert was organized by Dr Margo Griffin-Wilson, Teaching Associate in Modern Irish. The Modern Irish Language courses and cultural events have been supported by a generous grant from the Irish Government.

N.B. Saileog is on Facebook and her page can be found here. Details of her CD can be found here.

Report: Communication and Cultural Contacts in the North Atlantic Community

Sarah Waidler, a doctoral student in ASNC, writes:

On 2^nd March, the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic hosted a seminar entitled ‘Communication and Cultural Contacts in the North Atlantic Community’. Held in St John’s College, this lively and intellectually stimulating event focused on the related topics of medieval commerce and the economy within this geographical area. The seminar also touched on many other forms of exchange, including cultural, intellectual, familial and political ties between the lands joined together by the North Atlantic waters. Ranging from the actual process of trade and use of currency to how crafts and ideas travelled, to the memory of specific events and preservation of literary and historical traditions, this day presented much food for thought and presented many useful insights, while at the same time highlighting how much work still needs to be done in these areas.

The event was divided into two parts. In the morning, four speakers gave 45-minute talks on different aspects of contacts in this region. The day kicked off with a presentation by Andy Woods, from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, on ‘An economy of scale? Considering the volume and use of coinage in Ireland c. 995 -1170’. Andy presented his work on coinage in Ireland and demonstrated how it was possible to make fruitful comparisons between Dublin and many other commercial centres in the North Atlantic world in the medieval period. As well as showing the considerable variation in Ireland’s use of coinage both regionally and chronologically, this paper answered old queries and raised new questions on the nature of currency in Ireland. Dr Colmán Etchingham of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, was the next speaker of the morning and presented a paper entitled ‘The myth of the Irish monastic town’, in which he revisited a topic which he has discussed in other publications, including in his Kathleen Hughes Memorial Lecture at Cambridge in 2010.  Dr. Etchingham provided further evidence in support of his argument that ecclesiastical centres in medieval Ireland did not function as commercial hubs. This included a very worthwhile investigation into the semantics of terms such as ‘óenach’ and ‘marggad’, which took account of the sources in which they appear.

The Lewis Chessmen, image © Trustees of the British Museum

After a short tea break, the third speaker of the morning, Dr Alex Woolf of the University of St Andrews, discussed ‘The bishops in the Lewis chess sets’ and looked in particular at the question of provenance of these famous pieces. This paper also considered the identity of the craftsman who made such pieces as well as other high-quality goods and how the basic materials for manufacture were obtained. The morning was rounded off with a lecture by Professor Helgi Þorláksson, from the University of Iceland, on ‘Between Oddi and the Orkneys: on Icelandic Orcadian connections, c. 1180-1240’. Professor Þorláksson examined the complex relationships between families in these areas and how much insight could be gained from the extant sources regarding their relationships.

In the afternoon, a text seminar was held to investigate three primary texts which had been circulated prior to the seminar. This discussion was led by Dr Máire Ní Mhaonaigh and Dr Elizabeth Ashman Rowe of the Department of ASNC and Dr Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir of the University of Iceland. Dr Rowe introduced a text entitled ‘Gísls þáttr Illugasonar’ in which an Icelander, Gísl, comes to the court of the Irish king Muirchertach as a hostage. Dr Ní Mhaonaigh and Dr Óskarsdóttir presented the Irish text ‘Cogadh Gáedhel re Gallaibh’ and the Icelandic text ‘Njáls saga’ and examined how these texts represented the battle of Clontarf. These two sessions proved how bringing together experts from multiple disciplines to examine textual traditions can provide new insights into the material and help elucidate difficult textual quandaries. The discussion covered a range of topics, including the way in which the Irish language was portrayed in ‘Gísls þáttr Illugasonar’ and the transmission of material about specific events and wider culture phenomena between Ireland and the Norse-speaking world.

This seminar was attended by many of the members of the Faculty from the Department of ASNC, several distinguished speakers and visiting academics, as well as post-graduates and students.  This event was an excellent example of how interdisciplinary approaches can hugely benefit research and present new findings. I’m sure that much of what was discussed at this seminar will go on to influence many of the attendees’ work and it is hoped that the many fruitful discourses that began at this seminar will continue for some time to come!

Illuminating the Middle Ages debate, Battle of Ideas 2012

Three ASNCs past and present, namely recent graduate Albert Fenton; Dr Levi Roach (Lecturer in Medieval History, University of Exeter); and Dr Elizabeth Boyle (Affiliated Lecturer in ASNC and Research Fellow of St Edmund's College, Cambridge), teamed up with cultural commentator Lindsay Johns to discuss the significance of the Middle Ages at the Battle of Ideas 2012 at London's Barbican. You can watch the video here:

Old English Riddles

Recent ASNC PhD graduates, Dr Matthias Ammon and Dr Megan Cavell, are pleased to announce their new blog, The Riddle Ages. Stemming in part from their participation in the department’s exciting Old English Reading Group, Ammon and Cavell have embarked upon the ambitious task of providing open access translations and commentary for every riddle in the Exeter Book. The hope is that this blog will act as a teaching and reference tool for those learning Old English, offer an easily accessible list of potential riddle-solutions for researchers and provide insight into these fascinating poems for interested members of the public.

Below is an example of the first post for Riddle 1:

Hwylc is hæleþa þæs horsc      ond þæs hygecræftig

þæt þæt mæge asecgan,      hwa mec on sið wræce,

þonne ic astige strong,      stundum reþe,

þrymful þunie,      þragum wræce

5   fere geond foldan,      folcsalo bærne,

ræced reafige?      Recas stigað,

haswe ofer hrofum.      Hlin bið on eorþan,

wælcwealm wera,      þonne ic wudu hrere,

bearwas bledhwate,      beamas fylle,

10   holme gehrefed,      heahum meahtum

wrecen on waþe,      wide sended;

hæbbe me on hrycge      þæt ær hadas wreah

foldbuendra,      flæsc ond gæstas,

somod on sunde.      Saga hwa mec þecce,

15   oþþe hu ic hatte,      þe þa hlæst bere.

Who among heroes is so sharp and so skilled in mind

that he may declare who presses me on my journey,

when I rise up, mighty, sometimes savage,

full of force, I resound, at times I press on,

5   travel throughout the land, I burn the people’s hall,

plunder the palace? The reek rises,

grey to the roofs. There is a clamour on the earth,

the slaughter-death of men, when I shake the forest,

the quick-growing groves, topple trees,

10   sheltered by the sea, pressed into wandering

by the powers on high, sent afar;

I have on my back that which earlier covered each rank

of the earth-dwellers, flesh and spirit,

swimming together. Say what covers me,

15   or how I am called, who bear that burden.

See the original blog post for possible solutions!

Kennings in the Community and Poets on Viking Poetry

Dr Judy Quinn and Dr Debbie Potts have been awarded funding to run two cultural engagement projects from February–April 2013 as part of an AHRC pilot scheme. The projects – Kennings in the Community and Modern Poets on Viking Poetry – are aimed at nurturing a wider public interest in the aesthetics of skaldic poetry through creative writing workshops and collaborative cultural translation. As Debbie Potts elaborates…

At a workshop last weekend, I fell into conversation with a poet about kennings. To my surprise and gratification, she not only knew what kennings were, but was able to relate an interesting little anecdote about them. A colleague of hers had recently conducted a workshop on kennings with school children. The exercise involved developing ways of referring to family members using items and actions associated with their character or behaviour. A certain precocious child came up with a wonderfully original kenning for his father: sofa-farter.

Some of the most linguistically dexterous of skalds, experts in the rhetoric of defamation, would have found it hard to respond with a kenning equally as cutting. The idea behind sofa-farter is simple, but it carries with it a great deal of cultural resonance (irrespective of whether we would describe our own fathers in such terms). It plays on a cultural stereotype that is both gender and class specific – i.e. the working-class male couch potato (which is in itself a kenning) – and could only emerge from a social milieu in which it is acceptable to occasionally make fun of one’s parents rather than holding them in a perpetual state of reverence.

I think this story provides an excellent illustration of the kenning’s universal cognitive appeal, its capacity to accommodate the mindset of a given individual or particular speech community. The project Kennings in the Community seeks to produce resources for creative writing workshops based on the kenning. My aim is not only to nurture a wider public interest in skaldic metaphor, but to encourage people to create their own kennings relevant to their everyday experience, thereby prompting them to question and re-imagine the way our culture conceptualises the world.

I’m excited to be working with three practicing word-smiths: Lucy Hamilton, Emma Hammond and Jane Monson. These habitual quaffers of Odinnic mead will be applying their creative writing expertise to the development of the workshop materials. Some ‘test’ workshops will take place at the beginning of April and the resources will be made available on the ASNC website before May, so watch this space! If you simply can’t wait until then to try your hand at creating kennings, you can take a look at an exercise I wrote for the Poetry Society’s Young Poets Network here.

(from Wikimedia Commons)

The sister project Modern Poets on Viking Poetry is all about extending the skaldic aesthetic into the creative consciousness of contemporary poets. My intention is to encourage a dialogue between academic research and modern poetic practice.

In the wake of the Poetry Parnassus – the largest ever international poetry festival, hosted by London’s Southbank Centre last summer – it seems an opportune moment to be tapping into the poetry world’s enthusiasm for cultural exchange. Poets will be encouraged to engage with basic translations and commentaries provided by skaldic scholars; they will have complete creative freedom in the way they choose to interact with the poetry, and may produce anything from a poem that seeks to replicate the phonic qualities of skaldic metre to a multimedia art-piece…I’m intrigued to see what they come up with! Selected poems will be published on a blog attached to the ASNC website, and two events will take place (in Cambridge and London) at the end of April where poets will be invited to read or perform their translations.

Debbie and Snorri

It must be acknowledged that neither project would be possible without the boundless curiosity of poets, who are constantly looking for new ways of understanding and expressing the world around us, however bizarre and alien (so much the better). And, of course, the open-mindedness and intellectual generosity of skaldic scholars, who are happily rather less mercenary than Mímir when it comes to offering a drink from the well of knowledge.

https://www.facebook.com/modernpoetsonvikingpoetry

@eehammond

2013 H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lecture

The twenty-fourth H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lecture will be given by Professor John Blair (University of Oxford), on the subject of:

The British Culture of Anglo-Saxon Settlement

The lecture will take place on Thursday 14th March at 5pm in Room GR.06/07 of the English Faculty Building, West Road, Cambridge. The lecture will be followed by a wine reception. All welcome.

Sutton Trust Summer School in ASNC 2013

Applications are now open for the 2013 Sutton Trust Summer School in Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic, which will take place during the week of 26th - 30th August. The Summer School provides an opportunity for Year 12 pupils from non-privileged backgrounds to experience life at Cambridge. Participants will stay at St John's College, and will have the chance to take part in a range of lectures, classes and seminars on various aspects of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic languages, literature, and history. All costs are covered by the Sutton Trust. For more details about Sutton Trust Summer Schools at Cambridge, see the university's webpages. For more about the ASNC Summer School, see here. Or watch what one previous participant had to say about his experience:

Applications can be made through the Sutton Trust website. The deadline for applications is 11th March. Many of our current undergraduates first experienced ASNC through a Sutton Trust Summer School; other participants have simply enjoyed the opportunity to experience a week of interdisciplinary study completely unlike anything they've ever done at school.

Final congratulations of 2012

Hoping that all our readers are enjoying the holiday season, here's a final round-up of good news from the ASNC department:

Dr Rory Naismith, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in ASNC, has been awarded the 2012 Jan H. Nordbø scholarship and medal by the Norwegian Numismatic Society. This prestigious award exists to bring foreign scholars of numismatics to give a lecture in Norway. On 30 October, Dr Naismith lectured to the Norwegian Numismatic Society in Oslo on the subject of ‘Gold Coinage and the Fall of the Western Roman Empire’, and received the medal accompanying the scholarship. He also delivered a lecture the following day at the Museum of Cultural History in the University of Oslo, on ‘The Agnus Dei Coinage of Æthelred II’.

The Research Centre of St John’s College Oxford has awarded pump-priming funding for the initial stages of an international research project, ‘Interpreting Eddic Poetry’, to Dr Carolyne Larrington (Oxford) and ASNC's Dr Judy Quinn (Principal Investigators). The project will support an interdisciplinary research network which will convene for its first Workshop ‘Interpreting Eddic Poetry: Interdisciplinary Perspectives’ in Oxford in July 2013. Details of the programme and registration arrangements will be announced shortly.

Funding has been awarded to Dr Judy Quinn and ASNC alumna Dr Debbie Potts from the pilot AHRC Cultural Engagement Fund to support the projects ‘Kennings in the Community’ and ‘Modern Poets on Viking Poetry’. Dr Potts will be based in the Department for three months from February to April 2013 to develop the projects and organise events related to them.

Congratulations to all of them, and best wishes to all of you for the New Year ...

Report of Quiggin Lecture 2012

Helen Oxenham, a doctoral student in ASNC, writes:

One of the highlights of the ASNC year is always the annual E.C. Quiggin Memorial Lecture, begun in 1993, to commemorate Edmund Crosby Quiggin, the first teacher of Celtic at the University of Cambridge.  This year's lecture was as highly-anticipated, well-attended, and fascinating as usual.  On the 29th November at 5pm, the ASNC department was very pleased to welcome Professor Ruairí Ó hUiginn of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, to speak on the subject of ‘Marriage, Law and Tochmarc Emire (‘The Wooing of Emer’)’.

The lecture began with a summary of the tale of Tochmarc Emire – a tale in which the hero Cú Chulainn pledges fidelity to Emer, and then proceeds to break his pledge with multiple women, while Emer remains faithful – and then moved on to an analysis of the surviving manuscript sources for the various sections and versions of the tale.  Then came the main body of the lecture, which focused on the connections between the earliest versions of Tochmarc Emire (dating to between the eighth and the eleventh centuries) and the early Irish legal material.  Professor Ó hUiginn argued convincingly that Tochmarc Emire can be viewed as a negative exemplary tale through an analysis of certain legal prescriptions.  The legal text Cáin Lánamna, for example, carefully regulates a wide range of types of sexual union, both permanent and transitory.  Cú Chulainn, however, enters an unregulated union with Aífe, a female warrior, which ultimately leads to him killing his own son.

The combined use of a vernacular prose tale and the early Irish legal texts threw new and interesting light onto the ways in which such tales might be analysed within their early medieval context, the underlying messages being given greater resonance and meaning through this wider understanding.

It is traditional at the Quiggin Lectures that questions be reserved for the time at which the visiting speaker has a glass in hand, so after the launch of the pamphlet for the previous year’s lecture (Professor Odd Einar Haugen on The Orthographic Reform of the Old Icelandic First Grammatical Treatise) the assembled audience moved out of the lecture room for a feast of wine and canapés, to continue discussion and bombard Professor Ó hUiginn with questions. We look forward to seeing this lecture in print about this time next year.

Conference report: Linguistic Encounters and Educational Practice

Razvan Stanciu, a PhD student in ASNC, writes:

On 29 and 30 November, St John’s College was host to a symposium organised by the Department’s own Máire Ní Mhaonaigh and Michael Clarke of NUI Galway. They brought together six scholars of medieval literature who presented their work to an eager audience of lecturers and students, from Cambridge and beyond, all under the theme of ‘Linguistic Encounters and Educational Practice in Medieval Europe’. Rosalind Love of the Department kick-started the proceedings and warmed up the audience (on what was otherwise a crisp winter’s day) with a spirited and at the same time inspiring talk on glosses and commentary in the Anglo-Saxon manuscripts of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. What otherwise could be mistaken for a terse topic caught the audience’s ear with its wider implications for early medieval intellectuals’ relationship to textual authority, but also with the abundance of involuntary humour emerging from some of the glosses. Abigail Burnyeat (University of Edinburgh) provided the second act of the day, an analysis of a single manuscript (British Library Egerton 1782) in which colloquy-type texts can be read as evidence for classroom practice. Elizabeth Tyler (University of York) took advantage of the most privileged of talk slots (i.e. after the first tea-and-cookies break) to grab attention with her study of Anglo-Saxon poetic manuscripts, in which she used a comparison between the Latin Cambridge Songs (Cambridge University Library Gg 5.35) and the vernacular Exeter Book to illustrate the symposium’s general theme of multilingualism. Michael Clarke illuminated one of the lesser-known aspects of the Middle Irish Lebor Gabála Érenn (‘The Book of the Takings of Ireland’), its connections with the early medieval texts of commentary on Classical authors. His talk and Rosalind’s worked like two sides of the same coin, enabling listeners to see how the same kind of material was re-worked in a Latin and scholiastic context and in a vernacular and narrative context respectively. After a long lunch (and especially dessert), Jan Rüdiger (Goethe University, Frankfurt) and Lars Boje Mortensen (University of Southern Denmark) wrapped up the day, the former talking to us about a research project surveying the political vocabulary of medieval languages and the latter about the emergence of historiographical prose in various European literatures. 

Jan Ruediger's talk, chaired by Michael Clarke

After such a full day, we came back the next morning to experience a refreshing insight into the world of Chinese textual culture of the ninth and tenth centuries offered by Imre Galambos of the University of Cambridge. Imre’s talk was a highlight, especially since he emphasised some specific aspects of the material he is working with (i.e. geographical periphery, complex multilingualism) which are highly relevant to many medievalists too and to ASNC in particular. The two-day symposium concluded with a free round-table discussion, where the various participants, particularly the PhD students and postdocs, had a chance to exchange impressions about the issues raised during the two days and about the way in which the talks provided food for thought for their own work. And food for thought they indeed provided, through the often intriguing nature of the general theme and the unusual internal cohesion of the schedule of talks. The specific focus of the research group meant that in every presentation the issue of medieval education and of its interplay (or indeed interface) with textual multilingualism was given centre stage and harmonised with the particulars of each scholar’s work. It was thus a rather rare opportunity for many students and researchers to take part in an academic conference where the celebrated ‘And now for something completely different’ could not cross their minds.