Ollam ("ollav"), named for the ancient title of Ireland's chief poets, celebrates the career of Tomas O 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 ban; a suite of articarticles on the ideal king of Irish tradition, Cormac mac Airt; and studies on well-known heroes like Cu 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.

This volume includes "The Influence of Nineteenth-Century Anthologies of Celtic Music in Redefining Celtic Nationalism," by Graham Aubrey; "Breuddwyd Rhonabwy and Memoria," by Matthieu Boyd; "A Reactionary Dimension in Progressive Revolutionary Theories? The Case of James Connolly's Socialism Founded on the Re-Conversion of Ireland to the Celtic System of Common Ownership," by Olivier Coquelin; "The Spiteful Tongue: Breton Song Practices and the Art of the Insult," by Natalie A. Franz; "Celtic Democracy: Appreciating the Role Played by Alliances and Elections in Celtic Political Systems," by D. Blair Gibson; "Pendragon's Ancestors," by Nathalie Ginoux; "When Historians Study Breton Oral Ballads: A Cultural Approach," by Eva Guillorel; "Textual and Historical Evidence for an Early British Tristan Tradition," by Sabine Heinz; "Time and the Irish: An Analysis of the Temporal Frameworks Employed by Sir Henry Maine, Eoin MacNeill, and James Connolly in Their Writings on Early Modern Ireland," by Heather Laird; "'And thus I will it': Queen Medh and the Will to Power," by Edyta Lehmann; "Judas, His Sister, and the Miraculous Cock in the Middle Irish Poem Crist ro crochadh," by Christopher Leydon; "Se principen nominat: Rhetorical Self-Fashioning and Epistolary Style in the Letters of Owain Gwynedd," by Patricia Malone; "Abduction, Swordplay, Monsters, and Mistrust: Findabair, Gwenhwyfa, and the Restoration of Honour," by Sharon Paice MacLeod; and "Performing a Literary Paternity Test: Bonedd yr Arwyr and the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi," by Sarah Zeiser.

Ollam ("ollav"), named for the ancient title of Ireland's chief poets, celebrates the career of Tomas O 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 ban; a suite of articarticles on the ideal king of Irish tradition, Cormac mac Airt; and studies on well-known heroes like Cu 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.

Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 26 includes "Heroic Recycling in Celtic Tradition," by Joseph F. Nagy; "On the Celtic-American Fringe: Irish-Mexican Encounters in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands," by Marian J. Barber; "The Encomium Urbis in Medieval Welsh Poetry," by Helen Fulton; "Prophecy in Welsh Manuscripts," by Morgan Kay; "'Ceol agus Gaol' ('Music and Relationship'): Memory, Identity, and Community in Boston's Irish Music Scene," by Natalie Kirschstein; "Colonization Circulars: Timber Cycles in the Time of Famine," by Kathryn Miles; "Up Close and Personal: The French in Bantry Bay (1796) in the Bantry Estate Papers," by Grace Neville; "In Praise of Two Margarets: Two Laudatory Poems by Piaras Feiritear," by Deirdre Nic Mhathuna; "Observations on Cross-Cultural Names and Name Patterns in Medieval Wales and the March," by Laura Radiker; and "Mouth to Mouth: Gaelic Stories as Told within One Family," by Carol Zall. Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 27 includes "Poets and Carpenters: Creating the Architecture of Happiness in Late-Medieval Wales," by Richard Suggett; "Revisiting Preaspiration: Evidence from the Survey of the Gaelic Dialects of Scotland," by Anna Bosch; "The Anoetheu Dialogue in Culhwch ac Olwen," by Fiona Dehghani; "Homophony and Breton Loss of Lexis," by Francis Favereau; "The Origins of 'the Jailtacht,'" by Diarmait Mac Giolla Chriost; "A Confluence of Wisdom: The Symbolism of Wells, Whirlpools, Waterfalls and Rivers in Early Celtic Sources," by Sharon Paice MacLeod; "The Real Charlotte: The Exclusive Myth of Somerville and Ross," by Donald McNamara; "Language Shift in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland," by Maire Ni Chiosain; and "Conceptions of an Urban Ideal and the Early Modern Welsh Town," by Sally-Anne Shearn.

Coire Sois, The Cauldron of Knowledge: A Companion to Early Irish Saga offers 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 literature. 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.

First English translation of one of the most influential French poems of the Middle Ages. 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 Graeco-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 significant 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 manuscripts. 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.

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. First translated in parts by William Owen Pughe (d. 1835), the Four Branches of the Mabinogi did not become widely available in English until the mid nineteenth century, with Lady Charlotte Guest's translation of "the Mabinogion." (The word mabinogion, a plural form that occurs only once in the manuscripts, has been repurposed to refer collectively to the Mabinogi and seven other prose tales.) This new translation is by a Celtic Studies scholar working with a contemporary American playwright; its primary purpose is to make the text accessible and engaging for twenty-first-century readers (and especially, undergraduate students). One significant way in which that philosophy is expressed is in the treatment of Welsh names. For example, the protagonist of the First Branch is named Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed. The University of Wales dictionary, Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, lists the following possible meanings for pwyll: "deliberation, consideration, care, caution; discretion, prudence, wisdom, patience, understanding, intelligence, perception, judgment, mind, wit(s), reason, (common) sense, sanity." It is one of the hardest names in the text for North Americans to pronounce, since it contains the notoriously difficult voiceless lateral ll. Calling the character Prince Sage, as this translation does, is a way of addressing both issues. (In general, transparently meaningful names have been rendered in English; all other names have been left in modernized Welsh spelling, with a note on pronunciation when they first occur.) The editor has also included a number of background materials that help place the Mabinogi in the context of medieval Welsh history and culture.

Coire Sois, The Cauldron of Knowledge: A Companion to Early Irish Saga offers thirty-one previously published essays by Tomas O Cathasaigh, which together constitute a magisterial survey of early Irish narrative literature in the vernacular. O 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 O Cathasaigh's first encounters with the literature. 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.