A Dictionary of Gaulish Nominal Stems. Review of the book: Delamarre X. Dictionnaire des thèmes nominaux du gaulois. I : Ab- / Iχs(o)-. Paris : Les Cent Chemins, 2019. 398 p.

This new book by Xavier Delamarre is the first volume of the dictionary of Gaulish nominal bases. Since onomastics is the source for most of its data, this book is of interest for the readers of this journal. Apart from Gaulish, the author considers data of other ancient Celtic languages such as Lepontic, Celtiberian, or British (Brittonic). The review surveys methodological aspects underlying this research, and particularly a number of questions related to suffixation in relation to the most recent research on Celtic morphology and word-formation. Undoubtedly, the book is the most complete collection of Gaulish onomastics up to date, although a number of missing forms can be brought forward, which is to be expected due to the amount of data at our disposal, and selection of several examples as Celtic should be questioned. The text contains etymological comments, and some of them appear in the book for the first time which deserves special attention. The dictionary is a very important contribution to Celtic studies in general, and to Gaulish onomastics in particular.

The female quest for the Celtic tongues of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales

This chapter highlights the female contribution to Celtic studies. It begins by expounding the context of the discipline in relation to nineteenth-century nationalism, surveying the predominantly male contributions during its formative period from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century. It then examines the four main fields in which female scholars have made significant contributions, namely the collection of oral material, the publication of editions and translations, language activism including the production of grammars and textbooks, and linguistic studies of modern dialects and historical texts. The chapter concludes by discussing the social, political, religious, and educational reasons both for the comparatively small percentage of female scholars within the Celtic-speaking countries in general and for their comparatively high percentage in Irish studies. The chapter concludes by suggesting ways in which archival research might improve our understanding and appreciation of the female contribution to Celtic studies.

Classics, Medievalism, and Cultural Politics in Myles na gCopaleen’s Cruiskeen Lawn Columns

This chapter illustrates how Brian O’Nolan, author of the Cruiskeen Lawn columns in The Irish Times from the 1940s to the 1960s under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen, occupied a liminal position between intelligentsia and mob, modern and postmodern, Irish and English, classical and medieval. His columns, with their wide variety of classical allusions and multilingual use of classical language, Irish and English, underline the changing attitudes to classical learning in Ireland during the mid-twentieth century, not least in respect of the ‘nativist’ privileging of the Irish language in Celtic Studies. O’Nolan’s code-switching between Latin and Irish, and his glosses on other portions of the newspaper recall the practice of medieval scribes, implying that the Irish language is historically connected with classical learning.

Celts, Romans, Britons

This introduction gives an overview of the interwoven history of the ‘Celtic’ and the ‘Classical’ as concepts, in both British and Irish history and in scholarship more generally, and makes the case for increased interdisciplinary collaboration between the disciplines of Classics and Celtic Studies. It provides examples of the long-established tendency to contrast the Celtic and the Classical, and portray them as opposing poles of civilization and primitivity, but also notes the often anachronistic and misleading nature of this approach, drawing attention to the long history of intercourse between Celtic speakers and the Classical world, the persistent interpenetration of ‘the Celtic’ and ‘the Classical’ as conceptual frameworks, and the possibility of viewing Celticism and Classicism as intellectual counterparts rather than opposing world-views. It ends by briefly setting out the organization and structure of the volume, and summarizing the arguments of its chapters.

Identity, Celtomania and the Narrative of Wales in Travel Writing in German from 1850 to 1905

The focus of travelogues shifts from the industrial to the cultural, while the advance of Celtic Studies on the Continent leads to a far deeper engagement with the indigenous culture. Many such engaged writers viewed the development of tourism, of which they were of course a symptom, as a palpable threat to the survival of Welsh culture. This reflects concerns about the situation closer to home as the German states moved towards unification in 1871 and the realisation of a political underpinning to the long-held sense of a common ‘national’ German identity. The image of Wales which emerges by the end of the century is a distillation of cultural elements, - bards, princes, legends, - which can to some extent be seen as an attempt to preserve the cultural alterity deemed to be under threat. This century of Germanophone writing about Wales sees the consolidation of a Welsh narrative which, while sharing numerous themes with Francophone writers, nevertheless addresses over time a number of key German concerns around national identity, the advance of modernity and the place of ancient cultures in the modern world.