AncientPages.com – Eire and Wales share extra than simply geographical proximity; they’ve deep cultural and linguistic connections. And this 12 months marks the centenary of a groundbreaking work which explored the connection between the 2 international locations.
Eire and Wales: Their Historic and Literary Relations was written by the Irish scholar Cecile O’Rahilly in 1924. Her legacy within the discipline of Celtic research continues to resonate, 100 years after her guide was first printed.
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The Welsh and Irish languages are shut kinfolk, descended from a standard Celtic ancestor. It appears believable, if a lot much less open to proof, that the Irish and Welsh additionally inherited cultural and literary options from their Celtic-speaking ancestors.
One putting instance is the position of the skilled reward poet, a revered determine in each Irish and Welsh societies. Classical authors observe that poets in historical Celtic Gaul (present-day France, Belgium and Luxembourg, in addition to components of the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and northern Italy), held a equally esteemed place. The phrase for “poet” in Gaulish, bardos, shares its roots with the Center Irish phrase bard and the Welsh bardd. It’s a linguistic hyperlink that underscores their shared cultural heritage.
Irish literature gives vivid examples that carefully mirror classical descriptions of historical Gaulish society. Notably, warriors have been mentioned to maintain severed heads as trophies and fierce competitions to the loss of life at feasts decided who would declare the choicest lower of meat. These examples led to the idea {that a} comparatively uniform Celtic tradition as soon as spanned the Celtic-speaking areas of antiquity, with Eire preserving these traditions the longest, partly because of the reality it by no means grew to become a part of the Roman Empire.
Wales, alternatively, was profoundly altered by its absorption into the Roman province of Britannia. The medieval Welsh adopted the Trojan Brutus as their ancestor, and idolised the Roman normal Magnus Maximus.
The Welsh phrase Gwyddel (Irishman) derives from gŵydd (wild), and so actually means “savage”. The gulf between Irish and Welsh was facilitated by the truth that main phonological (the sounds in a selected language) adjustments to each languages obscured their historic relationship. Little question the Seventh-century Irish who borrowed the Welsh phrase Gwyddel as a time period of self-definition (it provides us Gael at this time) have been blissfully unaware of its unique which means.
Although the medieval Welsh noticed the Irish as being simply as alien because the English, they have been in frequent contact with them. There have been Irish-speaking communities in components of Wales, till the Seventh century, as might be seen principally from bilingual inscriptions carved into stones in Irish and Latin.
Welsh churchmen such because the household of Sulien of Llanbadarn Fawr, Eleventh-century bishop of St Davids, have been educated in Eire. And Gruffudd ap Cynan, king of Gwynedd from 1081 till his loss of life in 1137, spent his youth exiled in Eire. He returned to north Wales with Irish troopers to reclaim his throne. Day-to-day commerce throughout the Irish sea can also be mirrored in each Welsh and Irish literature.
Cecile O’Rahilly
Born in 1894 in County Kerry, O’Rahilly’s tutorial journey started in Eire however her work quickly took her to Wales, the place she received a scholarship to pursue a grasp’s diploma at Bangor College. She submitted an essay to the Nationwide Eisteddfod Welsh cultural competition in 1920 and ended up successful. The essay was the seed that grew into her seminal guide, which explored the advanced relationship between Eire and Wales in the course of the center ages.
She remained in Wales, educating French at various totally different colleges, till 1946 when she took up a submit on the Dublin Institute for Superior Research. She later grew to become a professor there, the primary lady to carry the submit. O’Rahilly lived within the Irish capital along with her Welsh companion Myfanwy Williams till her loss of life in 1980. She is finest recognized at this time because the editor of the epic Irish saga Táin Bó Cúailnge (the Cattle-Raid of Cúailnge), launched in 1967.
O’Rahilly didn’t return to the query of the connection between medieval Eire and Wales in print. Nonetheless, her work was pioneering, but it surely additionally opened up debates that proceed to this present day.
Debates
Among the many discussions arising from her work, scholar Proinsias Mac Cana and others, posited loads of Irish affect on Center Welsh tales equivalent to Branwen, one of many earliest surviving Welsh prose tales.
However given their shared heritage, some similarities may date again to prehistoric instances moderately than the medieval interval. They might even have arisen by unbiased era, or have been independently borrowed into the 2 traditions from a 3rd supply, equivalent to Latin literature, for instance. A colleague of mine, Patrick Sims-Williams, has proven that it’s troublesome, if not unimaginable, to decide on definitively between these potentialities.
The rise of “Celtoscepticism” within the late twentieth century has challenged conventional views of Celtic identification, particularly that there was no uniform shared tradition amongst Celtic audio system over time and place. It has led to the retreat of particular person students inside Celtic research departments into their very own areas of experience, moderately than broader comparative work.
Students like Cecile O’Rahilly, who expertly navigated each Irish and Welsh sources and was fluent in each languages, are more and more uncommon. However as new generations of consultants discover these connections, the shared heritage of those two nations continues to supply recent insights.
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