Early Welsh Gnomic and Nature Poetry

Early Welsh Gnomic and Nature Poetry PDF Author: Nicolas Jacobs
Publisher: MHRA
ISBN: 1907322582
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Among the most enigmatic and fascinating of early Welsh poems are the sequences of stanzas commonly categorized as gnomic. In their most typical form they juxtapose vivid natural description with generalisations about the physical world and about human life, combining an evident delight in weather and the changing seasons, landscapes and seascapes, and birds, beasts and plants with a serious and often witty concern for the moral and practical aspects of daily life. The origin and function of these stanzas remains a puzzle; some may be associated with particular situations in narratives now lost, but as a whole they appear to have developed at an early stage into a recognised genre of their own. They may be supposed to have a philosophical purpose, serving to assert a continuity between the natural and moral orders; on the other hand they may be read simply as a repository of folk-wisdom. While their interpretation remains a matter for discussion, their language is comparatively simple, and they thus provide an engaging window on the ordinary conceptual world of mediaeval Wales. This volume presents texts of the gnomic stanzas from the most important collection, that in Red Book of Hergest, and from some other manuscripts, with a few other poems containing related material, some of them edited in English for the first time, together with a literary and linguistic introduction, explanatory commentary and extensive glossary. Nicolas Jacobs is an Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford.

Early Welsh Gnomic and Nature Poetry

Early Welsh Gnomic and Nature Poetry PDF Author: Nicolas Jacobs
Publisher: MHRA
ISBN: 1907322582
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Among the most enigmatic and fascinating of early Welsh poems are the sequences of stanzas commonly categorized as gnomic. In their most typical form they juxtapose vivid natural description with generalisations about the physical world and about human life, combining an evident delight in weather and the changing seasons, landscapes and seascapes, and birds, beasts and plants with a serious and often witty concern for the moral and practical aspects of daily life. The origin and function of these stanzas remains a puzzle; some may be associated with particular situations in narratives now lost, but as a whole they appear to have developed at an early stage into a recognised genre of their own. They may be supposed to have a philosophical purpose, serving to assert a continuity between the natural and moral orders; on the other hand they may be read simply as a repository of folk-wisdom. While their interpretation remains a matter for discussion, their language is comparatively simple, and they thus provide an engaging window on the ordinary conceptual world of mediaeval Wales. This volume presents texts of the gnomic stanzas from the most important collection, that in Red Book of Hergest, and from some other manuscripts, with a few other poems containing related material, some of them edited in English for the first time, together with a literary and linguistic introduction, explanatory commentary and extensive glossary. Nicolas Jacobs is an Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford.

A Selection of Early Welsh Saga Poems

A Selection of Early Welsh Saga Poems PDF Author: Jenny Rowland
Publisher: MHRA
ISBN: 1907322639
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
The saga englynion are among the most appealing medieval Welsh poems. Despite some difficulties, their style is generally direct and their contents interesting to modern readers. In these poems the anonymous poets speak as characters from story. The full narrative setting has been lost, but enough can be reconstructed to appreciate the poetry. This selection includes dramatic dialogues and monologues exploring the acceptable limits of heroism. The old warrior, Llywarch Hen, mourns his sons’ death in battle and his lonely old age full of regrets. Heledd, the only major female character in the saga poetry, laments the loss of her family and her country to the invading English. A Selection of Early Welsh Saga Poems, the fifth volume of the Library of Medieval Welsh Literature Series, presents edited texts from the main manuscripts. The introduction offers a guide to interpretation, dating, and metrics, while a full glossary and explanatory notes make these poems readily accessible to the reader.

Studies in Early Celtic Nature Poetry

Studies in Early Celtic Nature Poetry PDF Author: Kenneth Jackson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107600189
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Kenneth Jackson examines nature poetry that was produced in Ireland and Wales in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Arthur in Early Welsh Poetry

Arthur in Early Welsh Poetry PDF Author: Nerys Ann Jones
Publisher: MHRA
ISBN: 1781889082
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
For over a thousand years, Arthur has had widespread appeal and influence like no other literary character or historical figure. Yet, despite the efforts of modern scholars, the earliest references to Arthurian characters are still shrouded in uncertainty. They are mostly found in poetic texts scattered throughout the four great compilations of early and medieval Welsh literature produced between 1250 and 1350. Whilst some are thought to predate their manuscript sources by several centuries, many of these poems are notoriously difficult to date. None of them are narrative in nature and very few focus solely on Arthurian material but they are characterised by an allusiveness which would have been appreciated by their intended audiences in the courts of princes and noblemen the length and breadth of Wales. They portray Arthur in a variety of roles: as a great leader of armies, a warrior with extraordinary powers, slayer of magical creatures, rescuer of prisoners from the Otherworld, a poet and the subject of prophecy. They also testify to the possibility of lost tales about him, his father, Uthr, his son, Llachau, his wife, Gwenhwyfar, and one of his companions, Cai, and associate him with a wide array of both legendary and historical figures. Arthur in Early Welsh Poetry, the fourth volume in the MHRA Library of Medieval Welsh Literature series, provides discussion of each of the references to Arthurian characters in early Welsh poetic sources together with an image from the earliest manuscript, a transliteration, a comprehensive edition, a translation (where possible) and a word-list. The nine most significant texts are interpreted in more detail with commentary on metrical, linguistic and stylistic features.

Wales and the Britons, 350-1064

Wales and the Britons, 350-1064 PDF Author: T. M. Charles-Edwards
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198217315
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 816

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Book Description
The most detailed history of the Welsh from Late-Roman Britain to the eve of the Norman Conquest. Integrates the history of religion, language, and literature with the history of events.

Power, Identity and Miracles on a Medieval Frontier

Power, Identity and Miracles on a Medieval Frontier PDF Author: Catherine A.M. Clarke
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131553651X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
A thriving port, a frontier base for the lords of Gower and a multi-cultural urban community, the south Wales town of Swansea was an important centre in the Middle Ages, at a nexus of multiple identities, cultural practices and configurations of power. As the principal town of the Marcher lordship of Gower and seat of the Marcher lord's rule, Swansea was a site of contested authority, colonial control and complex interactions – and collisions – between different cultures, languages and traditions. Swansea also features in the miracle collection prepared for the canonisation of Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford (d. 1282), as the setting for the intriguing case of the hanging and strange revival of the Welsh rebel, William Cragh. Taking medieval Swansea and Wales as its starting point, this volume brings into focus questions of place, power, identity and belief, bringing together inter-disciplinary perspectives which span History, Literary Studies and Geography / Archaeology, and engaging with current debates in the fields of medieval frontier studies, urban history, manuscript studies and hagiography. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Medieval History.

Arthur in the Celtic Languages

Arthur in the Celtic Languages PDF Author: Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786833441
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
• Arthur in the Celtic Languages is a reliable up-to-date introduction to the field. • It is the only book covering Arthurian literature and traditions in the Celtic languages (Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Irish, Scottish Gaelic) • This book covers medieval and modern literatures. • It also discusses folklore, ballads and other popular traditions as well as place-names.

Between Languages

Between Languages PDF Author: Sarah Lynn Higley
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271042299
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Early Welsh and Old English poetry are rarely spoken of together, but when they are, they have been described as like or different from one another. Sarah Higley breaks this cycle of mutual marginalization by examining what it means to read otherness or sameness into a text, concluding that too much of our reading is "anglo-centric" in its expectations and dictated by invisible ideological agendas. Examinations of the Llywarch Hen Corpus, for instance, have sought comparisons among the Old English elegies, but mainly for the purpose of demonstrating how the Welsh are of a color with them: derived from the same penitential genre merely less explicit in their penitential thrust. Scholars have been reluctant to acknowledge the secular nature of these Welsh laments, which are discomfitingly silent about divine solace and which, like the Old English poems, do not cooperate with our efforts to categorize them. The author reexamines notions of genre, category, and poetic "explicitness" and how they snare us. Higley sees the English and Welsh traditions as foils to one another rather than as template and variation, and she starts with the connection of natural image and emotion, employed differently in these two contiguous but separate traditions. She shows how the English poems, long thought to be disjointed and cryptic, are invested in explanation and disclosure to a degree that the Welsh are not. The Welsh "omissions" might be better understood as dynamic juxtapositions wherein other poetic aspects (metrics, imagery, context) serve to link ideas, perhaps even to disrupt them. She sees difficulty, ambiguity, and dialogism as loci of power - neither accidents of our reading distance nor defects in other classical standards of wholeness. Reading the English and the Welsh together with a respect for the mutual differences helps us to get beyond some of the cliche's about what is English and "familiar" and what is Celtic and "other." Her argument revolves around the plight of the lone human as he or she is depicted in these texts in a precarious state of connection with the rest of the world: caught between society and wilderness, inside and outside, sacred and secular, meaning and nonmeaning. This focus on connection informs the title as well: "between languages" expresses our position as readers reading two different cultures together, reading ancient literature mediated through modern poetic theory, and the position of medieval scholarship in its struggle between traditional and postmodern approaches. Between Languages brings obscure and moving poems into a wider academic orbit, offering new editions and translations of Old English and Early Welsh elegies, wisdom poems, and enigmata, including one of the few complete English translations in this century of a vatic text from The Book of Taliesin.

Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics

Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics PDF Author:
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0080547842
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 26924

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Book Description
The first edition of ELL (1993, Ron Asher, Editor) was hailed as "the field's standard reference work for a generation". Now the all-new second edition matches ELL's comprehensiveness and high quality, expanded for a new generation, while being the first encyclopedia to really exploit the multimedia potential of linguistics. * The most authoritative, up-to-date, comprehensive, and international reference source in its field * An entirely new work, with new editors, new authors, new topics and newly commissioned articles with a handful of classic articles * The first Encyclopedia to exploit the multimedia potential of linguistics through the online edition * Ground-breaking and International in scope and approach * Alphabetically arranged with extensive cross-referencing * Available in print and online, priced separately. The online version will include updates as subjects develop ELL2 includes: * c. 7,500,000 words * c. 11,000 pages * c. 3,000 articles * c. 1,500 figures: 130 halftones and 150 colour * Supplementary audio, video and text files online * c. 3,500 glossary definitions * c. 39,000 references * Extensive list of commonly used abbreviations * List of languages of the world (including information on no. of speakers, language family, etc.) * Approximately 700 biographical entries (now includes contemporary linguists) * 200 language maps in print and online Also available online via ScienceDirect – featuring extensive browsing, searching, and internal cross-referencing between articles in the work, plus dynamic linking to journal articles and abstract databases, making navigation flexible and easy. For more information, pricing options and availability visit www.info.sciencedirect.com. The first Encyclopedia to exploit the multimedia potential of linguistics Ground-breaking in scope - wider than any predecessor An invaluable resource for researchers, academics, students and professionals in the fields of: linguistics, anthropology, education, psychology, language acquisition, language pathology, cognitive science, sociology, the law, the media, medicine & computer science. The most authoritative, up-to-date, comprehensive, and international reference source in its field

celt and saxon

celt and saxon PDF Author:
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description