Folklore | 2019
Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy: Idealization, Identity, Ideology
Abstract
has broken new ground. The late Anders Ahlqvist provides a hugely useful edition and translation of the celebrated Pangur B an (aka ‘The Scholar and his Cat’), one of the most anthologized of early Irish lyrics. Joseph Falaky Nagy gives us a splendid contextual analysis of a famous nature poem placed in the mouth of Finn mac Cumaill (the second greatest of Irish heroes) and its place in the material about the young Finn’s training as a poet (fili) as well as a warrior-hunter (f ennid). S ım Innes’s contribution continues the Fenian theme, looking at the persistence of stories of riddles passing between Finn and Ailbhe, daughter of Cormac mac Airt, in Gaelic Scotland in the nineteenth century, in a piece which says much about the persistence of the themes and detail of early Irish literature in later folklore and oral tradition. A second Scottish Gaelic entry comes from William Gillies, who considers the poetry in the Book of the Dean of Lismore, compiled in Perthshire in the first half of the sixteenth century. The Gaelic poetry in that manuscript is weighed up in the context of both Irish and Scots literary contexts and traditions. Turning to the other side of Celtic Studies, Catherine McKenna offers the only purely Welsh essay in the book, with a rigorous examination of the metalanguage of early poetry within the remarkable mid-thirteenth-century Black Book of Carmarthen. Her piece does much to excavate and explore the poetic terminology on display in that manuscript, and thus to recover how early Welsh poets conceptualized their art. Ollam is attractively and clearly printed, with few typographic errors. Each chapter has its own bibliography, but a list of other works cited is also present, and a helpful index. The title of the book is the Old Irish word for the highest grade of poet, or indeed of any learned profession; it means ‘most supreme’, and is also the modern Irish word for ‘professor’. O Cathasaigh is an ollam indeed, and this stimulating collection is a fitting marker of the respect in which he and his work are held.