Medieval Irish
Mailing ListsDon’t forget to take a look at the various lists, email based discussion groups, that deal with medieval Irish. The Old Irish List is specifically intended for discussions of medieval Irish and liguistically related issues (it is not the place for cultural discussions). Focal an Lae, the word a day list, though not primarily concerned with Old and Middle Irish, often includes etymology relating to them.
Focal an LaeThis site, created by Dennis King, is principally an archive site for the Irish Word a Day mailing list (see Lists), but it’s one of my favorite Irish language sites. It’s chock full of resources, including a bibliography of books for beginning learners and a timeline of the Irish language, various common phrases in Irish Gaelic, and a brief guide to spelling and pronounciation of modern Gaelic, among many other features. It uses frames, so I’m not going to link to individual pages, just look for his “Features” list. Pay particular attention to his essays on the orthography of Old Irish, and his presentation of Kuno Meyer’s edition of the Irish triads.
Celtic Electronic Literary Texts CELTThe Thesaurus Linguarum Hiberniae was a joint project of the Royal
Irish Academy and University College Cork (CURIA) to create an
on-line archive of literary and historical materials in the various
languages of early, medieval and modern Ireland. Irish texts can be
downloaded in a variety of formats. The CURIA project ran out of funding, but their texts have been incorporated into the CELT project. This is a list of the medieval through modern texts, in Irish, Old Norse and English, that can be downloaded.
The Celtic-Latin Word-ListThe Celtic-Latin Word-List is a working checklist of distinctive vocabulary found in the texts being treated by the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of Medieval Latin from Celtic Sources (DMLCS) project.
The List takes the form of a browsable, lemmatized, alphabetical list consisting mostly of two kinds of words: vocabulary that is foreign to Classical Latin and would not be found in a standard Latin dictionary, and Classical vocabulary that appears in unusual forms in texts.
Manuscript Sources for Old and Middle Irish TalesJohan Corthals provides a chart listing many of the published Irish texts for tales in the Ulster and Mythological cycles. Much of this information is duplicated in Cross and Slover, and of course in the Bergin and Best bibliographies, but this is still a good resource and contribution.
The Bibliography of Irish Linguistics and LiteratureThe Electronic Bibliography of Irish Linguistics and Literature 1942-71 Compiled by Rolf Baumgarten is available for searching or downloading. A new test database covering the period 1972–, concentrates on materials published in scholarly journals and periodicals only. The database currently (i.e. end of 2004) contains entries for all volumes of the School’s journal, Celtica (vols 10–24), all volumes of É:riu (vols 23–53), Cambridge / Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies (vols 1–14), some issues of Eigse, Peritia, Scottish Gaelic Studies, Zeitschrift fur celtische Philologie, and a number of other sources.
CelticaThis scholarly journal from the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies has posted the tables of contents of all the volumes through 1991. The entire contents of the last three volumes, for 1990 vol. 21 and 1991 Vol. 22, and volume 23 from 1999 are available for downloading as postscript files. You can download P. L. Henry’s edition and translation of “Verba Scathaige.” The administrator of the site has thoughtfully converted the files to .pdf; you can read and print them with a free copy of Adobe’s Acrobat Reader
The
Story of Mac Datho’s PigThe text is from N. Kershaw Chadwick’s An Early Irish Reader, Cambridge University Press. The site uses frames to present the Irish text and the English text side by side.
The TainSteve Taylor has done a lovely job of presenting the Táin or The Cattle-Raid of Cooley, in the form of an adaptation of the English translation of Joseph Dunn (1914) accompanied by the Irish transcription of Ernst Windisch (1905). He includes a pronunciation guide, an index of names, and even a sample image of a page from the Book of Leinster, and the text itself is divided into a list of episodes, making it easy to navigate.
Scéla: A List of Medieval Irish NarrativesThis list of medieval titles of Irish scéla is based primarily on d’Arbois de Jubainville’s Essai d’un catalogue de la littérature épique de l’Irlande, Proinsias Mac Cana’s Learned Tales, and other sources, including Gerard Murphy etc., and was compiled by Štĕpán Kosík.