This volume, a double issue of the CSANA Yearbook, containing articles from some of the leading scholars in Irish, Welsh, and medieval studies, honors Patrick K. Ford, the retiring Margaret Brooks Robinson Professor of Celtic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, and a founding member of the Celtic Studies Association of North America.

Hero Lays is a collection of powerful and evocative poems that explore the themes of heroism, love, and sacrifice. Written by Alice Milligan, one of Ireland's most beloved poets, this book is a celebration of the Celtic tradition and its rich heritage of myth and legend. With beautiful imagery and a powerful voice, Hero Lays is a must-read for anyone who loves poetry. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

In this book, Eric Falci reshapes the story of Irish poetry since the 1960s. He shows how polemical arguments concerning the role of poetry in 1960s Ireland evolve into a set of formal and compositional strategies for emerging Irish poets in the mid 1970s and beyond. His study presents a cohesive picture of the relationship between Northern Irish poetry from the Republic of Ireland since World War II and traces the lineage of lyric practice from a unique historical perspective. At the same time, it recontextualizes late twentieth-century Irish poetry within the long Irish poetic tradition, places Irish writing more accurately within the field of postwar Anglophone poetry and offers a new account of lyric's critical capacities. Of interest to Irish studies and twentieth-century poetry specialists, this book provides a much-needed guide to some of the most inventive and notable poetry written in the past forty years.

Seventh-century Gaelic law-tracts delineate professional poets (filid) who earned high social status through formal training. These poets cooperated with the Church to create an innovative bilingual intellectual culture in Old Gaelic and Latin. Bede described Anglo-Saxon students who availed themselves of free education in Ireland at this culturally dynamic time. Gaelic scholars called sapientes (“wise ones”) produced texts in Old Gaelic and Latin that demonstrate how Anglo-Saxon students were influenced by contact with Gaelic ecclesiastical and secular scholarship. Seventh-century Northumbria was ruled for over 50 years by Gaelic-speaking kings who could access Gaelic traditions. Gaelic literary traditions provide the closest analogues for Bede’s description of Cædmon’s production of Old English poetry. This ground-breaking study displays the transformations created by the growth of vernacular literatures and bilingual intellectual cultures. Gaelic missionaries and educational opportunities helped shape the Northumbrian “Golden Age”, its manuscripts, hagiography, and writings of Aldhelm and Bede.

Political prophecy was a common mode of literature in the British Isles and much of Europe from the Middle Ages to at least as late as the Renaissance. At times of political instability especially, the manuscript record bristles with prophetic works that promise knowledge of dynastic futures. In Welsh, the later development of this mode is best known through the figure of the mab darogan, the 'son of prophecy', who - variously named as Arthur, Owain or a number of other heroes - will return to re-establish sovereignty. Such a returning hero is also a potent figure in English, Scottish and wider European traditions. This book explores the large body of prophetic poetry and prose contained in the earliest Welsh-language manuscripts, exploring the complexity of an essentially multilingual, multi-ethnic and multinational literary tradition, and with reference to this wider tradition critical and theoretical questions are raised of genre, signification and significance.

This edited collection explores absence, presence and remembrance in British political culture and memory studies. Comprehensive in its scope, it covers the entire modern period, bringing together the 19th and 20th centuries as well as Britain, Ireland and the Atlantic World. As the first comparative and in-depth study to explore the central and contested place of memory and the invention of tradition in modern British politics, chapters include memorialisation, statue-mania, anniversaries and on the wider impact and invoking of 'dead generations'. In doing so, this book provides a new, exciting and accessible way of engaging with the history of British political culture.