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Semester 1

Outlaws and Monsters: The Finn Cycle in Ireland and Scotland (CELT10059)

Subject

Celtic

College

CAHSS

Credits

20

Normal Year Taken

4

Delivery Session Year

2023/2024

Pre-requisites

Visiting students will be expected to demonstrate an equivalent level of competency in the Gaelic language. Visiting Students must have completed the following courses (or equivalents) at grade B or above: Gaelic 1A (CELT08004) or Gaelic 1B (CELT08005) AND Gaelic 2A (CELT08006) or Gaelic 2B (CELT08007). Entry to this course is at the discretion of the Course Organiser and will be arranged on a case by case basis by the Visiting Student Office in consultation with the department. **Please note: this course will be taught in Gaelic**

Course Summary

This course gives students an introduction to the vast body of Fianaigecht, or the Ossianic legendary traditions of Fionn mac Cumhaill and his band of warriors. This is a corpus which includes verse, prose romances, heroic ballads, place-name lore, folktales, proverbs and much else besides, and it has been a key part of Gaelic literary and oral culture in Ireland and Scotland for many centuries. We will trace the growth and development of the tradition from the early medieval period to the present, the interaction of written and oral literature and how the tradition has been reshaped, (mis)represented, collected, argued over and studied. The course will primarily consist of the discussion of edited written texts, but students will also make use of other materials held in the University's unique multilingual collections: audio recordings in the School of Scottish Studies Archives and/or manuscripts in the Carmichael-Watson Collection. The course will be taught in either Gaelic or English depending on students' existing Gaelic language compentence.

Course Description

Academic description: This course is an exploration of the Fianaigecht tradition from the early medieval period to the present, giving students the opportunity to study texts of a range of different types and dates, which are unified by their focus on a core set of characters and events. They will gain experience of working with a range of primary sources, as well as engaging with and discussing key scholarly approaches on the origins and development of those sources, set within the wider historical and cultural contexts of medieval and modern Scotland and Ireland. Most of the materials used in the course will be ones that have been edited and translated into English, but students will also have the opportunity to work with audio and manuscript sources as well, giving them first-hand experience of using unedited materials and confronting the issues in doing so that are faced by scholars. By the end of the course, students should have a sound understanding of the development of the Fianaigecht tradition and the scholarly discourses around different aspects of it, as well as experience of working with a range of different kinds of primary sources from manuscripts to printed translations which will help them develop their research and interpretation skills. Outline of content: The course is divided into two sections. Following a general introduction, the first charts the development of the tradition across a range of genres in the medieval and early modern periods, taking in poetry, sagas, romances, heroic ballads and folk tales, structured broadly by chronology. The second takes the publication of James Macpherson's Ossian in the 1760s as a turning point, and considers the modern oral tradition and the processes of collection, recontextualisation and revival from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. The second half of the course will also include an archive project, in which students will engage with audio recordings and/or manuscript versions of ballads or stories from the oral tradition, gaining key insight into the processes of collecting these materials, but also of performance context and the role of individual tradition bearers within Gaelic-speaking communities. Student learning experience: The course will consist of two one-hour classes per week, on separate days. The first will be an introduction to that weeks topic with time for questions, led by the instructor. The second will be a discussion of that week's set primary texts, informed by the relevant scholarship. This second, discussion-based class, will be guided by questions and prompts from the instructor.

Assessment Information

Written Exam 0%, Coursework 100%, Practical Exam 0%

Additional Restrictions

This course cannot be taken alongside Gaelic 1A (CELT08004), Gaelic 1B (CELT08005), Gaelic 2A (CELT08006) or Gaelic 2B (CELT08007)

view the timetable and further details for this course