Dr Emily Lyle
Qualifications
MA (St Andrews), Dip Ed (Glasgow), PhD (Leeds)
Research interests
Emily Lyle has pioneered advances in the broad history of oral culture by putting folk material such as narratives and customs together with ancient mythology (interpreted through a fresh awareness of social rootedness in family and authority roles) to come up with a new theoretical perspective, which she hopes to publish shortly in book form as "Ten Gods: A New Approach to Defining the Mythological Structures of the Indo-Europeans", with a view to opening the way to a fuller appreciation of the oral dimension of our cultural history.
These new developments have been explored through the Traditional Cosmology Society and the SIEF working group on the Ritual Year, of which she is president, and the International Association for Comparative Mythology of which she is a vice-president. She is happy to act as a supervisor for postgraduates in this area and also in Scottish ballads and songs, which has been her other main field of study.
- Traditional Cosmology Society
- The SIEF working group on the Ritual Year
- International Association for Comparative Mythology
She has studied a number of the Scottish song collectors of the past and, in some cases, has edited their collections. In Fairies and Folk: Approaches to the Scottish Ballad Tradition (2007), she discusses fairy ballads like "Thomas the Rhymer" and "Tam Lin" in the context of traditional beliefs and Scottish culture from the Middle Ages up to the present day.
Selected publications
Her mythological and cosmological studies include:
- 'Archaic Cosmos: Polarity, Space and Time'. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990.
- "The Importance of the Prehistory of Indo-European Structures for Indo-European Studies." Journal of Indo-European Studies 34 (2006), 99-110. 2007
- 'The Marriage and Recovery of the Young Goddess: Story and Structure'. Journal of Indo-European Studies 36 (2008), 356-70.
- 'Royal Descent from Odin'. In "á austrvega. Saga and East Scandinavia: Preprint papers of The 14th International Saga Conference". Uppsala 9th-15th August 2009, ed. Agneta Ney, Henrik Williams and Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist, pp. 628-34. Gävle: University of Gävle, 2009.
This article was published on Nov 16, 2011