Gaelic Grace Notes rev. Scottish Studies 38 2018

2011

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An introduction to the Gaelic languages, some rudiments of grammar and an overview of old naming customs as a aide to understanding the meaning of Gaelic family names from Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Man.

BOOK REVIE\rS tune was played in this manner'a definitive account of style in eighteenth-cenrury Highland scotland such as that proposed by Allan MacDonald in his r99y M.Lin thesis -will therefore be disappointed and frustrated. Although such an approach would have been more appealing to pipers hungry for the stuff of repertoires, Gibson is concerned with the broader questions of function, conrexr, and the dynamics of inexorable change. Instead of casting judgement on either style, he merely identifies the points and means by which they diverged, and offers justification for the aural idiom's value to current scholarship. He places piping in the hands of the Gael uninfuenced by Empire, and proceeds to observe its evolution within Empire as the cultural pillars which had previously supported it eroded over decades and centuries. It is an important and timely point to make nowadays, as the feis movement gains in popularity and more competitors look to early nineteenth-century manuscripts for 'new' settings of familiar tunes; and therein lies Gibson's opportunity to capture the imagination of the performers as well as the scholars. His work emerges at a time when the piping world is looking more and more at what was, as inspiration for what will be.

Unlike England, modern Ireland has relatively few place names of Norse origin, a fact that is surprising when one considers the Vikings' enormous impact on Irish history. Of the Norse names that do survive in Ireland, almost all are totally secular in meaning. They refer to the site's natural features and contain neither the name of any Scandinavian god, nor any Old Norse words relating to religion, such as hof, meaning 'temple', or ví or vé, meaning 'hallowed site'. It cannot be said that the Norse simply did not use such names, for hof, ví, vé, and a host of other Old Norse religious terms are easy to find on a map of Scandinavia (Steinsland 2005, 270-72). It is my contention that, though few if any of these names have survived in Ireland, medieval Irish sources occasionally mention places whose names clearly reveal the practice of Norse heathenism in Ireland. These names often consist of Irish words for ordinary things, such as forests, mixed with words or names that were specific to Norse religion, such as the name Þórr.

This short essay, submitted as part of an MLitt Viking Studies, tries to re-evaluate W.A.Craigie's statement about the lack of Gaelic names in Landnáma using latest research on the Gaels in Iceland. The initial topic for this essay was set by Dr Andrew Jennings as part of the module "Celts and Vikings in contact: The North Atlantic - a shared cultural space" and I want to thank him for thoroughly waking my interest in this field.

Contrary to received wisdom, while the phrase airer Goídel did have a geographical application, the name of the County of Argyll in Scotland has an entirely unrelated etymology, being a name transferred from Airgialla/Oriel in Ireland. This paper examines and distinguishes the two, explaining the difference and how the conflation occurred.

2020

The article deals with the culture and heritage of ancient Celts by analyzing the toponyms of Celtic origin in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, as well as in the places where the Irish diaspora is present. In accordance with the set goal, the article considers the cultural component in the meaning of linguistic units and the classifi cation of toponyms and their use in diff erent parts of the island. By the example of the analysis of the meaning of Celtic toponyms functioning in modern Ireland and Northern Ireland, it is shown that Celtic national heritage has not been lost. The study of toponyms allows us to penetrate into the worldview of the ancient people whose culture infl uenced and shaped the descendants of Celts. Key words: Celtic languages, place name, toponymy, Ireland, the Irish language, semantics.

Craobh nan Ubhal: A Festschrift for John MacInnes (Scottish Studies 37), 2014