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Season 3 of the Celtic Students Podcast: Some Reflections

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     The third season of the Celtic Students Podcast has come to an end and I am happy to be able to reflect in this blog post on what has been a fantastic season. Once again, the podcast has brought together students, academics and community members to discuss a wide range of topics relating to Celtic Studies. The diversity of places, themes and sectors mentioned across the season reflects the wide approach to Celtic Studies that the Association of Celtic Students promotes. This approach is one centered on the Celtic languages and all aspects of their use past and present. In keeping with our commitment to promoting these languages, this season has featured bilingual episodes with Cornish, Manx and Irish, as well as poetry reading in Welsh. This has allowed speakers of these languages to hear more content in their language, while allowing people who are less familiar with the languages but who can understand English to hear them being spoken and gain that familiarity. While this is a
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The Sounds of Medieval Wales, featuring Llewelyn Hopwood (podcast notes, s3e9)

The Sounds of Medieval Wales featuring Llewelyn Hopwood In this episode, Nina Cnockaert-Guillou talks to Llewelyn Hopwood, a DPhil student at the University of Oxford, about his doctoral research, which focuses on ‘Sound and Control’ in medieval Welsh poetry during the Beirdd yr Uchelwyr period (c. 1300–1600). Llewelyn first explains how he got the idea for such an innovative research project and talks about Celtic Studies in Oxford. He then discusses sound studies and his own research in more detail, and treats us with a few readings from medieval Welsh poems! Please find all the translations and details of these poems below. This episode was recorded in August 2022.  Host: Nina Cnockaert-Guillou  Guest: Llewelyn Hopwood  Languages: English, with poetry readings in Welsh  Music: “Kesh Jig, Leitrim Fancy” by Sláinte, CC BY-SA 3.0 US (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/), available from freemusicarchive.org   Dafydd ap Gwilym ‘Trafferth Mewn Tafarn’  ll. 31–46 ed. and t
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Getting Into the Ulster Cycle

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In April, here at the Blog we discussed the issue of Public Outreach in Celtic Studies , where we touched on the idea that while the public adores what we as students of the Celtic languages and associated cultures study, the proliferation of poor resources on the internet wildly misleads the public. This is particularly problematic for medieval Celtic literatures, where, while we as a field have created wonderful databases of edition,  translations, manuscripts, and articles available online, they are little-known by the public. What could be outstanding resources for public outreach are passed over and missed by the hungry minds that go searching online for answers. Táin mural by Desmond Kinney. Featuring a guest pigeon. As discussed in April's blog post, while this is an issue greater than any individual in the field, it is one that we as students often find ourselves working in our own small and disparate ways to resolve. However, there are only so many times one of us can w
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Learning Breton / Deskiñ brezhoneg

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     Demat deoc’h ! I have the immense pleasure of sharing with you, within the Learning Celtic Languages series, resources on how to learn Breton. This Celtic language from outside the British Isles, is a Brythonic language, thus partial intercomprehension does exist with Welsh and more so Cornish. Today, standardised Breton, or peurunvan , is composed of KLT and Gwenedeg. KLT stands for Kerne-Leon-Treger which were the main bishoprics of Lower Brittany. Gwenedeg, or vannetais, is spoken in Bro-Wened and is known as the most linguistically conservative form of Breton, it’s writing, pronunciation and certain words differ from that of KLT.      Nota bene: Upper Brittany is everything not highlighted in bright colours on the map below, this is where people speak Gallo – the second language of Brittany. Similar to the relationship between Scots and Scottish Gaelic, Gallo is a langue d’oïl with an estimation of 191,000 speakers (2012). Map taken from Atlas de Bretagne (2011), showing th
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