Guth: Reading Irish Myths and Legends
YouTube and other such public mediums are filled with misleading information about medieval Irish literature. Errors range from the benign, tellings of medieval narratives by non-experts that miss key details or misinterpret events, to misinformed, where members of the public repeat out-of-date scholarly arguments, to the actively malignant, with at least two Fascists publishing forged or edited versions of medieval tales on YouTube. Correcting all of these is impossible for the same reason that point-by-point challenging Gish Gallop arguments (a style of argument intended to flood the opponent with so many poor, unsourced, or untrue pieces of evidence it is extremely time consuming to systematically refute due to the sheer volume of errors confidently stated) is futile, but, that does not mean that we as scholars must abandon the public to the digital wilderness. Instead, it just requires an alternative tactical choice. Several years ago, I, Emmet Taylor, the previous manager of the b...