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by non-experts that miss key details or misinterpret events, to misinformed, where members of the public repeat out-of-date scholarly arguments, to the actively malignant, with at least two Fascists publishing forged or edited versions of medieval tales on YouTube.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 blog, wrote a post discussing the need for further public outreach from scholars in Celtic Studies, particularly those who work with ancient or medieval material. What I come to you today with is a small announcement that I have started my own little project to try to get our voice out there. Guth: Reading Irish Myths and Legends is a podcast you can find on YouTube, Spotify, Podbean, and hopefully soon on Apple Podcasts. In the podcast, I read out of copyright academic translations of medieval Irish literature. I do not retell the stories, or (knowingly) alter them in any way, but simply provide the text in an audio format. These readings are followed up by a brief discussion of a piece of secondary scholarship I personally think is interesting or helpful for understanding the material. In addition, I occasionally get scholars to come in and join me on the podcast for supplemental episodes where they can get the chance to speak about one of the stories we covered.
This podcast is inspired by several others doing similar work for other fields. For example, Saga Thing is a podcast by two scholars of early Icelandic literature where they have been workin towards the goal of discussing all of the Icelandic sagas for the last several years. Slightly different is The Maniculum, which is a Podcast where a game designer and a PhD student read medieval texts from a wide range of sources aloud for members of the public, and discuss how elements of these stories can be incorporated into modern games, narratives, or other pieces of modern reception. Outside of the Arts, other podcasts have successfully served as teaching tools in STEM, with Popular Science’s The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week offering a primarily science-based discussions of interesting niche subjects.
Guth Logo, by Demelza Nowell
The podcast is designed with two goals in mind: (a) to provide an option for students with disabilities that make reading challenging, or have busy schedules who are enrolled in modules I teach to have an alternative option to complete assigned ‘readings’; (b) to create a vetted, scholarly option for members of the public interested in these stories.
This second element is the best method available to us, as scholars, to start to challenge the deluge of less-than-ideal versions of these stories in circulation online. While as academics our first instinct when faced with the misleading, misinformed, or malignantly twisted facts circulating the internet about medieval Ireland is to systematically refute each point, this is impossible due to the sheer volume of misinformation, the same reason that point-by-point refuting Gish Gallop arguments is impossible. Instead, by creating an alternative option for interested members of the public, carrying the seal of approval of someone with a doctorate from a recognized institution (an unfortunate reliance on authority, but something which can help when working in such environments), I hope that Guth will start the process on course-correcting some of the widespread misconceptions circulating online. While members of the public could always sit down and read the same translations that I am reading aloud through online databases like CELT, scholarly databases are simply not the places people are looking for these stories online. By putting these materials in places where the public are already looking for them, I hope to be able to capture the attention of an existing audience.
While I highly doubt that alone Guth will be able to course-correct the issues circulating online, hopefully it can serve as one of the first steps towards a future for the field where the division between the public and the academy is more permeable than it currently is.
However, such lofty goals aside, at its core, Guth is a tool. Something I have created to help my students, and with luck, help students elsewhere in the field. In this first season of the podcast, we have covered the following tales, which were drawn from the reading lists of several modules that we teach in the Department of Early and Medieval Irish at University College Cork:
Aislinge Óenguso.
De Gabáil in t-Shída.
Cath Maige Tuired.
Scéla Mucce Meic Da Thó.
Tochmarc Emire.
Serglinge Con Culainn.
Finn and the Man in the Tree.
The Boyhood Deeds of Finn.
Fingal Rónáin.
Aided Muirchertaig meic Erca.
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