Mark Williams' "Ireland's Immortals": Book Review

How the Christian Irish regarded their island's pagan divinities, in medieval and modern times, comprises the two halves of Ireland's Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth. Mark Williams, an Oxford medievalist, unravels the tangled threads in texts that challenge even the skilled interpreter. Old Irish remains formidable for scholars, and the fact that the evidence exists only in copies centuries after its first renditions onto parchment, deep within already Catholic times, complicates any explicator's task. Dr. Williams remains steady throughout this study. His accessible style remains academic but blessedly free of jargon or cant. His glossaries summarize key concepts and his footnotes address arcane debates.

His history of the gods of Irish myth examines key writings left by the monks and scribes, from the period after conversion. Williams estimates that within a half-century after the Patrician period, Ireland would have been effectively under Christian control. Although pre-Christian practices may have endured, they diminished rapidly, despite the imaginations of later bards eager to insist on secret continuity with centuries nearly up to our own. Williams separates the archaic from the innovative elements inserted into these stories and chronicles preserved within monasteries. Although these tales and accounts were tamed, a "ferocious weirdness" persists in surreal or juxtaposed scenes, distinguishing imagery from the dour scenarios in Anglo-Saxon sagas such as {Beowulf}, for instance.

These Irish pre-Christian versions resemble (as in the Book of Invasions, a chronological origin myth of successive waves of those landing on the nation's shores) the configurations of Romanesque architecture.  Williams compares the sagas to these simple, repeating structures which are decorated with teeming surface details. The medieval corpus, furthermore, rises as a massive edifice, if resting on slender foundations. Pseudo-scholarship at its most ingenious labored to match biblical lore with Celtic supposition. This tension, concentrating around the meaning of the "god-people" the Túath Dé sustains itself within the literature Williams examines. As a blend of inherited narratives with concocted alterations shaped into a Christian mindset, these tales' impact faded by the end of the Middle Ages. The Irish seemed to lose interest. Only in the nineteenth century did curiosity revive about gods.

Part two delves into more recent re-workings of the myths of the Irish gods and goddesses. Romanticism, antiquarianism and the occult all generated speculation. W.B. Yeats and George Russell epitomized the poetic turn of the Celtic Revival at the end of the Victorian period, in the wake of a British passion for the classics and the pagan to counter the tamed, the scriptural and the stolid. Gods, as redefined by the Irish revivalists, emerge as "spiritual entities." Among the Anglo-Irish gentry emerge intellectuals eager to fabricate a past for their country, rooted in wisdom of the earth and appeals to the forces lingering, despite the reign of Christendom, supposedly on fringes of the Celtic homeland.

The ninth chapter introduces William Sharp (1855-1905). Taking on the feminine alter ego of Fiona Macleod, Williams engagingly shares this fantasist of Gaelic Scotland. In Fiona, we encounter a fabled "self-sequestered Highland visionary." Williams labels her as "an imaginary personage, albeit an alarmingly insistent one." Characteristic of this author's tone, he keeps his investigations lively even as he grounds them in careful judgment. He counters the bent suppositions and fey imagination lavished upon sources that, in modern times, create a "feedback loop." Williams analyzes distortions within American anthropologist Walter Evans-Wentz's The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. He adapted his Oxford dissertation oddly; this 1911 compendium persists as a New Age "crank piece."

For Mark Williams' predecessor at his university proved both an "exorbitant Celtophile" and a misled eccentric. Evans-Wentz conjured up the peasantry as informants for a pan-Celtic fairy belief system. He incorporated an unnamed mystic's testimony. Yet this was none other than George Russell. Williams reasons that Evans-Wentz betrayed a "spiritual crush on Russell." Testifying as to the endurance of this account lies beyond the scope of Williams' work, but he admits he had to cut a third of his own draft. The results remain impressive, even if the source of that apt John Cowper Powys colophon beginning Chapter Nine lacks attribution to that fabulist, as obsessive as many in this volume, of strange magic.

Nowadays, Williams tracks a second arc, again with diminishing attention to the old gods, among Irish writers. The Túath Dé and their replacements, the Túatha Dé Danann, as the Irish supernatural race, endure within the "wide uptake" by creative classes outside the isle. The fine arts alongside Celtic Paganism and Celtic Reconstructionism enshrine goddesses, notably the fire spirit of Brigit.

Unfortunately, opposition to the ancient forces still exists. Vandalism of historic sites and a modern sculpture to the Celtic sea-god testifies to the powers of these representations as feared by evangelicals. Unlike other cultures where monotheism replaced paganism, Williams concludes that in Ireland, a "restless refusal to resolve" the ambiguities of the survival of the venerable if often barely recalled deities within a Christian context distinguishes that island's literary legacy within the extant sources.

Fittingly, Williams ends his six-hundred page survey with a tribute to the late John Moriarty, a philosopher and shaman from County Kerry. Moriarty's "ecological and psychic sensitivity" to summon up again the mythic terrain's specters signifies the restoration of "imaginative vitality." In a nation divided by income inequality and sectarian squabbles, Moriarty's vision and Williams' precision combine. This learned volume contributes valuable insights that may guide all those who look to the Irish tales and Celtic heritage as a relevant force of energy.

(Interview with Mark Williams here. Amazon US 1/11/17 and Amazon British 1/12/17)

"Wales Is Our Concern": 2 books on Welsh Nationalism

I examine two titles about 20th century efforts, one by a prominent novelist, the other by a shadowy faction, to rouse English-speaking Welsh citizens to fight, by mostly peaceful but sometimes violent means in the latter case, for their cultural, linguistic, and territorial survival. Originally, this was composed in 2009 for the journal Epona: A Journal of Ancient and Modern Celtic Studies, but as that publication appears in hiatus, I preserve my critique here in the meantime.

(Diane Green, Emyr Humphreys: A Postcolonial Novelist?

Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009.

290 pp. 978-0-7083-2217-8. £19/€20/$25.

John Humphries, Freedom Fighters?: Wales's Forgotten “War”, 1963-1993.

Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008.

228 pp. 978-0-7083-2177-5. £20/€21/$25)

 

Can one "speak Welsh in English?" Embattled cultural and linguistic identities from Wales conveyed through our dominant language capture this novelist's struggle for articulation. Diane Green, basing this on her doctoral thesis on "narrative patterning," stops in 1998, but five decades out of the six that still see him writing provide plenty, given his steady output for a man born in 1919, for her study.

Its postcolonial contexts comprise the theoretical foundations for Green's explanations of how myth-- not only Celtic but Etruscan, set in Wales but also in Tuscany and Benin-- combines with history, often filtered via discontented intellectual males caught between a secularized homeland and relentless anglicization. How can one live in Wales as Welsh? His breakthrough novel, A Toy Epic, (1958) contrasts the rural, impoverished religious pacifist Iorwerth with Albie the ambitious, assimilating, Marxist emigrant, and Michael as uprooted intellectual.

Humphreys given his own status as a teacher and BBC producer may represent a combination of Michael's social mobility with Iorwerth's organic and linguistic allegiances. Learning Welsh as a young man, inspired as a teenager by the Penyberth burning of the bombing station by three Welsh activists in 1936, Humphreys chose to write in English to educate and appropriate the best of what Welsh identity could transmit to a wider audience. Green emphasizes the difficulty of using the "language of the oppressor" (15) to proclaim the "language of the tribe" (12). Fiction offers, citing Humphreys, a "supranatural language which is detached from the cultural problem" as "one of the escape routes" (27). The tension between "his political ideals and his creative talents" energized his long series of novels in which he delved into the same conflicts within his Welsh characters.

This entry in the Writing Wales in English series expects close familiarity with a body of work not well known even within Britain. His books from 1946 to 1991 were printed in London. However, as the 1990s progress his new novels get published only in Wales, and his older ones depend on reissues by the University of Wales Press. Humphreys may have sensed this fall-off in broader support when in 1987 he wrote an essay "The third difficulty."

He explains how he chose the role of "People's Remembrancer." He gives his readers the feeling of Welsh through English. He uses the novel, already feared as giving way to other mass media, as his method of proclamation. He figures that Welsh culture within British society for him can best be transmitted by fiction. Still, confronted with a formidable series of interlinked novels demanding considerable grounding in mythic archetypes, the result of a small-press minimal audience for his works may not be surprising.

Bonds of Attachment (1991) includes episodes from the controversy over the investiture of Charles Windsor in 1969. This novel offers rich material for investigation, but Green prefers to pursue the mythic and historiographic aspects. She largely limits her study to postcolonial theory. Given this book presumably represents a revision of her dissertation and not a reproduction of it, this narrowed focus may not satisfy a reader seeking cultural relevance as well as critical theory.

Green elides a more pressing and less academic application. This analysis lacks attention to the political contexts in Wales at this time when the Penyberth impact, however long delayed, threatened to burst into renewed protests. These continued what Saunders Lewis, at Penyberth in 1936, called upon his countrymen to continue, and they broke his heart when none rose up. This episode was fictionalized in Humphreys' début The Little Kingdom (1946).

The complexities of a peaceful Christian ethos that may have led to the relative marginalization of Welsh republicanism as opposed to its physical-force Irish variety surely must have factored into Humphreys' fiction more than Green's work establishes in a few asides, mostly very early on. While the slow disintegration of non-conformist religious conventions surrounds Outside the House of Baal (1965), the pacifism and Christian idealism Humphreys shared with Lewis and other nationalists appears very muted in Green's critique. For study in literary criticism, her book fills a need. But it may leave an inquirer still wondering about Humphreys' semi-imaginary plots in relationship to the real-life Welsh predicaments faced by his neighbors and colleagues and readers since Penyberth. Three decades of frustration erupted into protests in 1969.

Bombings, jailings, censorship, arson against holiday and second-homes, marches demanding rebellion, calls against terrorism: these rocked Wales if on a small scale the past few decades. This is where the force of myth, after all, lands heaviest. History as lived and not only dramatized must run through Humphreys' work, determined as it is to convey Welsh implicated in postcolonial society. The subject of Green's work deserved more attention as a chronicler of these decades.  The Taliesin Tradition (1989) delves into the place of Welsh nationality within culture and language; Green understandably concentrates on the novels rather than this elegant study, but if she had expanded its role as a summation of Humphreys' ideological evolution, it would have enriched her theoretical and literary bases.

How did Humphreys invest his energy-- not only as mythologized, historically framed, or channeled overseas-- within his fictional inquiries about his native land under such pressures? Did Humphreys weary of protest and step aside into fiction as an escape? Did this "supranational language" succeed or fail him over half a century's output? How did his Welsh colleagues and English critics react to his efforts over these changing decades? What growth or retraction did his readership show? Her book elides such questions; it leaves one wondering the worth of some installments in a long series of demanding novels for an apparently small audience. 

Perhaps more immediacy comes not in novels, but what the news reports, or does not report, as John Humphries' Freedom Fighters?: Wales's Forgotten “War”, 1963-1993 narrates, starting with his walk-on role as a Cardiff Western Mail night-desk editor who took a call one night in 1966 that explosives were set at Clywedog reservoir. These detonations signalled that the spirit of Saunders Lewis would lead to the practical action and symbolic resistance begun at Penyberth. Thirty years on, protests against the British presence would reignite.

Nationalism revived in the early 1960s; postcolonialism proved more than theory. Underdeveloped, made redundant by mine closures, exploited, ignored, Welsh natives resented the English thirst for water. So close to Liverpool, the reservoir at Tryweryn inundated the village of Capel Celyn near Bala. In 1963, three men gathered to detonate the transformers. They represented Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru, the Movement for the Defence of Wales (MAC).

MAC2, for Clywedog slightly reformed after its original members went to ground, continued what the Free Wales Army (FWA) then propagandized as a counterpart to Breton and especially Irish republicans. One of the bombers, Welsh-speaking farmer Owen Williams, had to flee during the mid-1960s to Ireland, to evade police capture. There, the FWA made contacts with Irish republicans. 

This episode has given rise to legendary tales that the Marxist-directed IRA sold off its arms to the Welsh, leaving the Irish ill-prepared to fight back when “the Troubles” returned three years later. Yet, Humphries downplays the actual exchanges of weaponry or explosives. Denis Coslett attracted too much attention to the FWA. He boasted of killer Alsatians ready for suicide missions, and he courted John Summers, a journalist inveigled in the fight for funds for the victims of the Aberfan coal-tip disaster in 1966. Summers appears to have finagled himself on behalf of the FWA to demand redress for the Aberfan claimants. Curiously, Humphries—who reveals Summers informed the authorities about his Welsh activist contacts-- ignores Summers’ 1970 paperback, The Disaster -- slightly revising his 1969 potboiler The Edge of Violence -- which dramatizes Summers’ involvement in Aberfan and sensationalizes the potential of FWA rebellion. 

The media, quick to leap on connections claimed (if satirized by such as Summers) between Fenians and Welsh hotheads, brought the Special Branch, founded to fight against Irish republicans a century earlier, to arrest and jail many innocent nationalists. Both the activists and the authorities stoked the fires that threatened, as the investiture of Charles Windsor as “prince of Wales” loomed in 1969, to kindle militarism in Wales similar to the Irish resurgence.

Humphries cites John Jenkins that Seán MacStiofáin, in 1968 soon to be “the founder of the breakaway Provisionals,” took from Jenkins the concept of a cellular structure for the PIRA. The conversion of the Provos to this non-hierarchical organisation took place nearly ten years later, after MacStiofáin had stepped down from his leadership role. Whatever impact Jenkins’ model had on the Irish campaign appears indirect and at considerable remove. 

This episode of Irish-Welsh contacts remains little investigated in Humphries’ book, perhaps due to reticence from those involved, perhaps out of a legend inflated out of a few casual contacts. This topic merited more attention. The pan-Celtic and Welsh countercultural milieus in which pop and folk musicians along with language activists revived political radicalism likewise gain scant coverage here. 

Any pan-Celtic contentions in Humphries' account stint on the details of what such alliances sought. He barely quotes from Roy Clews' To Dream of Freedom (1980 ed. cited; but rev. 2001). Humphries  glosses over Keith Griffiths (Gethin ap [ab?]Iestyn)  in his roles as propagandist for the Patriotic Front and Cofiwn. (Not to mention his role, recalling Emyr Humphries’ commemorative stance, via Gethin’s spirited website and republican-related archives at Welsh Remembrancer.) 

Such scarcity of firsthand testimony may also reflect a largely more self-effacing Welsh movement determined to avoid infiltration and informers, which had repeatedly weakened their Irish counterparts. The Welsh campaign’s two spokesmen tended towards grandiosity, while its operatives kept hidden. Griffiths, Jenkins, and a few others, perhaps no more than twenty-five identified members of the FWA, fronted a silent majority of grassroots sympathisers. Detectives were clueless about many who fought back. The authorities fumbled and followed many false trails. 

The FWA was “living on a legend of newspaper cuttings,” Griffiths admitted to its “commandant” Cayo Evans. (qtd. 98) Humphries compares their outbursts to a flailing by “a drowning man.” He lashes out in desperation to alert those long assimilated, too long complacent to danger from constant English in-migration and Welsh abandonment of its heritage. (65) 

This small band of Welshmen, some far more anglicized than Welsh-speaking, also split along political vs. linguistic necessities for their strategy to revive their embattled land’s culture. Luckily, a visit from “Red” Rudi Dutschke with MAC2 was aborted; British surveillance expelled him before links between German revolutionaries could be forged. Coslett and Evans, the self-proclaimed leaders, by their love of the limelight brought Griffiths to warn them of their antics. “There is nothing substantial behind us at all,” he warned in a letter found in a police raid at Evans’ farmhouse. (qtd. 98) 

Did these “freedom fighters” valiantly sustain the example of Penyberth’s fire-setting trio against the British bomber station on venerated Welsh land? Or, did they perpetuate the futile gestures of desperate cultural nationalists driven to protest the only way they could for attention, faced with an indifferent audience of those who had surrendered to the English incursion and the Welsh erosion? 

Early on Humphries pins blame. “But while the campaign of violent direct action had its genesis in nationalist virtues and goals, it was the failure of the patriotic foot soldiers to articulate their cause that allowed government to marginalize Welsh extremism as the action of crazed fanatics.” (15-16)

Two activists blew themselves up the night before the investiture ceremony; the bomb went off near the tracks that would carry the royal train to Caernarfon Castle, icon of imperial domination over the Crown’s first colony.  Charles was crowned; as crowds of his countrymen cheered, “MAC2’s chief bomb-maker, Sgt. John Jenkins, providing dental care for the troops on ceremonial duty, “ was the perfect mole, “at other times wandering around Caernarfon and being abused by locals on account of his uniform.” (127)

The next day, July 2, 1969, nine of Jenkins’ FWA comrades were sentenced. Griffiths alone refused what Evans and Coslett promised the court: to distance themselves from militant activity. They kept their word. A year later, Jenkins was captured and sentenced to ten years imprisonment. He refused to name his accomplices. 

Faced with these men’s actions, Humphries examines if they were terrorists. He admits that “for all its eccentricities and blurred message,” their restrained response constituted the “only authentic Welsh uprising since Owain Glyndŵr.” (146) However, the caricaturing of Welsh republicans as “mad dogs,” Alsatians aside, contributed to the media’s defeat of nationalist-fueled radicalism. The language issue was left to Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, and many who fought for Welsh freedom lacked fluency in a language foreign to their upbringing. The political base, furthermore, never was allowed to emerge, unlike Sinn Féin’s role for the IRA. Republican traditions emerged more from the southern valleys as opposed to Y Fro Gymraeg, the Welsh-speaking northern and western heartlands under cultural assault. 

Welsh saboteurs lacked the popular if again reticent support afforded those a decade later. After the momentous defeat of devolution in 1979, shadowy guerrillas, as Meibion Glyndŵr, rallied under cover of darkness. For a third time this century, a few Welsh asserted themselves. Their linguistic heartland faded. Wealthier English bought its quaint dwellings, “Sons of” this leader (who resisted Westminster for fifteen years after declaring himself in 1400 Prince of Wales), decided to fight back with fire.  

Contrasted with those who took the fall for the pipeline bombings and attacks on buildings in the 1960s, why were any arsonists undetected for another ten years? They had clandestine backing, Humphries reasons, from the people. Folk heroes rather than incendiaries, they were not feared-- as were the 1960s bombers-- for importing leftist revolution.  Invented for Northern Ireland, the Prevention of Terrorism Act brought down its force upon Welsh suspects; again many were taken in without cause. The perpetrators eluded the law. Over two hundred holiday and second homes (often turned permanent residences, thus undermining Welsh culture even more) were burned over twelve years. 

Dignity despite destruction permeates this story. Imagine protests during the 1960s elsewhere with such polite signs as Capel Cefyn’s residents carried to Liverpool in vain: “Your homes are safe. Save ours. Do not drown our homes.” Or, “Please Liverpool, be a great city not a big bully.” (17) After the first attacks on homes in 1979, a note written in ballpoint pen was found:

“The houses were burnt with great sadness. We are not ferocious men. It was an act of despair. The rural areas are being destroyed all over these islands. Wales is our concern. These homes are out of reach of local people because of the economic situation. We call upon individuals of goodwill to take action before these sorry steps take place.” (qtd. 163) 

Emyr Humphreys sought to escape by fiction his homeland’s strife but his mythic models revived within his novels’ depictions of his neighbors and colleagues, caught in an anglicizing land that meant the author himself had to use “the language of the oppressor” to speak on behalf of his Celtic tribe. For a second author with nearly the same surname, also raised in an assimilated Welsh home and working for London’s mouthpiece, the “paper of record” in the Welsh capital, a similar journey back to the heartland occurs. Humphries does wander, during the 1980s, into his own entertaining but digressive stints abroad as a foreign correspondent, but he comes back to his homeland in 1988 aware that swerves away from the anglicized complacency of the Anglo-Welsh establishment may represent renewal. Under Margaret Thatcher’s closing of the mines and privatization of steel, the Welsh workers capitulated, as despair fueled reaction vs. resignation. One-third of North Walians are English-born.  Cohesive communities-- to where Lewis and Humphreys as young men had left their cities to learn Welsh-- have dispersed. 

Humphries closes his study integrating his own reflections. His own transformation from editor for a pro-British, anti-Walian Cardiff newspaper into a critic of Westminster demonstrates a telling shift. He supports Welsh autonomy and welcomes his grandson, raised speaking Cymraeg. He critiques the pacifism of Plaid Cymru’s Gwynfor Evans as “fundamentally incompatible with Welsh freedom.” (191) Whereas Emyr Humphries shared with Evans and Lewis the traditional non-conformist avowal of a Christian socialism (an aspect deserving here as with Green more than a cursory nod) refusing to countenance rebellion by armed means, Humphreys allies himself with those tired of Plaid’s careful retreat into quietism. He backs (if for awhile) Cymru Annibynnol/ Independent Wales Party and its refusal to support the 2001 census which denied Welsh their ability to tick a box for their identity. 

This editor, now retired from the fray, ends with a recapitulation of flashpoints for Welsh resistance. In-migration from England, the concomitant reduction of the Welsh-speaking heartlands, and the recurring water demands from its larger, thirstier neighbor add up. They summarize grim assurances that the seven million sterling spent to crush a few dozen rebels in the 1960s may pale before the costs accrued by those complicit in cultural, linguistic, political, and ecological destruction of a long-exploited nation.

Slightly revised and altered for Amazon US 8-14-12:Freedom Fighters and  Emyr Humphries

"Mebyon Kernow + Cornish Nationalism": Book Review

Unlike Scotland and Wales, Cornwall represents ambiguity as a Celtic nation. Formerly Celtic-speaking, its last native speakers having died before the nineteenth century, for five centuries it remains an English county. This paradox, accepted by many of its residents, introduces this study by Bernard Deacon, Dick Cole, and Garry Tregidga. (Cardiff: Ashley Drake-Welsh Academic Press-Griffin Press, 2003. ISBN: 1-86057-075-5.) Mebyon Kernow & Cornish Nationalism sums up, concisely and dispassionately, the formation of the 'Party for Cornwall' in 1951, its revivalist and antiquarian predecessors, and its inspiration for wider Cornish Solidarity pressure groups and Cornish Assembly campaigns now agitating for de-evolution in the wake of SNP and Plaid Cymru's successes over the past decade.

The language had faded well before industrialization took full hold over Cornwall. Contrasting with Welsh and Scots nationalist efforts in the early 20c, Cornish progressives took the momentum that erosion of agriculture as a basis for most of its residents provided, and celebrated the spread of the machine. Yet, by the end of the last century, the last tin mine having closed after millennia digging and refining the metal that made Cornwall famed, the trust placed in mechanization had crumbled. Instead, the influx of second-home owners from 'up-country' loomed, along with the relegation of Cornwall as a touristed but otherwise neglected backwater by Westminster, as larger threats. Reasserting Cornish Celtic identity has both played into the hands of those vacationing or retiring there, and tricked those predicting that cultural nationalism could never lead to political activism among those once again proud to be Cornish, not English.

The second chapter surveys the early 20c language movement. The Celtic Revival, as elsewhere in the Atlantic archipelago, remained mired too often in antiquarianism. Garbed druids were picturesque, but failed to use their powers to halt emigration of the land's youth. Many who sought to resurrect the language fought against any accompanying radicalism, paralleling the Gaelic League-IRB Hyde-Pearse contentions. Henry Jenner is here quoted in 1926 as claiming 'no wish on anyone's part to translate the Irish political expression "Sinn Féin" into Cornish, [or] to agitate for Home Rule for Cornwall [or to] foment disloyalty to England's King or the British Empire.' (16) Jenner's assurances of an apolitical revival showed how fearful many of the elder generation could be about any revolution, given the scale of Ireland's recent wars.

Only at mid-century, in the postwar British reassessment of conventional pieties, did nationalists form a constitutional party, Sons of Cornwall, MK. Even tiny nudges towards what was perceived as a call for federalism or regional representation aroused mainstream culturalists' fears echoing Jenner's jitters. Under Richard Jenkins and other committed activists, change began, however small. The competition, the content, and the compromises could be tiny: unable to select among three vying canonized candidates to be Cornwall's patron saint, it was agreed to consecrate the Duchy to their care as a trio.

But, by the early 1960s, more substantive rather than symbolic considerations loomed. Although the authors make no mention, the parallel with Sinn Féin in the Wolfe Tone Society ginger group of the mid-60s sharpens the depiction of what confronted a miniscule cadre. Young Cornish patriots, like their Irish and other Celtic counterparts, longed for not nostalgia but real advance into a politically relevant and economically practical terrain upon which the recovery by Celtic nationals of their land, their subsistence, and their citizenship could be contested and won. For MK, the enemy emerged after the Greater London Council was formed. The GLC proposed-hidden from local scrutiny-that their metropolitan overpopulation problem could be alleviated by the relocation of thousands of its urban millions to rural areas such as Cornwall. This 'overspill' would flood whoever and whatever remained of a native, regional, and Celtic culture, the MK argued. Inspired by the SNP and Plaid Cymru, MK fought back through conventional elections. Like the Welsh and Scots (and the Irish parallel again of Official SF-The Workers Party, unmentioned again by the authors), such methods sputtered and few gains were kept in the invader's Parliament. Powers of resistance again slipped away from Celtic control.

Three splits, in 1969, 1975, and 1980, weakened MK. Two of these led to splinter parties. The complaint reminded me again of that leveled against the Provos more than once. The older organization, restless youth and militantly minded veterans complained, was too broad rather than too narrow a place for Celtic action. If everyone from soft-focus language lovers to conservative ruralists to itchy leftists belonged to MK, it could not move forward into grasping and holding onto meaningful gains, politically or practically.

By the 1970s, opposition did coalesce around one main enemy: housing. Holiday homes and the rising prices that tourism spurred combined. They undermined the ability of native Cornish to afford to remain in their homeland.

But the radical action of another group of Mebyon, the Sons in Wales, the Free Welsh Army, and other shadowy contingents was not the acceptable face of Cornish nationalism. As the paper Cornish Nation became radicalized by such Celtic guerrillas in the early 70s, protests were lodged about its 'increasingly sympathetic coverage of Irish Republicanism.' (61) And in a media climate that loved the global warming of fist-pumping wild youth, the Cornish staged their own performance art. Posing as, inevitably, the 'Free Cornish Army,' students from Plymouth Polytechnic, among '40 fully trained units' as they claimed, marched and were duly photographed and publicized before the trick was spoiled. (62) The heated atmosphere of the decade did, however, lead to another substantial storm, albeit contained within the confines of the Cornish nation. The Cornish National Party broke away from a too-timid, so they charged, MK in 1975. Two years later, the CNP leader left, lamenting its 'infiltration by communist elements.' (67)

By the 1980s, then, MK languished. As with the SNP and Plaid Cymru, the authors explain, the Thatcher years hastened MK's retreat into 'internal reflection about its philosophical role.' (75) Restless younger members, often with socialist ideological support, formed into pressure groups for more immediate action. Ties with leftists and Greens were sought. An elusive An Gof entity threatened violence. MK and nationalists consistently rejected physical-force efforts. They preferred backing up anti-nuclear grassroots efforts. They fought 'Devonwall,' in which the Crown would consolidate Cornish with Devon's services after its 1974 reconfigurations of the British counties.

The new European Parliament, later that decade, inspired calls for local representation, but the Cornish constituency was deemed too miniscule.

With the 1990s, the anti-Poll Tax protests sparked a novel legal defense. It was deemed illegal under a treaty, never repealed or superseded it was argued, that was signed by England with Cornwall-in 1508. Allied as Cornish Solidarity, many resistors to the Crown expanded regional resistance. Although only as a fill-in line under a newly placed box marked 'Other,' the Cornish could present themselves to the rest of Britain as a distinct ethnic group for the first time. In 2000, ten percent of the Cornish electorate, or 50,000 voters, signed a call for a local Assembly. At the time this book went to press, this effort met with stalling by Westminster, but the authors cautiously conclude that such a renewed pride in Cornish regionalism signals a sea-change from ingrained attitudes dominant as late as the 1970s that diminished cultural heritage, belittled local tradition, or condemned political activism among the Celtic remnant at the tip of the British island.

Their summaries make instructive reading. Deacon is a lecturer in Cornish Studies at the University of Exeter. Dick Cole currently leads MK. Dr Garry Tregidga serves as the Deputy Director for the Institute for Cornish Studies (at Exeter). They hold that the language activists have been often 'over-defensive'. (114) This may, they suggest, reflect decades-and centuries-of malaise in Cornish society. So long marginalized as the Celtic Fringe colonized within England itself, its natives lack confidence that its leaders can produce change and decide actions on the local level. Yet, the authors add, the cultural agenda derided by many as nostalgic decades ago now proves that results can be measured. The Celtic manifestations may be more displayed as kitsch in souvenir shops than before, but the Cornish flag flies, signs reflect bilingual heritage long suppressed, and resistance to the Anglophonic juggernaut can be seen more immediately than before by locals and tourists alike. (Compare my review of Marcus Tanner's "The Last of the Celts", which has a pessimistic chapter on this heritage industry in Cornwall and considers all six Celtic nations as doomed to extinction as the language erosion in turn eliminates any ground upon which natives can survive with any indigenous culture or self-governing polity.)

Still, the visual recovery of a Cornish nationalism, the authors warn, does not wrest territorial security. The Cornish flag was forcibly removed from flagpoles after the 2002 death of the Queen Mother, they note. This symbolizes how fragile are the symbols.

Flag-waving, they concur, may make Cornish prouder, 'but it has not fostered a clearly and consistently pro-active nationalist political activism.' (115) But, the druid-garbed revivalists of a century ago could never have predicted how fluid Celtic identity could become. Rather than looking back to antiquated slogans, the authors remind us, the newest Cornish symbols may be heard in music-and emblazoned on surfboards. (Amazon US 8-14-12; in slightly edited form to The Blanket 30 Nov. 2005)

P.S. See the New York Times, 17 November 2005. Sarah Lyall's 'Saving Cornish: But Stop. Isn't That Spelled With a K?' About 200 can converse in Cornish. But four competing versions contend, and any e-mailer, Lyall claims, rather than selecting the 'wrong' version and so incite the recipient's hostility, had better write only in English.

Ronald Hutton's "Blood & Mistletoe": Book Review

As the leading social historian of pagan movements today, Professor Hutton explores how the Druids, from the scant literary accounts left by their foes and by the few material traces left by themselves, have been interpreted over 2,000 years. He focuses upon their appropriation as cultural symbols, for better or worse, by the English, Welsh, and Scots. They have presented these ancient practitioners of wisdom and magic as demonic, romantic, proto-Protestant, anti-Catholic, death-obsessed, and/or socialist.

This broad array of categories demonstrates both the scope of the research necessary to uncover such traces in the British imagination, and the skill with which Dr. Hutton applies his understanding of historical bias and wish fulfillment to all who seek to claim or condemn the Druids as ancestors of the island’s three major nations.

Frequently, Professor Hutton notes how he had to condense an already massive study. This expands his popular 2007 study, and the endnotes, small print, and the elevated tone (leavened by humor as with his other books) do not detract from its readability for an audience committed to the advanced degree of both sympathy and distance which the author brings to his project.

He has gained in past work the cooperation of those who, as neo-Pagans, his own research has helped to challenge in terms of their own “origin myths.” Professor Hutton should earn again the respect of those open minds within the pagan community for his honesty, acumen, and fairness.

Blood & Mistletoe reminds us of the manner in which historians carry into the past their own present preoccupations. As a case study in the reconstruction of a barely-glimpsed group for whom linguistic or archeological evidence remains notoriously perplexing, the way in which scholars as well as seekers have labored to recreate the Druids in the images of their own ages and mentalities serves as its own testament to history’s inherent bias.

As soon as the Druids were introduced by such as Julius Caesar and Tacitus to their Roman audience, the priest(esse)s were caricatured as wise magicians (mistletoe) or barbarian butchers (blood). As with the Scottish highlanders or Native Americans cleared off their lands only then to be celebrated by their colonial conquerors, so, Professor Hutton demonstrates, the Druids were romanticized by the Romans after they had been castigated as savages. The evidence for an Iron Age Druid as selected from surviving later Celtic texts combined with archeological data, Dr. Hutton asserts, becomes warped by “the instincts, attitudes, context, and loyalties” of the interpreter.

Tracking the next 16 centuries, Dr. Hutton surveys the building of the legend. Historians, he explains, tend to follow a “hard” approach that favors a bold intervention by a person who shakes up the world, or a “soft” one that follows the cultural, political, and social shifts whose dramatic results may be delayed until the right person comes along. For this tale, William Stukeley follows the latter definition. His attempts to interpret the stone circles and monuments that puzzled the British ensured his popularity. He began by claiming a less Christian framework for their construction, but his increasing piety then led him to shift his argument. Either way, his influence persists even today among certain—if decidedly “alternative”—adepts.

Iolo Morganwg, the name assumed by Edward Williams later in the 18th century, follows Stukeley. The chapter on his checkered career as a “wayward genius” as determined to forge a future for the Welsh who resisted Anglicization and British imperial control shimmer with insight. It displays Professor Hutton’s command of complexity, for Iolo’s mission confounded a nation. Morganwg tainted the medieval Welsh-language sources he claimed to discover and edit. He ensured that the culturally threatened Welsh people would be trapped in their recovery of their own history as one in which truth and falsehood had been intermingled by him over decades, in ways so intricate that it took many years and considerable scholarship by experts to correct for some of the forgeries he crafted as claims of archaic Welsh rituals, legends, and occult practices.

However, from his entry into the historical record, Morganwg also inspired his fellow men and women to reclaim the practices of the Druids as they imagined them to have been carried out long ago. The traditions, albeit invented ones, have energized Welsh-language culture ever since. These also influenced the Georgian and Romantic poets and scholars who across Western Europe as well as in Scotland and England struggled to build frameworks based on Celtic and Scandinavian myth, the classic texts, and the Bible “in which to contain the early European past.”

When science emerged with Darwin to undermine biblical models of progress, antiquarians and then archeologists rushed in. By their own cultural assumptions via “explanatory models” stamped by their own time and place, they intruded heavily upon the same limited, fragile, evidence.

For nearly a century and a half, English figures of white-clad Druids (assembled as spiritual practitioners and as mutual support societies) have concocted their own ceremonies, fashions, and origins, based on Stukeley, Morganwg, and the nearly as challenging countercultural characters from long before the hippie era, first the formidably eccentric William Price and later the Universal Bond as headed by the intransigent George Watson MacGregor Reid. Price and Reid intriguingly shared a determination to legalize cremation, one of the many byways that this book reveals as it delves into the underbrush of British popular culture and social change from progressive and dissident forces. From the 1920s onward, the spiritualist and then New Age movements also overlapped with those who called themselves Druids, harbingers of change.

The familiar processions chanting around Stonehenge and similar Stone Age sites, as Dr. Hutton shows in English Victorian and early 20th century commemorations, have become less the radical, secular, or early countercultural protests they appeared to traditional Christians and more, by the advent of the rock-and-roll era, a sign of British tradition against modernity.

Full of anachronism, nevertheless these Druids came to stand for an enduring summer solstice tradition of their own. This modern invention on June 21st has persisted, on if often off, since the 1860s.

Even as the Bible was discredited and Darwin deified by many who shared the leftist mindsets of many Druid adherents, problems persisted among those who claimed to correct earlier misinterpretations. Popular perceptions a hundred years ago settled upon a romantic, Celtic visualization; secular scientists looked not to the Bible itself but to the same Middle Eastern roots for a civilization that dispersed its lore across the world, all the way to pre-Roman Britain. Professor Hutton incorporates his own knowledge of recent scholarship and his schooling with some leading scholars who proclaimed this model of diffusion from a far-off land of knowledge.

This section bogged down with intricate debates among archeologists, but even at its densest, the range of sources and energy brought to this project displays the professor’s sharp mind and generous spirit. The novelty of the Druids whose archives he scours appears to have lessened, despite the charges kept alive by a few reactionary Christians of their murderous sacrifices of babies, prisoners, and criminals.

I admit with surprise that recent film treatments such as The Wicker Man were not analyzed, and as the professor admits, nearly nothing seems oddly to remain extant of memoirs or accounts by the common folks who joined the Druid organizations in the past few centuries. However, this is already a substantial, long, and very detailed book.

Finally, Professor Hutton shows the mingling of those who speak for and then as the Druids—Stukeley, Morganwg, Reid foremost—as also those who make up its rogues’ gallery. Mingled deceit and honesty persists in this clever trio. They all provoked controversy and then shunned the limelight once public opinion fanned by prejudice or ridicule turned against them. Later, it edged toward them, attesting to their own adroit manipulation of a certain kind of media magic.

Secrecy endures as the ultimate legacy of this mysterious movement, then as now. Professor Hutton has uncovered and shared with us all he is able to in a book of 500 learned but accessible pages. It should remain the definitive source, not on the Druids about whom we know so few facts, but on those who claim in their homelands to remain true to their enigmatic but compelling spirit, thousands of years later. (Featured May 10, 2011 at the New York Journal of Books)

Ronald Hutton's "Witches, Druids & King Arthur": Book Review

These collected essays examine mainly pagans past and present. The title may be pitching an historian's scholarship more widely. For Hutton, the leading expounder of the discontinuity between modern and ancient paganism, such a wider audience may welcome his work.

The essays are uneven in length and scope, and at times some drag. I found my attention wandering on and off, but I admit far less interest in magic than witches, say, and more in Druids than the Renaissance, for example. But all chapters make thoughtful points, and Hutton phrases his judgments with tact and care. He delves into controversial subjects and dismantles falsity. The title and cover may evoke an occult or stereotyped overview of these subjects, but these are advanced essays, geared for the educated reader. Perhaps those less knowledgeable may finish these thoughtful pages with a greater respect for an historian's approach to mythmaking.

"How Myths are Made" takes on the British Isles. Kilts, atrocity tales from the English Civil War, native Irish resistance, or "traditional" Welsh dress, among many examples, can be shown to be fabricated rather than verifiable products from long ago. I found some of his discussion on Irish republicanism, the topic closest to my own studies, to be at times overstated and simplified. But he does resurrect a broad range of delightful anecdotes to elaborate his contentions. As in the faithful hound-legend of Beddgelert, how the Russians were supposed to have infiltrated English ports early in WWI, Margaret Mead's islanders, Melville's "Typee," or how 120 years seems to be the maximum length one can "trust" any orally transmitted memory.

The next two essays explore Arthurian lore-- first how recent academia treats the historicity of Arthur, and then how Glastonbury became a New Age center full of dubious dabblers. The fourth one looks at length into "the New Old Paganism" and seeks to find how monotheism began to supplant polytheism among non-Christians in later antiquity. "Paganism in the Lost Centuries" examines strands of ancient belief that may have become enshrined, so to speak, in the Christian-dominated culture. These two are both densely written studies. For more on this field, by an author whom Hutton barely touches upon, see Pierre Chuvin's "Chronicles of the Last Pagans." (Also reviewed by me on Amazon US and this blog.)

"A Modest Look at Ritual Nudity" tries to find if this practice, contrary to Hutton's earlier thinking that only Wiccans practiced it regularly as worship, and not any ancient cult, may have existed way back. The evidence of course may be suspect as often we only have detractors to track for such charges. Yet Hutton shows here as throughout his scholarship an appealing open-mindedness to sift through masses of difficult sources on touchy subjects to find what seems most likely true.

For Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Hutton returns to their familiar stories to find more pagan foundations than many Christian apologists do for their mythologies. Hutton argues that in the tension between their faith and their love of pagan tales and multiple gods, the two Inklings gained the power that marks their best work. Especially for Tolkien, Hutton reminds us that except for an "accident of publication" (231), the Middle Earth we know would have been preceded by the origin and creation myths of the gods later assembled after his death into "The Silmarillion," and if that work had been put out first, we'd likely read differently the rather understated mindset and populated mythos within "The Lord of the Rings."

In retrospect given two works on the ancient and modern Druids, published later this decade, Hutton's "The New Druidry" appears to be a warm-up for these books. He notes how 200 years of a "dream of syncretic universalism" for pagans in the wake of Romanticism appears to be waning. We see emerging in its place a more localized, land-based practice as becoming grounded by those reclaiming and reinventing "the old native religions." (249)

My favorite essay, "Living with Witchcraft," serves as a coda for his most famous study, "The Triumph of the Moon" (1999). This was the first serious history of modern British neopaganism. Hutton contrasts the patient reception it gained among current witches and pagans-- even as it revised their own origin myths often-- vs. the fears, contempt, and ridicule indulged in by many of his academic colleagues when they learned he studied witches and witchcraft. Even with tenure, he felt his career often at risk when engaging in sensitive research into what's a misunderstood, denigrated, and/or too overdramatized yet very under-explored topic.

Hutton reminds us, for some need so, of how past scholars fumbled their investigations into witchcraft. He shows how professors have toyed with their informants from the pagan community, and how cautiously he then had to tread to keep the confidences he established. His ethics and probity speak well for his difficulties, as he relates in compelling detail how controversial witches remain for the British audience. When learned clerics and esteemed dons scoff at the legitimacy of such research, one can only suppose how everyday folks regard witches and neo-pagans among them. Hutton represents the first sustained attempt to teach the public and the professoriate about the truth of modern witchcraft and its reasons for the same respect accorded other religious practices by today's neighbors.

By the way, the "nine million" supposedly executed in "Burning Times" for their "Old Religion" are shown an extrapolation of a 1793 figure of "9,442,994" from a unnamed local historian in the first chapter. (30) In this final section, Hutton shows how "Triumph of the Moon" sought a more sober revision of inflated discussion of witches past and present. (He estimates 40-50,000 probably died for witchcraft in Europe during Christian hegemony. [31]) (Posted to Amazon US 11-26-09)

Tara & a traveller's tale

Only 300 feet elevated, but Tara's eminence does appear, once you're on it, to expand. 16 counties from this navel, this fifth province, supposedly can be seen, but not when I stood there. An Atlantic storm had washed over Meath, neither mountain nor bog. Gales scoured tourists off the hill, but left a few (neo-)pagans.

And/or those who had studied them that weekend before this excursion. Among them, recalling (if not a Facebook one done today that defined me for my "God can neither be proven nor disproven" assertion as bonafide "atheist/agnostic") my recent Beliefnet.com quiz scoring me a hundred percent as "neo-pagan" and a "Mahayana Buddhist," I heard on the way over Tara's background. An ancient coronation site-- likely far older than the Celts who spread its fame. We were told of its past rumored glory and its present predicament-- as it borders a new motorway-- by a practicing dharma follower. He'd preceded me in our panel on Irish Buddhism panel at the NUIM conference on Alternative Spiritualities he'd organized at Maynooth.

Palisades and piers, of course, by millennia of rain as we encountered had long blown away, but ceremonial ramparts and ditches remained. The Mound of the Hostages upon which I first scampered upon chilly arrival was perhaps raised over a passage-tomb in 2500 or as long ago as 3200 BCE, when the Boyne monuments, Tara, Newgrange, nine km. away from there at Millmount (a new one to me, but I'd seen it-- still thinking it only a Martello Tower and not bard Amergin's supposed tomb after the Milesian landing in Eirinn ca. 1694 BCE in lore-- as a landmark to guide myself by when disembarking from Drogheda's bus station, and over its summit I'd see my last sunrise over Ireland two days later as I waited at that same terminus), Loughcrew, Slane: these too were orientation lines down to the Irish Sea, aligned by Stone and Bronze Age peoples about which we know nearly nothing but their stones and spiral scratches.

These guided my ancestors along the maternal path of the stars called not the Milky Way but Bóthar na Bó Finne, "the road of the illuminated cow" along the Boyne river valley down to Drogheda and the Irish sea, so Anthony Murphy and Richard Moore argue in a book I'd consulted before my trip about the derivation of "Tara," their "Island of the Setting Sun: In Search of Ireland's Ancient Astronomers." If I had looked further into Murphy & Moore, as they summarize at Murphy's "MythicalIreland.com", my perambulation around what I figured just another Norman-Cromwellian-Imperial tower of subjugation overlooking Drogheda might have been more cautious, or more inspired. Still, as it was that last morning, I noticed the conjunction of road sign for Newgrange with the day-star's ascension over Millmount, and I basked my pale face in its welcome glow.

Back to where I'd wound up after Drogheda and Maynooth, Tara, as our host told us on the bus, while it had succumbed despite long protest to the M3 motorway thanks to a greedy landowner connected with the government's right of way through the valley, still remained at least somewhat vindicated. Soon, closer than my home is to the world's first freeway, visitors to the hill will be able to hear (as I do here) the hum of traffic piercing the calm. The motorway waits 2.2 km. away, ready to ease congestion of Meath as it suburbanizes, as does Drogheda along its own new highway, and the pressures of a wealth undreamed of by Tara's assemblies of three thousand, with three hundred cooks to sustain them, in fabled if still mysterious days of yore.

The challenge lies for those who must dig and discern. The British Israelites damaged the site a century ago in their foolish insistence that Tara equated with Téa who came with eponymous Scotia from Scythia via Pharaoh's Egypt of the Exodus. The motorway did its own destruction, as it had with the infamous Wood Quay demolishment when that Viking-era site on the Liffey had to go the way of the valley below Tara to satisfy earlier scions favored by a nation's leaders more engaged with money than dúchas, heritage being less a value and more a marketing scheme. "Save Tara" failed against Celtic Tigers. Still, the salvage archeologists hired by the same Republic did their best for their masters in their doomed project. (I recall Brian Friel's 1975 play "Volunteers" about the Wood Quay destruction, and the digs done on Liffey''s shore, in his drama, by prisoners there.)

A few of us from the Alternative Spiritualities conference-- all students (at least) of neo-paganism more than Catholic pilgrims, befitting our weekend's exploration of New Age and 'new religious movements' in the changing Ireland that led to Wood Quay and Tara Valley's erasure and also their mourning by such as us a saving remnant of keeners-- heard from the organizer a telling tale. A few Buddhists on reverting to an earlier practice than the indigenously implanted Catholicism, a few years ago, had defied Patrick's decree. They buried on Tara a snakeskin. They proclaimed the return of the repressed, the triumph of what 1500 years had failed ultimately to banish from the Emerald Isle of now saints pursuing shamanism, healing arts, and druidry, and scholars such as we studied them.

Our teller's daughter, four-year-old Alannah, was as I told her aptly named for one of the Irish words for beauty. She and her minder walked about the blustery hill. Nobody else I could make out was on it. It did seem to stretch out much farther than you'd expect, once you scaled its gentle slope, barely noticeable. A couple of Travellers, New Age more likely than native, offered a Scottish scholar, an expert on cults, a homemade oatmeal and chocolate biscuit after she talked with them. They stood at a tent over a fire.

We trooped past after a stint in the dreadful teashop-cum-gift shop that I will not dignify with a name. My Downpatrick host noted later a fine used bookstore's nearby, and I wished I'd spent my time there rather than wandering ruefully its few square feet. One section, candle-scented and unattended off to the backside, filled with wraps and bric-a-brac you might find in a Keltick Mall ("mall"="slow" in the Irish) out of an airline shopper's catalogue in your seat pocket. The other, where I stationed myself after foregoing tea (I take it easy on the road, remembering well a time two years ago from Glencolmcille to Ballyshannon when the bus had no time to stop for me to stop in Donegal Town; under an an hour later on the weaving road I was about to burst and-- mortified-- had to dash off to the jakes, begging the driver and passengers to wait.), boasted such a selection of misguided New Age gimcrackery that it made my hometown's shop, The Bodhi Tree, look as serious as the Bodleian Library at Oxford, I hazarded.

The only semi-respectable book on Tara, Michael Slevin's illustrated guide, was what you'd expect, but that was it. All the rainbowed, crystalline, astrologically aligned auras and baubles and gee-gaws you'd desire filled the other shelves. As our guide mused, "twenty years ago, you'd never've seen this in Ireland." I looked for a tea-towel, standard of an earlier brand of kitsch, for my wife, but the single one on sale failed to move me. No State-approved map, no visitor's guide, and the audiovisual center that took over the old C of I church up the hill--talk about prime real estate-- tellingly was open only in a sunnier tourist's season.

My own Maynooth talk had loads of pseudo-scholarship cited; I have always had sympathy for misguided autodidacts like British Israelites I confess. So, I glanced in what soon turned to disdain rather than delight in what I will not name by author, titled "The Lost Magic of Christianity: the Celtic Essene Tradition." Even by New Age teashop standards, disappointing. To my dismay, the expert on cults bought it, I had a feeling not for novelty's sake, and a colleague who studied circles from an anthropological perspective sprung, despite her skepticism, for said self-published scholar's (the book jacket noted he was of Anglo-Irish gentry descent so his inevitable coming to live on an island off his family's former colony's coast was foreshadowed I suppose) companion volume full of spirals and circles galore.

Maybe I was to blame or credit for those two purchases by curious scholars. I'd told them on the bus, after that expert's query, that although Tara's naming as bodhisattva of compassion and Meath's omphalos seemed fortuitious, my own forays into many scholars, degreed and self-taught, failed to show more than happy coincidence, unless "teamhair" as "eminence" and "sTAR" and Hindu status for the goddess beloved by Aryans and Tibetans could make a very attenuated Indo-European match made in heaven. I wish I could have proven this. Surely the teashop benefits from such imagined conjectures by many who visit Tara during equinoxes, solstices, and cross-calendrical times the eight seasons of the neo-pagan commemorations.

I scanned the trinkets but was depressed by the Cadburys, Chinese-made trash, and soulless Green Man zodiacal "crafts" that lacked any "mana," any spirit, any genuine pagan spark. The clerks did a boom business, even in the damp, for where else were the few visitors an All Saint's morning going to go until-- and if-- the sky cleared?

I figured my change should go to a better cause on Tara. I've always left coins in the Guide Dogs for the Blind figurines on my British and Irish travels; I did then. I'm a soft spot for totemic appeals to charity. If beggars dressed up in animal costumes, I'd probably donate more to their pet causes.

Once outside, I did see a rainbow to the south-east. One of six I'd see that day, easily a record for me from "the land of little rain." It occured to me for the first time that such apparitions might appear always at a certain angle to the sun. But I lacked the astronomical expertise that Murphy & Moore documented among our forebears here along the Boyne. I contented myself by showing the rainbow to Alannah on the bus, where some had retreated for shelter before we faced the pagan forces who kept so many from easily enjoying Tara that morning.

I told Alannah's minder, as we tried to talk about the Irish prison system (she was studying the juvenile incarceration-rehabilitation there), about the even more dismal American equivalents. But, the weather discouraged advanced discourse. "At least it's not rainy, cold and windy," Maria commented as gusts slapped even native Irish faces silly. "It's only two out of three," I sighed. My Southern Californian nature had won out over my genetic disposition. It was brisk, even natives concurred.

We academics marched out, finally, and the wind hit me hard as we faced the hill itself among the mud and grass. Cattle grazed as they may always have among whomever scaled Tara long before teashops in the Old Age. We closed gates to keep them in or out, and we soon faced "Dumha na nGall," that hostage's mound, and other fancifully named (by antiquarians determined to make the nondescript surface remains match the scraps of Iron Age sagas) sites, such as An Forradh, the king's seat, and Rath Righ, the fortress of the kings, and Teach Chormaic, Cormac's house. I tried to scurry up that last one, but as the wind roared, I admit it was difficult. Still at its small summit, I made out even in the mist a panorama that seemed to encompass the horizons as I swooped around 360 degrees, a splendid sight, if one's imagination was kindled.

The site's rich, if you harbor that kind of mindset as I indulge-- for research purposes only-- in sexual and potent allure, if subtly so after so much Christian revision. The 'Bán Fheis,' euphemistically called the "sacred marriage" said to have been granted by Medb or Maeve to nine successive suitors seeking the symbolic kingship over the isle, here was said to have been consummated. Michael Dames wonders if the cry of the standing stone when it approved a claimant might recall the orgasm-labor cry twinned of a woman transformed into a goddess, a faint gasp of Neolithic ritual.

The position of the Lia Fáil (although moved from its original site where it'd been found fallen) and the night sky, Murphy & Moore suggest, hold an alignment of release into the Bó Finne, the Milky Way, the path for the Bóinne, the cow-goddess of fertility that even in Stone Age times four millennia before Christ may have guided early settlers along this sacred route towards and from Drogheda from Millmount along Newgrange, Slane, and the next place we'd visit, Loughcrew.

Alannah's father asked a few of us outliers making our own confused pilgrimage in the whirling breezes if we'd want to see a sheila-na-gig. The C of I graveyard, that well-chosen plot, stood on an older site, naturally. Two small standing stones in it rested near a ruin that was a church wall from who knows when, the visitor's center being locked up. Near the base of one stone, the sheila-na-gig rested, if unseen to the likes of my eye. On what to me looked like a slightly raised bit of lichen, but what the expert told us was beneath one of these caricatures as if from a medieval bestiary, much debated by feminists, New Age devotees, archeologists, and folklorists still.

I can direct you to a Wikipedia entry easier than I can explain these explicit, disturbing, but still, to my warped sense of humor, amusing creations. "Figurative carvings of naked women displaying an exaggerated vulva," as the definition primly puts 'em. Made famous for many impressionable hipsters by a P.J. Harvey song, as my Drogheda host and her big fan might second. Underneath the stone, I was touched. Three tiny pink petals, trefoils smaller than periwinkles, rested, and one white. Despite the nasty weather that "soft day," they nestled in a row securely beneath and among the elements. I'd see no such floral tribute left before Patrick's supposed tombstone the next day in Downpatrick.

It helped to have so much noisy air about and so few companions. One fellow from the conference, a young, earnest autodidact from Clonmel down in Tipperary who to my earlier delight had the same name as my older son and had worn a Lakers cap like my younger would, circled and quietly recited as he dipped his walking stick into the puddles. I respected his ritual. Yet, he also jammed with his foot what looked like to me a purple child's purse into the grass in front of Lia Fáil, the stone of destiny. That puzzled me. Next to the half-buried phallic pillar in commemoration stands a hideous marker raised for Patrick. This juxtaposition alone made me want to see the eradication of papal priestcraft in this snakeskinned demesne.

The daughter danced about, chanting too. Her minder encouraged her to keep hoping as she asked the Lia Fáil: "I want to be a princess." The stone answered the royal petitioner-- a man back then in less enlightened times-- by shrieking approval for the claimant to the throne. I assured the four-year-old girl that the wind was too loud for her to make out the stone's approbation, and with that diplomatic judgement she was well pleased.

I found out on that hill a bit of my own connection to a mystery from the past. NUIM's Attracta Brownlee had researched not New Age but indigenous travellers in my ancestral maternal territory of East Mayo. I went up to her by the Mound of the Hostages and asked her about my great-grandmother's surname. I had suspected it to be a Traveller name, but I had doubted any intermarried back around 1880. Still, then as now, a few do, she told me with authority.

Like pagans, perhaps not the most popular group to ally with even in today's Ireland, but Travellers until recently stayed, or were made to stay away, rooted in what so many in today's Ireland reject at their peril, as plastics replace tin, cars turn plastic. My Irish cousins rush to pave over their past and make it to me an all-too-familiar parking lot. Coming from L.A., take my caution as a warning, will yiz? Attracta confirmed it was all but certain given the name and provenance and time that I am a direct descendent of a people still argued over today, as to when and where and why they came to wander, once, these roads. Roads less crowded if no less dangerous than today's superhighways. Romanticizing our heritage runs its own risks.

So, I left Tara's hill with my own small share of acquired wisdom. Granted with a scholar's judgment, I accepted my smidgen of folkloric Irish heritage. It rests within a family tree, far off, but I claim it as Alannah did her reign over Tara.

Photo from a good overview on "Mythical Ireland: Tara". Hard to get a sense of this site from the air or from illustrations. I've seen it all my life in books or on screens, but still, you get a liberating sense from standing on Tara, I swear. Defying I pray even the motorway's arrival, there is a magic power there. Even for cynics like me.

Coirnis: an teanga Ceilteach beo aríst

Tá Coirnis beo slán aríst. Léigh mé an alt fúithi. Tá sé anseo: "Cornish Coming Back from the Brink" le Henry Chu ina 'Amanna na gCathair na hÁingeal' inniu.

Is cuimhne liom chomh ag léite fúithi agam go bhfuil dúshlán de réir aistriú ceart. Mar sin ní raibh comhcheangal ag rá Coirnis, níl leagan sin in úsaid gach uile duine anois. Tá tri modhannaí: Coiteann, Aontaithe, agus Nua-aoiseach i An Corn.

Ar scor ar bith, insíonn Chu go raibh aontaithe anuraidh faoi caighdéan ag scriofa sí faoi dheireadh. Mar sin féin, tá trí chéad duine Coirnise ag labhairt go líofa an teanga seo anallach Ceilteach is cosúil as Breatnais agus . Tá duine leath-mhillúin i gcónaí i gCornach.

Is iníon deiféar bhean a tí agam. Tá an nheacht seo i a chónaí ina Ghleann Féir i gCalifoirnea Thuaidh. Tá sa cheantar go raibh áitriú leis mianadóirí Cornach ar feadh an "Ruathar Ór."

B'fhéidir, tá foghlameoirí fásta ina bhaile sin féin ag éisteacht a podcraobhannaí "Miotas Ceilteach" gach seachtaine leis An Corn as Coirnise. Cuireann Maitiú Ó Clerigh Kernewegbva amach bealach naisc sin fós. Ní bheireann mé an podchraobhanna eile as Coirnise ansiúd air triu iTunes i Meiriceá, os a choinne sin.

Go iontach, bhí eipeasód de "Na Siommainach" leis "Sibeal" ag liú as Coirnise: "Rydhsys rag Kernow lemmyn!" {"Saoirse dó An Corn anois!"} Deir Chu go raibh cúis is déanaí uirthi. Ar ndóigh, níl ábalta muid ag féiceáil an eipeasód seo amuigh An Bhreatain Mhór ach oiread.

Cornish: A Celtic tongue alive again.

Cornish is alive and well again. I read an article about it. Here it is: "Cornish Coming Back from the Brink" by Henry Chu in the "Los Angeles Times" today.

I recall while I was reading about it that there was a struggle concerning a correct version. Since there was no continuity in speaking Cornish, there is no rendering that's in use by every person now. There are three styles: Common, United, and Modern in Cornwall.

However, Chu tells that there's unity last year about the standard in writing it, at last. All the same, there's only three hundred Cornish people fluently speaking this ancient Celtic tongue, similar to Breton and Welsh. There's a half-million people living in Cornwall.

There's a daughter of [the] sister of my woman of [the] house {="my wife's niece"}. This niece is residing in Grass Valley in Northern California. This district was settled with Cornish miners during the "Gold Rush."

Perhaps, there's adult learners in that same town listening to "Celtic Myth" podcasts every week from Cornwall in Cornish. Matthew Clarke sends out "Kernewegva" by way of that site too. I cannot catch the other Cornish podcast from over there through iTunes in America, on the other hand.

Wonderfully, there was an episode of "The Simpsons" with "Lisa" {"Lizzie" is closest in Irish} yelling in Cornish: "Rydhsys rag Kernow lemmyn!". {"Freedom for Cornwall now!"} Chu says it was her latest cause. Naturally, we weren't able to see this episode either, outside Great Britain.

Ghriangraf/ Photo: "Bheith móralach as Cornach/ Kernow bys vykken/ Proud to be Cornish" cap from/caipín ó/"Cornish Heritage Shop/ An Siopa Dúchas Cornaigh".

De ghlór an bháis?

Scríobh Caitríona Ní Dhonghaile ina nuachtan "Eireannach Neamhspléach" 20 Feabhra faoi tuarascáil nua le UNESCO. Duirt siad go bhfuil Gaeilge "ag cur i gcontúirt go cinnte" é. Mar sin, ní fhoghlaimíonn sé mar príomhteanga ina bhaile leis duine ar bith.

Ar scor ar bith, insíonn UNESCO go raibh ag cur "i mbaol" mar Baisceis, Gaeilge na hAlban, agus Breatnais. Níl é seo chomh olc. Faigheann an triú na teangachaí bás atá ag druidim leis anois. Chuala mé go imeacht leathan na teangachaí ar fud an domhan sa céad againn féin.

Ar ndóigh, tá bron ormsa féin go leor faoi an tuarisc seo. Ar feadh an seachtain seo caite, léigh mé freagra ó Nigel Ó Ceallacháin orm. Is foghlaimeoir fásta é na Gaeilge (Oideas Gael chomh mise!) agus Breatnais níos formhór. Chonaic mé alt go scríofa leis Nigel ina leabhar go léamh mé anois, "Breatnais sa Bhliain" leis Jen Llewelyn.

D'fhoglaim sé Breatnais go foirfe. Tá sé i gcónaí ina An Bhreatain Beag anois. Oibríonn sé leis ducháis Breatnaise gach lá. Is é leathanach baile anseo. Tá Nigel go bhfuil duine dea-shamplach go raibh muineadh dúil ar aghaidh againnsa eigin.

Bhí seanathair Breatnais airsean féin ina bhaile. Bhí seantuismeitheoraí Gaeilge acu mise féin. Ní déanfaidh duine níos mo i bhfad ó láthair nó de chóir baile fiú amháin an dushlan mór a foghlaim teangachaí Ceilteach amárach. Níl deireadh dúile bainte de agam fós. Tagann muid briathra deireanacha.

In a dying voice?

Katharine Donnelly wrote in the newspaper "Irish Independent" 20 February about a new report by UNESCO. They say that the Irish language's "definitely endangered" [="put into danger surely"]. That is, it is not learned at home as a primary language by anybody.

However, UNESCO tells that Basque, Scots Gaelic, and Welsh are put in the "unsafe" category. This is not as bad. A third of languages find death approaching now. I heard half of languages all over the world will go away in our own century.

Of course, I myself was very sad about this report. During the past week, I read a reply to me from Nigel Callaghan. He's an adult learner of Irish (Oideas Gael like me!) and moreover Welsh. I saw an essay that was written by Nigel in a book I am reading now, "Welsh in a Year," by Jen Llewelyn.

He learned Welsh perfectly. He lives in Wales now. He works in the Welsh-language homeland every day. Here is his homepage. Nigel is a fine example of a person who may inspire an expectation to progress within some of us.

He had a grandfather with Welsh himself in the home. I myself had grandparents with Irish. Fewer people from afar or even close at home will make the great struggle to learn Celtic tongues tomorrow. I have not yet given up hope of it. We revive dying words.

Photo/ Griangraf: "Stair, Láthair, agus Todhchaí Athbheochan na Gaeilge i mBéal Feirste" le/ "Past, Present, and Future Revival of Irish in Belfast" by Harry Holland, Glór na Móna, (="Voice of the Turf"= lost in translation?) 2007. Tá muid ag plé faoi Gaeilge as Béarla. Tosaíonn muid go mall. Caitheann muid cloí leis an bhfírinne. We discuss Irish in English. We start slowly. We must stick to reality.

Dafydd Jenkins' "A Nation on Trial: Penyberth 1936": Book Review

Does a moral law overrule that of the State? What happens if you reject violent protest, but you still fight back practically? Can military installations turn legitimate targets for anti-war activists? Symbolically, would a small act of damage to an RAF bombing school turn a nation away from craven submission or economic capitulation to its dominant, ruling neighbor?

These questions, posed by later radicals such as the Catonsville Five, have been debated for centuries by theologians, judges, citizens, and especially among members of an oppressed minority faction. Schoolteacher D. J. Williams, Baptist preacher Lewis Valentine, and university lecturer Saunders Lewis directed their rage, only after eloquent and learned appeals to the Crown. The English-- who previously had saved a similar site in England for the preservation of swans-- determined to go on. As usual, the Welsh had been ignored, patronized, or ridiculed.

The English, preparing for another world war, built a bombing range and training school on the Welsh-speaking bastion, pilgrimage-hallowed trails, and natural beauty spot of the Llŷn peninsula in Caernarfon, beyond Pwllheli. While some locals welcomed the jobs this project would bring during the Depression, most Welsh people who were polled opposed this intrusion into an ecologically fragile and linguistically sensitive region. I reckon this may have been one of the first instances in a Celtic country when these two causes were explicitly linked.

Jenkins wrote this account originally in 1937 (in Welsh "Tân yn Llŷn" or "The Fire at Lleyn") six months after the trial for arson of what came to be known as "the Three" at what must have been a very young age, for he offers sixty years later an updated forward to this 1998 edition. Williams, Valentine, and Lewis were tried first by a Welsh court in Caernarfon and then, under great publicity for the refusal of the men to testify in English but only in Welsh, as moved to the Old Bailey in London. As with perhaps in more tense circumstances the arrests and executions of the Irish rebels after the 1916 Rising met at first with disdain or indifference among many of their countrymen and women who soon would rally to the Cause-- many Welsh people appear to have back then regarded "the Three" as cranks or crooks. They failed to ignite a national rebellion. Yet, their stance inspired those who had relegated the tiny Nationalist party Plaid Cymru to the far margins; from 1936 on, the momentum steadily grew, if slowly, for a revival of the language and a maturity in what would control the direction of Welsh nationalism.

Their decision to not only do damage to the military base, however minor, but to turn themselves in immediately so as to demand their right to be heard by a jury of their linguistic peers in a Welsh court, so as to make their case known to a wide audience in an honest and principled fashion, certainly speaks highly for their daring P.R. ploy. Jenkins offers a carefully presented depiction of the background, the arson, the two trials, and the stirring testimony of Valentine and Lewis.

The minister proclaimed his allegiance: "It was my responsibility for the Kingdom of God in Wales which led me to strike a blow for Wales in this act, since there is a higher law than the law of the English state-- our allegiance to Christianity is higher--"(at this point the judge interrupts; 74) Valentine defends their destruction as a means to alert people to the threat that war, ammunition, and imperialism represent for a nation that never invaded another land, and for a people who asked to be left in peace, free from the carpet bombing and mass murder that would soon overcome Europe again.

Comparisons between "the Three" to Martin Luther King, Gandhi, or the Dalai Lama may or may not have been made before, but they'd be intriguing ones. Do you go limp before the fire hoses? The later president of Plaid, Gwynfor Evans, twice to my knowledge went on hunger strikes: do these offer a sensible offensive? How far can totally non-destructive protest go? Can there be, as some argued in Irish republicanism, legitimate economic targets that can be hit, with no risk for loss of life? Could this provide strategies for an alternative radicalism? Or, especially post 9/11, must we expect only "state-sponsored terrorism" to be met by state-sponsored aggression in an endless if sanctioned war on terror levied from us all?

For Lewis, his intellectual rationale overlaps with Valentine's Christian antinomianism, but this critic of Welsh literature tends to assert a subtly structured, yet boldly stated, rationale. He regards the arson as another lesson to prove his studies relevant, to assert a Welsh Wales. As president of Plaid Cymru, he had and has often been denigrated as a highbrow out of touch with popular instincts. Yet he roused a few (under Evans) who led the party into a resurgence. Their rearguard stance in retrospect may have saved much of what remnants remained of Cymraeg or Cymry Cymraeg from annihilation under cultural colonial carpet bombings.

I cite at length from Lewis' defense, for his statement deserves consideration in the wake of what has happened among many liberation movements and freedom fighters before-- and since.

"I have repeatedly and publicly declared that the Welsh nation must gain its political freedom without resort to violence or physical force. It is a point I wish to affirm today. And I submit to you that our action in burning the Penrhos aerodrome proves the sincerity of this affirmation. Had we wished to follow the methods of violence with which national minority movements are sometimes taunted, and into which they often are driven, nothing could have been easier than for us to ask some of the generous and spirited young men of the Welsh Nationalist Party to set fire to the aerodrome and get away undiscovered."

The strategy had been deployed to mark the four hundredth anniversary of the Union in 1536. The marches and petitions had not worked. The Welsh needed, Lewis and his colleagues reasoned, an event to rally around. He continues that "the Three" had "determined to prevent any such development" as a regression into mob rule or assaults by vigilantes and fires set under darkness. Instead, they vowed to take responsibility for their crime, and then in court to aver it was no crime at all.

"When all democratic and peaceful means of persuasion had failed to obtain even a hearing for our case against the bombing range, and when we saw clearly the whole future of Welsh tradition threatened as never before in history, we determined that even then we would invoke only the process of law, and that a jury from the Welsh people should pronounce on the right and wrong of our behaviour." (77)

This savvy ploy earned them a degree of attention, if less than might have been expected. John Davies in his forward examines the mixed legacy of Penyberth's burning, for it meant Plaid members expected their leaders to suffer trials and incarceration on behalf of those at large, afforded "delightful political thrills." (xi) Ann Corkett's translator's note cautions that the tactical side of Lewis may have been obscured by his rhetorical stand. Yet, as she agrees, our knowledge in hindsight of what Jenkins may not have known in 1937 regarding legal countermoves by the defence does not diminish the real risk "the Three" took. The maximum sentence of penal servitude for life may not likely have been employed, but it remained an option for this trio of mild, kindly, and sensitive men who faced the possibility of prison.

This book originally appeared while they still served their terms. A brief appendix sums up the main players, an afterword recaps the reasons why Penyberth had been so highly regarded by lovers of Welsh culture, and a bibliography in both languages steers readers further along a fascinating episode in Welsh history, as well as a precursor for other such principled reactions to power and war later last century. One wonders if a Tibetan, Cuban, Palestinian, or Chinese reader might learn about Penyberth today, in some half-forgotten library. While not an easy book to procure even in its reprinted editions, it remains a thoughtful and valuable account of how ordinary folks can stand up to tyranny, however benignly or inevitably masked.

(Posted today to the half-forgotten listings of Amazon in US & Britain.)

Madoc: A Legendary Prince's Mythical Power.

This is my initial post to the Madoc discussion at the Welsh-American Internet Network. It's the story of a Welsh prince (Madoc or Madog) who claimed to guide in the 1170s a band of settlers who later became absorbed into the Mandan natives, argued variously but usually around the mid-South (or the far Dakotas) among its mound-builders. This proto-colonial tale became propagandized during Elizabeth's reign to bolster British expansion and Welsh cooperation.

Talk about coincidence. The morning-- speaking of mythologizing on Inauguration Day-- after I read about this by chance, I get an invite to join. I copy this diplomatic missive for wider audience attention (such as it is on this little blog!)

I'm a newbie to this network, so I will try to tread firmly but politely. I confess quite a few years of research, for academic and personal aims, of Irish investigations but a semi-dormant concurrent interest in Welsh cultural, nationalist, and linguistic connections to Ireland. Now, I am trying to learn more about the Cymric side. Please be tolerant!

My interests also include medieval British literature and medievalism, thus my curiosity in how Celtic tales get revamped by later storytellers. Madoc's been on the back burner although I've yet to read my copy of Gwyn A. Williams' study; I am halfway through his "When Was Wales," however.

By the way, I've reviewed a couple of titles that are germane. In passing, Emyr Humphreys' "The Taliesin Tradition" brings up Madoc in the American context as a rallying point for Welsh colonization. I posted about TTT on my own blog (see link to my review on my blog URL at my profile) only ten days or so back, and on Amazon US. Humphreys accepts the power of the legend but remains skeptical. If I may say so as a medievalist, a great-grandson of a man killed for his Land League activism for the Fenians-- found drowned in London over a century ago-- and as someone aware of how we moderns make sense or nonsense out of a presumed or real Celtic past, I'd caution romanticists about taking distant rumors and inflating them into what people centuries later want to wish. That's the appeal and the danger of Celtic revivals.

While I remain sympathetic to Ken Lonewolf's claims, I am also sure that he and anybody involved in serious searching of this vexed question about Madoc wants to follow truth and not conjecture. The Mandan-Welsh similarities rumored may be a treacherous foundation, for this tenuous and often coincidental tallying up of soundalikes reminds me of British Israelites who argued that Brit="covenant" and Ish="man" in Hebrew, so voila-- British had a Hebrew origin. Linguists to my recollection deny Mandan-Cymraeg cognates; seekers of alternate paths to wisdom denied by scholars may believe otherwise. As a Celt myself, whatever that revived term means thousands of years on, I acknowledge both a tug of my soul and the restraint of my mind.

Madoc has a tangled context. Iolo Morganwg's involvement in the publicizing of John Williams' account in 1791 should be noted. He did not always rely on facts, to say the least. Madoc was told to bolster Welsh emigration, it was promoted to counter Catholic colonists and Spanish threats, and it was popularized earlier by John Dee, who coined [see blog comments for correction by Rodger Cunningham and my reply] the term "British Empire," in his support of Welsh backing and co-option of that people and that polity within Elizabethan imperialism. Madoc was used to extend royal power.

I reviewed a few years ago the Irish poet Paul Muldoon's 1990 "Madoc" book-length sequence on Amazon US-- it's as formidable, erudite, and enigmatic as his other verse, I warn you, very loosely based on Robert Southey's 1805 epic. And, just last night, with no idea about this group yet, I was browsing Meic Stephens' "The New Companion to the Literature of Wales" (2nd ed. 1998). I found its entry on "Madoc." Here's the final three sentences, after it relates Madoc's 1858 debunking by Thomas Stephens. This entry seems to strike the right balance between skepticism and possibility; I admit I was surprised by its open-minded tone.

"It was probably a legend concocted in the sixteenth century to counter Spanish claims to the New World and to stress Elizabeth I's rights as heir to the Welsh princes. Yet, bearing in mind the strong Viking connections of the rulers of Gwynedd and the fact that Viking voyages across the Atlantic are accepted as germane, the Madoc story is not wholly incredible. There is no serious navigational argument against it and references in Welsh poetry, the account of William the Minstrel and early Spanish maps can be interpreted to give it credence." (s.v. 476)

P.S. Forgive me for a first post that may repeat earlier comments, but as I happened to find this only last night, I figured I'd leap into the friendly fray. Thanks for your comments in return, and I hope I can learn from this discussion. Hwyl pob ichi.

Illustration: Note Margaret Jones' cover for Y Lolfa's publication. Gwyn Thomas has authored earlier children's books with medieval storyteller/ compiler Kevin Crossley-Holland. "The First White Americans" proves a provocative subtitle. Image from "Bad Archeology: Leave Your Common Sense Behind." Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews offers to me a fair-minded evaluation of the evidence, or its lack, as he surveys recent claims to debunk it.

I'd be eager to see how Ken Lonewolf, chief of the "Shawnee-Welsh Madoc Native Americans," responds-- given his counter-claims of DNA linking him to the historical Owain Gruffydd, alleged as Prince Madoc's grandfather. The whole tale sparked by the earnest Elizabethans concocting a "capital" myth that'd resonate two centuries later for Romantic poets and post-colonial landgrabbers within a newly independent America doggedly seeking to oust Spain's Catholics from the Louisiana Territories-- with pioneers passing along hearsay about marvelous sightings of "white Indians" speaking attenuated Welsh among their fortified mounds.