CMRS Disitinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture: “Boats and Beachcombing: Poets and Power in Early Medieval Ireland, Some Stories from Cormac's Glossary”
Monday, January 29, 2007

In this lecture, Dr. Paul Russell (Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, Pembroke College, University of Cambridge) considered a series of stories preserved in the encyclopaedic Glossary attributed to the late ninth-century king and bishop of Cashel, Cormac mac Cuilennáin. He argued that, because of the particular distribution of these stories through the Glossary, they may have been absorbed into it at the same time. Consequently, it is worth exploring the thematic links between them. It emerges that there are several interrelated themes of which (unsurprisingly for material collected in a glossary) the power of language is the most dominant.