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Combined Academic Publishers represents North American university presses, including McGill-Queen’s, in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. This year CAP has launched Books Combined, a collaborative blog project with their member presses, developed to highlight our authors and the books that influenced their work. From the blog:
Better than anyone, we think scholars understand books’ potential, and how books, as repositories for ideas, can change us, and our perspective on the world. In bookscombined.com we’re asking scholars to write about the books that have had a significant impact on their lives – the good, the bad, and the ugly.
In her guest blog post “The book that paid a ransom“, Children into Swans author Jan Beveridge writes about the oldest known manuscript of Irish folklore called Lebor na hUidre, the Book of the Dun Cow, now held at the Royal Irish Academy.
The 900-year-old book was a key resource for Beveridge’s research because of its importance throughout the middle ages, as well as the strange and wonderful tales it tells, including, for example, “a queen transformed into a swan, a fairy woman in a glass boat, and a giant grinding a man between his palms like a millstone”.
The following is a brief excerpt (click here for the full post).
The journey begins, though, with an order of monks and with the scribe, Mael Muire. As I studied the manuscript, I thought of him working for long hours in his monastery’s scriptorium, carefully transcribing this text from older books. Many days it must have been bitter cold as he worked, not stopping until it was too dark to continue. I also imagined him with his writing supplies in a pack on his back, walking great distances from one monastery to another to copy stories. Very likely, Mael Muire was a teenager as were many of the scribes.
At that time, as repositories of wealth the Irish monasteries were constant targets of brutal raids by feuding clans, who looted buildings, stole and burned books, and murdered monks. In 1178 the manuscript’s library would be completely destroyed by the Normans, but by then the Book of the Dun Cow had been whisked away to a castle in Donegal. What saved this book while others were lost over the turbulent centuries was the name assigned to it. ‘The Dun Cow’ referred to a sacred relic, the hide of a dun-coloured cow connected with a beloved sixth-century saint, Ciarán. During these superstitious times some believed that the manuscript’s vellum was itself the relic, capable of miracles and possessing the power to appeal directly to God.
The book became prized plunder in battles between warring clans. On one occasion, it was used as a ransom when kidnappers captured the son of an important family member from the Donegal castle. It is hard now to conceive of a book being of such value that it could be a ransom payment for a human life! For centuries the manuscript shifted from one royal house to another, and then it disappeared into the hands of private antiquarians, its location unknown until it resurfaced, now bereft of many of its pages, in a collection of manuscripts sold to the Royal Irish Academy in 1844. Considering how important this text was during the Middle Ages and still is today, the great irony is that it remains relatively unknown. One reason for its obscurity is that, as a book, it has never been translated from Middle Irish into English.
Children into Swans is a lucid exploration of fairy tales and the lore of ancient stories embedded in them.
From the lost cultures of a thousand years ago, Jan Beveridge opens the door on some of the most extraordinary worlds ever portrayed in literature – worlds that are both starkly beautiful and full of horrors.
“Beveridge provides a concise, comprehensive, scholarly, and fascinating read on myths and fairy and folk tales from Europe, including Scandinavia, during the pre-Christian and Middle Ages through the 19th century. Recommended for mythology scholars and general interest readers alike.”
— Library Journal
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