Juxtaposing Cogadh Gaedel re Gallaib with Orkneyinga saga

Abstract My intent in the following paper is to make a case for the usefulness of comparative analysis in a narrower and more specific context, that is, in examining two fascinating but often marginalized medieval works: the Irish Cogadh Gaedel re Gallaib (modern Irish Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh ["The Battle of the Gaels and the Foreigners"]) and the Icelandic/Orcadian Orkneyinga saga ("The Saga of the Orcadians"). The Irish text relates the travails of Irish kingdoms in withstanding the depredations of Viking invaders over the course of several centuries, leading to the emergence of the Dal gCais Boruma dynasty of Munster, the rise of its greatest son Brian Boruma (Boru) to the lofty title of High King of Ireland (a rank seldom held by the kings of Munster), and his subsequent fall and death in an insurrection led by revolting Irish and Scandinavian populations in the fateful Good Friday Battle of Cluain Tarbh (Clontarf) on April 23, 1014.Issue title: Festschrift for John Miles Foley. This article belongs to a special issue of Oral Tradition published in honor of John Miles Foley's 65th birthday and 2011 retirement. The surprise Festschrift, guest-edited by Lori and Scott Garner entirely without his knowledge, celebrates John's tremendous impact on studies in oral tradition through a series of essays contributed by his students from the University of Missouri-Columbia (1979-present) and from NEH Summer Seminars that he has directed (1987-1996)

The narrator's voice in Kalevala and Kalevipoeg

By looking at one of the most important aspects of any such epic of the era--the narrator's role, usually equated with the persona of the bard--I believe we can perceive different strategies for handling and organizing the traditional material these nineteenth-century scholars had as their sources and different attitudes regarding the relation of scholarly editor to the epic bard of the past. We can glimpse differing implicit images of the role of the literary redactor in the great transaction underway between traditional performers and a modern reading audience, images indicative of areas of ambiguity in the literary enterprise of epic-making

Interpreting lyric meaning in Irish tradition : Love and death in the shadow of Tralee

This study is part of a larger research project that focuses on North European lyric songs: a genre characterized by its focus not on an explicit plot (as in narrative songs) but on the depiction of feelings, personalities, or situations glimpsed in the persona of an inscribed lyric "speaker," whose words or perceptions make up the fabric of the song.Not

Oral tradition

My current research focuses on the interpretive traditions behind lyric songs in Northern Europe. In my understanding, oral tradition refers on the one hand to concrete players and objects observable in an oral performance and, on the other hand, to a murky yet essential body of knowledge that underlies every aspect of the performance as created, enacted, and interpreted.Not

Lars Levi Sunna: Crafting a Sámi Presence in the Swedish State Church

The article explores the intertwined religious and artistic viewpoints of contemporary Sámi artist Lars Levi Sunna of Kiruna, Sweden. Sunna self-consciously situates his artwork within a personal and familial history that centers around traditional Sámi livelihoods and the practice of handicraft (duodji). Through his duodji-inspired picto- rial art and art installations, Sunna chronicles a personal exploration that involved learning about his people’s pre-Christian religious traditions and consciously making a place for them within his life and work, while maintaining his identity as a Laestadian Christian. Keywords: Sámi, handicraft, duodji, Laestadianism, Lars Levi Sunna, shamanis

The Kalevala received : from printed text to oral performance

In this study, then, I propose to examine one of Vihtoora Lesonen's Kalevala-derived songs with an eye to the interplay of printed text and oral tradition in late nineteenth-century Karelia. In so doing, I hope to reveal both the artistry and the traditionality of Vihtoora's act of appropriation. By examining literacy in the region and the social contexts in which peasants met with Finnish anthologies, I provide a framework for understanding the means by which a text from 1849 could become part of oral tradition in 1894. The paper's stance and content answer an earlier article in the pages of this journal (1993) in which I attempted to show how Elias Lonnrot transformed oral tradition in creating the Kalevala in the first place. The back and forth of oral and written art--this synergism--lies at the very heart of Finnish folk poetry at the end of the nineteenth century./

Tribological properties of room temperature fluorinated graphite heat-treated under fluorine atmosphere

This work is concerned with the study of the tribologic properties of room temperature fluorinated graphite heat-treated under fluorine atmosphere. The fluorinated compounds all present good intrinsic friction properties (friction coefficient in the range 0.05–0.09). The tribologic performances are optimized if the materials present remaining graphitic domains (influenced by the presence of intercalated fluorinated species) whereas the perfluorinated compounds, where the fluorocarbon layers are corrugated (armchair configuration of the saturated carbon rings) present higher friction coefficients. Raman analyses reveal that the friction process induces severe changes in the materials structure especially the partial re-building of graphitic domains in the case of perfluorinated compounds which explains the improvement of μ during the friction tests for these last materials

Constraining stellar assembly and AGN feedback at the peak epoch of star formation

We study stellar assembly and feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGN) around the epoch of peak star formation (1<z<2), by comparing hydrodynamic simulations to rest-frame UV-optical galaxy colours from the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) Early-Release Science (ERS) Programme. Our Adaptive Mesh Refinement simulations include metal-dependent radiative cooling, star formation, kinetic outflows due to supernova explosions, and feedback from supermassive black holes. Our model assumes that when gas accretes onto black holes, a fraction of the energy is used to form either thermal winds or sub-relativistic momentum-imparting collimated jets, depending on the accretion rate. We find that the predicted rest-frame UV-optical colours of galaxies in the model that includes AGN feedback is in broad agreement with the observed colours of the WFC3 ERS sample at 1<z<2. The predicted number of massive galaxies also matches well with observations in this redshift range. However, the massive galaxies are predicted to show higher levels of residual star formation activity than the observational estimates, suggesting the need for further suppression of star formation without significantly altering the stellar mass function. We discuss possible improvements, involving faster stellar assembly through enhanced star formation during galaxy mergers while star formation at the peak epoch is still modulated by the AGN feedback.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS Letter

Carbon Efficiency of Humanitarian Supply Chains: Evidence from French Red Cross operations

Natural catastrophes are often amplified by man-made impact on the environment. Sustainability is identified as a major gap in humanitarian logistics research literature. Although humanitarian supply chains are designed for speed and sustainability is of minor concern, environmentally-friendly behavior (e.g. through reduction of transportation emissions and avoidance of non-degradable materials) should be a long-term concern as it may ultimately affect more vulnerable regions. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how green house gas emissions can be measured using the supply chain of common relief items in humanitarian logistics. We analyze the CO2 emissions of selected supply chains by performing Life Cycle Assessments based on data provided by the French Red Cross. We calculate the CO2 emissions of the items from ‘cradle to grave’ including production, transportation, warehousing and disposal. Using these calculations, we show that transporting relief items causes the majority of emissions; however, transportation modes may not always be changed as the main purpose of humanitarian supply chains is speed. Nevertheless, strategic and efficient pre-positioning of main items will translate into less transportation and thus reducing the environmental impact. The study also shows that initiatives for “greening” item production and disposal can improve the overall carbon efficiency of humanitarian supply chains

Financing Direct Democracy: Revisiting the Research on Campaign Spending and Citizen Initiatives

The conventional view in the direct democracy literature is that spending against a measure is more effective than spending in favor of a measure, but the empirical results underlying this conclusion have been questioned by recent research. We argue that the conventional finding is driven by the endogenous nature of campaign spending: initiative proponents spend more when their ballot measure is likely to fail. We address this endogeneity by using an instrumental variables approach to analyze a comprehensive dataset of ballot propositions in California from 1976 to 2004. We find that both support and opposition spending on citizen initiatives have strong, statistically significant, and countervailing effects. We confirm this finding by looking at time series data from early polling on a subset of these measures. Both analyses show that spending in favor of citizen initiatives substantially increases their chances of passage, just as opposition spending decreases this likelihood