Kingship and the Hero's Flaw: Disfigurement as Ideological Vehicle in Early Irish Narrative

Produced by Hawai'i University Affiliated Program on Disabilities, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawai'i, Frank Sawyer School of Management, Suffolk University, Boston, Massachusetts, and School of Social Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas for The Society for Disability Studies

C.S. Lewis and the Toponym Narnia

Argues a possible derivation of the name Narnia from Old and Middle Irish sources; concludes Lewis was not likely aware of these Irish names, but Narnia was influenced by Lewis’s experience of Ireland

Serial Defamation in Two Medieval Tales: The Icelandic Ölkofra Þáttr and The Irish Scéla Mucce Meic Dathó

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“Finn and the Man in the Tree” Revisited

When he takes refuge in a tree along with animal familiars, Derg Corra, the fugitive in the anecdote Finn and the man in the tree , not only positions himself between culture and nature but also extemporizes a world tree, complete with various insignia of the tripartite cosmos as conceived in early Irish thought. Thus sacralizing the tree, he hopes to escape Finn’s retribution through the creation of a personal sanctuary

Animal vocalization and human polyglossia in Walter of Bibbesworth’s thirteenth-century domestic treatise in Anglo-Norman French and Middle English

Walter of Bibbesworth’s late thirteenth-century versified treatise on French vocabulary relevant to the management of estates in Britain has the first extensive list of animal vocalizations in a European vernacular. Many of the Anglo-Norman French names for animals and their sounds are glossed in Middle English, inviting both diachronic and synchronic views of the capacity of these languages for onomatopoetic formation and reflection on the interest of these social and linguistic communities in zoosemiotics

Norse Loki as Praxonym

The still debated Old Norse theonym Loki is projected against the wide semantic field of the ON verb lúka to close , not, as current scholarship would have it, as relevant to Ragnarǫk and the closing down of the divine world but in its judicial applications to successfull negotiated outcomes. The ingenious Loki, the bearer of a praxonym, would then be the inventive Fixer. While this aspect is well illustrated in tales of Loki\u27s ruses and expedients, a more archaic figure emerges when Loki is associated with the reconstructed Indo-European verbal root *lok- to accuse, blame, prohibit (cf. Old Frisian lakia, Old Norselá to blame ). The early Loki is first and foremost the Blamer (most evident in Lokasenna) and as such represents one dimension of the putative Indo-European poet of praise and blame