Description
For years, any editing work I carried out of medieval Irish texts did not include variant readings that were ‘merely’ spelling variants. Like many other editors, I was mainly interested in variants that would help me determine the linguistic date of a text, or perhaps the various strands of textual transmission. When I encountered the sixteenth-century Irish- language manuscript VLQ 7 in Leiden University Library, however, I could not bear to ignore its spelling, since the spelling stood out to such a degree that it was obvious that the copyist had either been incredibly clumsy or incredibly creative. This opened up a new perspective: could medieval Irish copyists be creative in their spelling, and if so, why? If Mark Sebba could write that ‘(…) we spell because orthography is part of the elaboration of our culture; because there is a natural tendency for all human activities which involve choice to take on social meaning’ (Sebba 2007: 160), then perhaps a medieval Irish scribe approached spelling in a similar manner. This paper will provide an initial analysis of the orthography of first section of VLQ 7, which contains a section of Echtra Finn, or Finn and the Phantoms, and which was written by a single scribe. In this, I will follow the sociolinguistic approach to orthography as proposed by Sebba, which sees orthography as an inherently ideological system.| Period | 8 Jul 2024 |
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| Event title | Poznań Conference of Celtic Studies 2024 |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Poznań, PolandShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |