Beyond Selidor

I've had a marvellous morning sitting in the university library reading the PhD thesis of a friend of mine (I'm reading it because it's relevant to my own research, not because she's my friend), and this reminded me once again how much I love my subject matter. But it also got me thinking how devalued humanities research is by society at large, and how it's incorrectly scorned as being frivolous or lacking in relevance to people's lives. Now, sure, research on literary representations of the nexus of land, history and claims to power might not be cancer research or studying the effects of climate change. But there is a point to it all, and this point has relevance outside the ivory tower.

I'm talking, in particular, about the tendency of Irish texts in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to carry on endlessly about the names of things - specifically, place-names: the history behind a name, the political group whose identity is bound up in that history, the various claims to power that such names represent, and the increasing need to keep written records of such names and meanings in order to solidify these claims. What you tend to find are a number of texts expressing sentiments along these lines:

'And because of such-and-such an event, Place X became known as Place Y, and this is the name that will always be upon it.'

Along with this anxiety that place-names might change (and displace the claims to authority that the original names represent), you also find authors using toponymic facts on the ground to justify their own contemporary political aims. Thus, in one of the poems about Temair (Tara, in modern-day Co. Meath) in Dindshenchas Érenn ('The Lore of Notable Places of Ireland', a sort of collection of stories about the names of prominent sites), you find the extraordinary claim that because there are multiple other sites named Temair, all of them are clearly satellites to the Temair in Meath. (The name 'Temair' probably originally meant something like 'high/prominent place', so it's entirely normal that numerous hills in Ireland have that name.)

So what? you might be thinking. But this is in no way a medieval Irish phenomenon exclusively. I come from Australia, and we have multiple place-names that are anglicised versions of whatever a place was called by the Indigenous nation who inhabited it before European settlement. (The city of 'Canberra', for example, is an anglicisation of what the region was called by its Indigenous inhabitants.) But there are many places in Australia which have an Indigenous name and a European name. Uluru/Ayers Rock is probably the most well-known. When I was growing up in the '90s, it was normal (in educational contexts at least) to refer to the site as 'Ayers Rock'. I'm not sure exactly when the switch took place, but certainly by the time I became a teenager, everyone called it 'Uluru'. To refer to it as 'Ayers Rock' nowadays would mark you as either an elderly person or a racist.

Then you have place-names such as 'Sydney', which refer to things that didn't exist in pre-settlement times. Certainly the area where the city of Sydney now stands would have had names given to it by its Indigenous inhabitants, but there was obviously no city there, and so the name refers to a transformation of the region undertaken by those who had taken control of it. I make this point because in the Irish literature I study, there are repeated instances where a character or group take control of an area, transform it in some way, and give it a new name in reflection of this transformation. (For example, they build a fort or cut down a forest, and the new name reflects these actions.)

I use the Australian examples because they are things with which I'm familiar, but I'm sure you could find many comparable examples elsewhere in recent history throughout the world. Names matter. Controlling the history and the written record matters. And recognising that people understood this even as long ago as in twelfth-century Ireland gives us a certain insight into human nature. Nothing we study, is, on closer inspection, divorced from reality or irrelevant to the concerns of our own times. We (and by this I mean humanities students) do ourselves a disservice when we play down this aspect of our research.