Beyond Selidor

It's been a pretty quiet weekend, but the main highlight was that Matthias got his first dose of the vaccine! The whole process was extremely well organised and straightforward (the benefits of it being managed by the NHS, as opposed to some Tory donor or ill-qualified friend of Matt Hancock's from the local pub). Matthias was notified by text about a week ago that he was up for the vaccine, he had to go to a website to choose a slot, and then he just had to show up at the venue (a medical centre on the other side of town, about 35 minutes' walk away) at the appointed time. The whole vaccination, from arrival to departure, took about five minutes, and apparently involved lots of people in high-vis vests sending people to various tables.

He had the AstraZeneca vaccine, and had no side effects yesterday, but said today his arm felt sore, and he had flu-like symptoms and was very sleepy.

I'm not eligible for the vaccine yet (and won't be for some time, as people in their thirties with no chronic health conditions are — rightly — at the bottom of the list), but it's reassuring to know that everything is working really smoothly.

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We have a fantastic little florist around the corner, and I've been buying a lot of flowers from her since we moved in (as well as fruit and vegetables, as she's started selling those as well). However, what I'd really been wanting was indoor plants. Our old house didn't have enough suitable surfaces to keep them (the one suitable windowsill I used to grow tomatoes), but this house has a plethora. I'm loving slowly filling the house with greenery, and I have the photoset to prove it.

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Given that Matthias was feeling very under the weather today (and that we can't really go anywhere anyway), I curled up on the couch and spent most of the day reading.

The book in question was incredible: Irish author Deirdre Sullivan's Savage Her Reply. It's billed as a feminist retelling of the myth the Children of Lir, and it is that, but what it really is is a story about women's anger, told in lush, poetic language that devastates like the crash of waves against the shore. It's a book told by someone who clearly has a deep and wide ranging love of medieval Irish literature (although its presentation of that literature and the context in which it was written hews more to the popular understanding than accepted scholarly consensus), but also someone who recognises — and is wounded by — the deep misogyny at its core. (It's a book that achieves what I was trying to do in this fic, and in the numerous fics I've written which attempt to reclaim the story of Tochmarc Étaín for the women it renders voiceless.)

It's a story about power — and about the ways men will use the women and children around them as weapons to be wielded when seeking that power — and the tools left to the powerless, and how those tools are demonised. It's also about the damage that hurt and powerless people will do, to themselves and others, and about the way that stories, and history, and the written record become a way to assert authority, and hide unwelcome truths.

Every line cut like a knife:

'What a pleasure, to show you and everybody else what happens when people who do not deserve power try to use it, for what? You desired to anger Lir with your cruelty? I will shake the very world with mine. And I am king, so people will remember it as justice.'

All in all, an amazing book. Not easy to read, and not gentle, but reverberating with power.

I've found that these briefer posts with three links seem to work better than longer links roundups, so I think they're going to become a semi-permanent fixture here.

First up, a link to the online exhibition put together by my former PhD supervisor (and others), A History of Ireland in 10 Words. This exhibition is a synthesis of work that they did initially on the academic Dictionary of the Irish Language, that they then adapted for a nonspecialist audience into a book, A History of Ireland in 100 Words, and then adapted into the exhibition. Apparently there were beautiful banners up all over central Dublin as well. The exhibition was meant to be in a physical space ... and then lockdown happened.

I found this article in The Guardian, in which newspaper reviewers and critics revise their former reviews (of music, films, books, etc), to be really interesting and thoughtful. I cannot believe the music critic who originally hated Daft Punk's Discovery album, though!

Finally, enjoy this video of Australian magpies singing together.

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.