#irish!luke

[lionofchaeronea]

Incipit of the Gospel of Luke (Quoniam quidem multi...), fol. 188r from the Book of Kells, created in an Irish or Scottish monastery ca. 800. Now in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin.

[llyfrenfys]

I'd like to preface this with that this is a screenshot of a post I saw a few days ago in the #welsh tag and that the OP has since deleted this post, but the sentiment is something I'd like to address since I see a lot of parallels with this kind of thinking in other contexts, such as in LGBTQIA+ rights conversations.

So, the most obvious elephant in the room is the idea that Welsh is super widely spoken in Wales now and that it isn't in as much danger as other Celtic languages. This idea is wishful thinking at best and erases the very real danger that Welsh is in and that it could be lost just as easily as Irish or Scottish Gaelic. Cornish (which is related to Welsh) actually did die out and has had to be revived. To make a metaphor out of this, we classify languages on a scale of non-threatened to endangered in a similar way to how we classify species.

Here are the statuses of Welsh and Irish as of 2010 (above) and the statuses of Lions and Tigers (below).

On paper tigers are more 'in danger' than lions. But that does not mean that lions are suddenly not in danger at all. The little bracket above CR, EN and VU labels all of these classifications as threatened. It isn't (and definitely shouldn't) be a competition of 'who is most in danger' because you do not want the thing you care about (whether it be a species or a language) to be in danger.

To come back to the original screenshot "they* [Welsh speakers] have always had the means and the ways because the English didn't beat or slaughter them for speaking it"- on the most basic of levels, this is just incorrect. The Welsh Not was a wooden token hung around schoolchildren's necks if they spoke Welsh in school. If someone else spoke Welsh the Not would be hung around their neck. At the end of the school day, whoever was wearing the Not would be beaten and caned by their teachers. I needn't go into much detail but there have been concerted efforts to beat Welsh out of schoolchildren. With the lions vs tigers metaphor, making the claim Welsh speakers have never been beaten for speaking Welsh because they always had the means and ways, while Irish speakers were beaten and never had the means or ways is like claiming poachers have never shot lions, only tigers. Bottom line is, lions and tigers are both victim to poaching and both species have suffered as a result. Similarly, Welsh and Irish have both suffered language loss and both need conservation efforts in order to survive.

(*sidenote- the consistent use of 'them' and 'they' in the original post is definitely indicative of a 'us vs them' sentiment which is a deeply unhelpful attitude to have when it comes to endangered languages and the Celtic languages in particular)

I see parallels with LGBTQIA+ rights in this situation. When equal marriage came in for gay and lesbian couples in the UK in 2014, many allies began to act like gay rights had now been achieved and that gay issues had been done, they're solved. Except, they really weren't (and aren't). Progress has been made in Wales and undeniably Welsh is doing the best out of the living Celtic languages. But that doesn't mean Welsh has been saved or that full equality for Welsh speakers has been achieved. It very much hasn't. The sentiment of the post in the screenshot is not conducive to helping Irish or Scottish Gaelic. Putting down Welsh speakers and erasing Welsh-language history will not save Irish or Scottish Gaelic. Pretending Welsh has had it easy in some kind of lap of luxury is a deeply harmful and bogus claim.

I'll address the tags under the cut as this post is getting long.

To address the tags, personal feelings ≠ an accurate reading of a situation. Nor is it praxis, for that matter. Why is pride in Welsh different/less good than pride in Irish? Is it the assumed proximity to England? If so, that's a terrible claim to make. Not only that, but Scotland is also next to England- does that make pride in Scottish Gaelic the same as pride in Welsh according to this metric? It's a ludicrous thing to say and deeply insensitive to the needs of Scottish Gaelic and Welsh speakers, who cannot help any current or former proximity to England.

Additionally, proximity to England ≠ worse. I know it's a popular internet joke to hate on England because of English attempts to eradicate the Celtic languages, but when the joke becomes praxis, it does not help. England ≠ a place devoid of Celtic languages either. Many English counties near the Welsh border actually have communities of Welsh speakers, such as Oswestry (Croesoswallt) in Shropshire. Cornwall is also home to many speakers of revived Cornish. It does a disservice to Celtic speakers in England to insinuate that proximity to England taints or corrupts them somehow. This is how ethnonationalism starts and we ain't about that.

And "#it feels a little.... blehhhhh you were seen as sophisticated and english enough and you assimilated however the Irish and the Scots? #brutish animals that need to be culled". So, this is arguably one of the worst things to say about a Celtic language- or any threatened language in general. First of all, the 'you were seen as' - 'you' is very telling. The switch from 'them', 'they' to 'you' indicates that this sentiment is aimed at Welsh speakers directly. This was likely a subconscious thing that OP wasn't thinking about when they wrote this. But it does indicate unhealthy feelings of jealousy and bitterness unfairly directed at Welsh speakers, who are also struggling. This righteous anger at the decline of Irish and Scottish Gaelic would be better directed at efforts to help promote those languages- some useful things to get involved with are LearnGaelic, similar to DysguCymraeg but for Scottish Gaelic or supporting channels such as Irish channel TG4 by watching their programmes.

The idea that Welsh speakers were or are 'sophisticated and english enough' is insulting and carries with it a lot of baggage of how any of these assumptions came about. Welsh speakers were definitely not seen as sophisticated. Where Welsh was 'tolerated', it was treated as a curiosity, a relic of a bygone age. Classic museification which all Celtic languages and cultures suffer from as well. Welsh was not tolerated in any legal sense since 1535- with English becoming the only valid administrative language and the language of Welsh courts after England annexed Wales into its Kingdom. Monolingual Welsh speakers suddenly had no access to any legal representation, unless they learned English. This is no voluntary assimilation- it is an act of survival for many speakers of minoritised languages to 'assimilate' into the dominant culture, or else risk losing access to legal security and other kinds of infrastructure. You need only ask any non-native English speaker living in an Anglophone country what that process is like. Welsh people did not see English incursion as an opportunity to become 'sophisticated and english enough', they had to assimilate in order to survive.

The "Irish and the Scots? #brutish animals that need to be culled" is also painfully misrepresenting a very complex social and political process that unfolded over the span of hundreds of years. The phrasing itself of 'brutish animals that need to be culled' speaks to righteous anger at the damage done to these languages and cultures, but it reinforces negative stereotypes about the Irish and Scots themselves. It also is more complicated than a simple English hatred of anything non-Anglo, since the English conception of particularly the Irish changed a lot over the centuries. It was (and still is) rarely consistent with itself. See: the enemy is both strong and weak. The very earliest Celticists were by and large, Anglos or French.

Ernest Renan (1823-1892) for example, was an early French Celticist who published La Poésie des races celtiques (Poetry of the Celtic Races- English translation) in which he says:

"... we must search for the explanation of the chief features of the Celtic character. It has all the failings, and all the good qualities, of the solitary man; at once proud and timid, strong in feeling and feeble in action, at home free and unreserved, to the outside world awkward and embarrassed. It distrusts the foreigner, because it sees in him a being more refined than itself, who abuses its simplicity. Indifferent to the admiration of others, it asks only one thing, that it should be left to itself. It is before all else a domestic race, fitted for family life and fireside joys. In no other race has the bond of blood been stronger, or has it created more duties, or attached man to his fellow with so much breadth and depth"

Yeah. This guy (unsurprisingly) was a white supremacist. Note that this sentiment is being applied to all people considered Celtic by Renan- Irish, Welsh, Breton, Scottish, Cornish, Manx etc. None unscathed by the celtophobia of the day. In this period, Celticity was romanticised (yet disparaged at the same time). It is less 'brutish animals' and more 'archaic, time-frozen peoples' in this period. Of course, 'brutish animals' attitudes towards Celticity did still exist, but it is disingenuous to act as if it was this attitude alone which drove English celtophobia. Like many things, it is always more complicated and never clear cut as it might seem.

I'll bring this to a close shortly, but returning to OP's suggestion that the Welsh assimilated and the Scots and Irish did not, is also incorrect in that some Scots did have to assimilate to survive as well. The Statutes of Iona (1609) required Scottish Gaelic speaking Highland chiefs to send their sons away to be educated in Scots and/or English in Protestant schools. Many did as the statutes required, which led to further language loss in the Highlands of Scottish Gaelic. These are acts of survival- and not ones always taken willingly.

This has been a long post but it's one which I felt I wanted to address. There's no need for infighting between speakers of Celtic languages over who has it worse. There isn't any answer to that question, nor is it a good use of time or energy. All in all, the Celtic languages have suffered greatly over the years and its only just now that some of them are turning a corner. If you care about these languages, put your energy into something good. Only through active work will these languages be saved for generations to come.

[vyorei]

Irish MEP Luke 'Ming' Flanagan calling for Ursula Von der Leyen to resign for her unwavering support of Genocidal Israel, he brought receipts.

IRELAND STANDS WITH PALESTINE ALWAYS 🇵🇸💜🇮🇪

Source: @lukeming on Twitter

Video below:

[devil-baker]

Accent musings

English: Lucifer, Dia, Raphael

Scottish: Mammon, Barb, Thirteen

Irish: Levi, Simeon

Welsh: Satan, Luke

Australian: Asmo, Solomon

Kiwi: Beel and Belphie, Mephistopheles

[atouchofireland]

Psssstt... Do ya'll think Luke N is still gonna be Mama Coughlan's favorite after, whilst surrounded by family, friends, neighbors, and strangers, she watches him dick her daughter down almost fully naked, on the big screen? 👀

[jessythebunny]

🚂Luke the Irish engine🍀

💚Luke is the final, youngest member of the group, and also he's the newest member

💚Luke is the smallest engine compared to the others, they don't know why, neither is he. The others think it's because of his young age

💚Luke has a baby deer that he calls Balwie or Deerie to pet him

💚Luke uses an Irish accent more than English, but unfortunately some engines like Diesel laugh at him because he thinks that Luke doesn't know how to talk perfectly

💚he never dares to swear

💚Luke is the engine most protected by others, and he is loved and spoiled by them. Sometimes Luke is a little naive and hasty, but he is very diligent in his work, and he has a caring heart for his friends because he loves them more than anything

💚Luke loves watching cartoons with Peter Sam, and they both love Disney movies

💚He has a tender heart towards Millie, they are known as the youngest couple on the island

💚He always has nightmares about the sea, and has a phobia of the depths of the ocean

💚he's addicted to candy very much, This resulted from his teeth becoming decayed

💚he treats Skarloey as a father, Peter Sam and Sir Handel like his big brothers, and Millie is his future wife

[annabethpursuit]

someone said phillipa soo as mama castellan and yeah i see the vision... racially ambigious mother-son power duo we love to see it

[eagna-eilis]

Ach-To and Irish Archaeology

The sequels were my entry into Star Wars and I never would have gone to see The Force Awakens if I wasn't an archaeology nerd.

During the production of Episode VII, a decent number of people with an interest in our archaeological heritage here in Ireland were quite worried about the impact of filming on one of our only two UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the island known as Skellig Michael down off the coast of Kerry.

I went to the film to see if any potential damage was worth it, or if they'd do something unspeakably stupid with it in-universe. I wanted to see if it was respected.

And holy hell I was NOT disappointed. I think I walked out of TFA sniffling to myself about how beautiful the Skellig looked and how it seemed like its use as a location was not just respectful but heavily inspired by its real history.

See, Skellig Michael was a monastic hermitage established at a point when Christianity was so new that the man who ordered its founding sometime in the first century CE was himself ordained by the Apostle Paul. The fellah from the Bible who harassed all and sundry with his letters, THAT Apostle Paul. This is how old a Christian site the Skellig is. It predates St. Patrick by at the very least two hundred years.

The steps we watch Rey climb were originally cut NEARLY TWO THOUSAND YEARS AGO. They have been reworked and repaired many many times since, of course. Still, the path the camera follows Daisy Ridley up is as much an ancient path built by the founders of a faith in real life as it is in the movies.

A hermitage was a place where monks went to live lives of solitude and asceticism so as better to achieve wisdom. The practice is common to many of the major world religions, including the myriad East Asian faiths which inspired the fictional Jedi.

It is said that the hermitage and monastery were originally built with the purpose of housing mystical texts belonging to the Essanes, one of the sects of Second Temple Judaism which influenced some of the doctrines of Christianity. They also, according to what I have read, characterised good and evil as 'light' and 'darkness' and were celibate.

As such, the use of the island in TFA and TLJ does not merely respect Skellig Michael's history, it honours it. It is framed as somewhere ancient and sacred, which it is. It is framed as a place where a mystic goes to live on his own surrounded by nature that is at once punishing and sublime, which of course it was. It shown to be a place established to protect texts written at the establishment of a faith, which it may well have been.

This level of genuine respect for my cultural heritage by Rian Johnson in particular is astonishing. I don't think anyone from outside the US ever really trusts Americans not to treat our built history like it's Disneyland. Much of the incorporation of the Skellig's real past into a fictional galactic history occurs in TLJ, which is why I'm giving Rian so much credit.

It's Luke's death scene which makes the honouring of Irish archaeological history most apparent though.

Johnson takes the archaeological iconography back a further three thousand years for his final tribute to my culture's beautiful historical temples. This time, he incorporates neolithic passage tomb imagery, specifically that of Newgrange, which is up the country from the Skellig.

I think if you understand what the image represents then it makes a deeply emotional scene even more resonant.

The scene I'm referring to is Luke's death.

As he looks to the horizon, to the suns, we view him from the interior of the First Jedi Temple. The sunset aligns with the passageway into the ancient sanctuary, illuminating it as he becomes one with the Force.

As for Newgrange, every year during the Winter Solstice it aligns with the sunrise. The coldest, darkest, wettest, most miserable time of the year on a North Atlantic island where it is often cold, wet, and miserable even in the summer. And the sun comes up even then, and on a cloudless morning a beam of sunlight travels down the corridor and illuminates the chamber inside the mound.

You guys can see this, right? The similarity of the images? The line of light on the floor?

Luke's death scene is beautiful but I think it's a thousand times more moving with this visual context. Luke's sequel arc isn't merely populated by a lore and iconography that honour the place where the end of his story was filmed, I think that incorporation of that history and mythology honours Luke.

We don't know for sure what the Neolithic people believed, religion-wise. We know next to nothing about their rituals. We know that there were ashes laid to rest at Newgrange. There is some speculation that the idea was that the sun coming into the place that kept those ashes brought the spirits of those deceased people over to the other side.

It's also almost impossible not to interpret the sunlight coming into Newgrange as an extraordinary expression of hope. If you know this climate, at this latitude, you know how horrible the winter is. We don't even have the benefit of crispy-snowwy sunlit days. It's grey and it's dark and it's often wet. And every single year the earth tilts back and the days get long again.

The cycle ends and begins again. Death and rebirth. And hope, like the sun, which though unseen will always return. And so we make it through the winter, and through the night.

As it transpired the worries about the impact of the Star Wars Sequels upon Skellig Michael were unfounded. There was no damage caused that visitors wouldn't have also caused. There also wasn't a large uptick in people wanting to visit because of its status as a SW location, in part I think because the sequels just aren't that beloved.

But they're beloved to me, in no small part because of the way they treated a built heritage very dear to my heart. I think they deserve respect for that at the least.

[nofatclips]

De Selby (Part 2) by Hozier from the album Unreal Unearth - Video directed by Wolf James, starring Domhnall Gleeson

[doireallyhavetochooseaname]

Niall Horan songs are so Colin-coded.

I do not wish to explain.

[stairnaheireann]

#OTD in Irish History | 30 January:

1649 – King Charles I is beheaded for treason. He was monarch of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution in 1649. When Richard Brandon, Executioner for the City of London refused involvement in the execution, emissaries were sent to Ireland, Scotland and Wales in search of a volunteer. There is much speculation about the masked executioner – it…

[meanscarletdeceiver]

He arrived on Sodor from a neighboring land (somewhere akin to Ireland) to work in the Blue Mountain Quarry.

Yes, what this universe really needs is another made-up place (x)

[llyfrenfys]

See, I personally find this quest to find pagan/pre-Christian elements in Welsh/Irish literature quite unnerving - I don't know about anyone else.

There's something to be said about genuinely discovering pre-Christian elements in a narrative or story and that being where evidence and study has led you. But I see some people on this fruitless quest to find pagan elements in very Christian texts and sometimes it feels like if no pagan elements can be found, people start making stuff up out of whole cloth - and that can be very dangerous for already not-well known texts in minoritised languages!

There's already so much misinformation out there about Irish/Welsh texts and literature in general - so it hurts to see people carelessly adding to the misinformation either out of ignorance or lack of respect for the source material.

I promise you the source material being Christian doesn't ruin it - you can in fact, enjoy these myths without making them into something they're not!

[victusinveritas]

Shane MacGowan and Ronnie Drew

Photo by Eric Luke

[araoc]

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[gothluke]

it’s been 9 years, and ashton is still recovering from the sting of luke CONSTANTLY reminding him that he is NOT irish 😭