This is a study of very short songs: pieces long perceived as 'fragments' or remnants of longer narrative texts, and dismissed as the by-products of a degenerative oral tradition. Coverage includes English, Welsh, Breton, American, and Finnish songs. The authors argue that the inherently metaphorical and connotative idiom of traditional song makes external critical notions of 'completeness' inappropriate: in practice, such pieces are rarely felt to be broken or lacking by those who sing them - they have a strong metonymic force. A wide range of texts and traditions texts and traditions is...

Iolo Morganwg was Britain s most successful (and hence, least visible) Romantic forger as well as a poet, Arthurian, influential antiquarian, and laudanum addict. During his lifetime, Britain was fascinated with literary forgery. Iolo s own strongly-held ideas about the truth historical, literary, and religious speak about more than mere deception and offer a provocative look at the blurred intersection of the Celtic and British Romantic worlds. "The Truth Against the World" examines the complex relationships entangled around Iolo s forgeries and their criticism, as well as how, after death,...

This is a vivid introduction, by two of the foremost scholars in the field, to one of the most fascinating and little-known song traditions in Europe, the Breton gwerz, or ballad. These narrative songs, collected in Western Brittany from the 19th century to the present day, recount a wealth of stories based on tragic local events or legends. They tell of shipwrecks, abductions, accidents and murders, miraculous rescues, penitent souls, and strange journeys. Quite unlike songs from the neighbouring French tradition, and distinct from anything else in the other Celtic languages, these...