Brigit Reviews (Series Six): Nonfiction, Academic/Popular Academic

Finally! The last installment of my promised book reviews. A pleasure it was to acquaint myself with the breadth of writing available on Brigit. I'll pin links to the reviews on the Pages tab (below the title banner of this blog) in order to make them more accessible to later readers, and will also make the whole lot available by request as a pdf. In the meantime you can find the previous reviews and introductory material at these links:

Brigit Book Reviews (1): Introduction

Brigit Book Reviews (2): List of Books to be Reviewed

The Reviews, At Last!

Brigit Reviews (Series One): Picture Books

Brigit Reviews (Series Two): Novels

Brigit Reviews (Series Three): Plays and Poetry

Brigit Reviews (Series Four): Nonfiction, Popular (Saint)

Brigit Reviews (Series Five): Nonfiction, Popular (Neo-Pagan)

Brigit Reviews (Series Six):

Nonfiction, Academic/Popular Academic

By “academic/popular” I mean books written in a scholarly style but accessible (sometimes with a real effort) to a general audience. They are footnoted, backed up citations, and so on, and so the thinking in them can be more or less traced and verified. These I can only observe as a reader, not criticize as an expert.

The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion, and Power in Celtic Ireland, Mary Condren (1989)

“Fire and the Arts” (etc) in Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish

            Literature, Kim McCone (1990)

The Festival of Brigit, Séamas Ó Catháin (1995)

Celtic Goddesses: Warriors, Virgins and Mothers, Miranda Green (1996)

“Imbolc: A New Interpretation”, Phillip A. Bernhardt-House (pp 57-76) in Cosmos 18 (2002)

The Rites of Brigid, Goddess and Saint, Seán Ó Duinn (2005)

Landscape with Two Saints: How Genovefa of Paris and Brigit of Kildare Built Christianity in Barbarian Europe, Lisa M. Bitel (2009)

“Queering the Flame: Brigit, Flamekeeping, and Gender in Celtic Reconstructionist Pagan Communities”, by Erynn Rowan Laurie in The Well of Five Streams: Essays on Celtic Paganism (Immanion Press, projected release 2015) 17 pp.

Introduction

There are some delicious writings in here, with lots of obscure references and nimble interpretations; a cornucopia of ideas to mull over in building an understanding of Brigit. Two recommended sources which give abundant info on the world in which St Brigit lived are Early Medieval Ireland 400-1200 by Dáibhí Ó Crónín (1995) (not reviewed here) and Bitel’s Landscape with Two Saints: How Genovefa of Paris and Brigit of Kildare Built Christianity in Barbarian Europe. Placing her in the context of her world allows for a much deeper look into her Lives and mythos, helping us to notice where our assumptions are modern and inappropriate, and allowing us to develop a more balanced perspective.

Though the earliest of these investigations, Condren’s The Serpent and the Goddess is less about Brigit as it is the Christian church in Ireland and its treatment of women. I don’t recommend it for developing an understanding of Brigit.

In The Festival of Brigit, Ó Catháin explores the festival of Imbolc and searches far afield for evidence linking Brigit to, for example, the bear cult and horned deities. Fascinating reading, carefully explored and documented.

McCone’s Pagan Past and Christian Present contains important insights into sacred kingship, the sovereignty goddess, and the three major divisions of Celtic society and convincingly suggests their reflection in Brigit’s various personae.

Green examines the place of women and female deities in Celtic society, and focusses on a number of female-related themes and specific goddesses in Celtic Goddesses: Warriors, Virgins and Mothers. Brigit is looked at in the chapter on the transition from paganism to Christianity.

Bernhardt-House offers a detailed and unique examination of the meaning of the word Imbolc and its possible links to the wolf in ancient times in “Imbolc: A New Interpretation”.

In The Rites of Brigid, Ó Duinn examines a variety of Brigit-related folk customs. He compares in detail the perpetual fires of the Vestal Virgins and Brigit, and describes other sacred and perpetual flames in medieval Ireland.Very useful.

Bitel looks at some important Lives of St Brigit in Landscape with Two Saints, comparing that by Cogitosus of Kildare with those of later writers of Armagh, and putting them into the political context of their times. She examines the legacy of Brigit, and the changing role of women in Ireland.

A rather different perspective is offered in Laurie’s “Queering the Flame: Brigit, Flamekeeping, and Gender in Celtic Reconstructionist Pagan Communities”. This piece, which could have fit well into the Nonfiction, Popular (NeoPagan) section, I place here because of Laurie’s exacting standards of research and presentation. (Footnotes and citations and quotes, oh my!)

You may notice trouble linking to footnotes through their symbols. No worries. Just scroll to the end of the post and they are there.

Read More!

The Meaning of the Word: Imbolc

Cross-Stitch by Donna Amaral

Don't be misled by bold and simple assertions of what Imbolc means. We really are not sure. Scholars give various tentative definitions of the word:

“The exact meaning of ‘Imbolc’ or ‘Oimelc’ presents considerable difficulty, and Pamela Berger suggests gently that cleansing of the fields after the winter and preparing them for sowing the grain in spring may be fundamental in the idea underlying the term. She refers to the theory which separates the term ‘Imbolc/Imbolg’ into two words: im and bolg, im meaning ‘around’ and bolg ‘belly’—the belly of that goddess—that is the land, the farm...”

         The Rites of Brigid, Goddess and Saint, Séan Ó Duinn, pg 19-20.

Ó Catháin reads things differently.

“Imbolc/óimelc the ancient name for the festival of Brigit is defined thus in the ninth-century Cormac’s Glossary:...‘that is the time when the sheep’s milk comes’...Though condemned as ‘a fanciful etymological explanation’ this statement has, nevertheless, inspired oft-repeated assertions that the pagan name of our feast, as imbolc/óimelc is said to be, has something to do with the period of the coming into lactation of sheep. Eric Hamp...has shown that the word simply means ‘milking’...”

          The Festival of Brigit, Séamas Ó Catháin, pg 7.

Ó Catháin goes on at length to examine the philological evidence and theorize about what the name—if it even IS the true name of the feast—means and what it may tell us about the festival. 

For an unorthodox and intriguing interpretation of the word Imbolc, see my upcoming review of  Phillip A. Bernhardt-House’s paper “Imbolc: A New Interpretation”. (Or better yet, hunt down the paper itself. You'll find it in Cosmos: The Yearbook of the Traditional Cosmology Society 18 (2002): 57-76.

 A hint here: If im has as its basis “butter”, olc is generally derived as “evil, bad, wrong” in Irish, both Old and Modern. But Kim McCone traces this word back to the Indo-European root meaning “wolf”. Joining these two, Bernhardt-House offers “Imbolc as the 'butter-wolf'”, hoping to “shed some light on further images in Irish sources, as well as connecting this to a further complex within Indo-European ritual” (60).

All of which simply shows that the details, roundabout though they may be, are infinitely more textured and fascinating than the boiled down versions we often receive, and that there are many more possiblities out there than the simplified story we often receive begins to hint at.