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General Editor's Foreword

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2012

Keith Busby
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan
Affiliation:
Cardiff University
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Summary

I was delighted when Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan accepted my invitation to be Guest Editor for an issue of Arthurian Literature devoted to Celtic Arthurian texts and traditions. No-one is better placed and informed than she to fill such a role. Her introduction raises a serious problem of linguistic competency that is often glossed over, not only in connection with Celtic studies, but generally in medieval studies, as the ability to read texts in the original, older, forms of languages declines. This is not the place to indulge in a lament for the old days of philological education, but I agree wholeheartedly with Lloyd-Morgan's bold restatement of an unpleasant truth, if I may rephrase it bluntly: medievalists who do not know the languages of the texts they wish to study should learn them, use reliable translations, consult specialist colleagues, or leave well alone. It is then incumbent on those with the competencies to make the results of their work in languages accessible to the wider community of scholars. This raises the intractable problem of the languages of modern scholarship. It is natural for Welsh scholars to write in Welsh on Welsh topics, as Lloyd-Morgan points out, but the problems are not limited to writing on medieval texts in the modern form of the same language. Our German colleagues, for example, may feel more comfortable writing on French topics in what is after all the founding language of romance philology. Much modern scholarship on Old French literature, for example, is lamentably deutschfrei.

Type
Chapter
Information
Arthurian Literature XXI
Celtic Arthurian Material
, pp. vii - viii
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2004

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