Natasha Sumner – författare

A mere 150 years ago Scottish Gaelic was the third most widely spoken language in Canada, and Irish was spoken by hundreds of thousands of people in the United States. A new awareness of the large North American Gaelic diaspora, long overlooked by historians, folklorists, and literary scholars, has emerged in recent decades. North American Gaels, representing the first tandem exploration of these related migrant ethnic groups, examines the myriad ways Gaelic-speaking immigrants from marginalized societies have negotiated cultural spaces for themselves in their new homeland. In the macaronic verses of a Newfoundland fisherman, the pointed addresses of an Ontario essayist, the compositions of a Montana miner, and lively exchanges in newspapers from Cape Breton to Boston to New York, these groups proclaim their presence in vibrant traditional modes fluently adapted to suit North American climes. Through careful investigations of this diasporic Gaelic narrative and its context, from the mid-eighteenth century to the twenty-first, the book treats such overarching themes as the sociolinguistics of minority languages, connection with one's former home, and the tension between the desire for modernity and the enduring influence of tradition. Staking a claim for Gaelic studies on this continent, North American Gaels shines new light on the ways Irish and Scottish Gaels have left an enduring mark through speech, story, and song.

A mere 150 years ago Scottish Gaelic was the third most widely spoken language in Canada, and Irish was spoken by hundreds of thousands of people in the United States. A new awareness of the large North American Gaelic diaspora, long overlooked by historians, folklorists, and literary scholars, has emerged in recent decades. North American Gaels, representing the first tandem exploration of these related migrant ethnic groups, examines the myriad ways Gaelic-speaking immigrants from marginalized societies have negotiated cultural spaces for themselves in their new homeland. In the macaronic verses of a Newfoundland fisherman, the pointed addresses of an Ontario essayist, the compositions of a Montana miner, and lively exchanges in newspapers from Cape Breton to Boston to New York, these groups proclaim their presence in vibrant traditional modes fluently adapted to suit North American climes. Through careful investigations of this diasporic Gaelic narrative and its context, from the mid-eighteenth century to the twenty-first, the book treats such overarching themes as the sociolinguistics of minority languages, connection with one's former home, and the tension between the desire for modernity and the enduring influence of tradition. Staking a claim for Gaelic studies on this continent, North American Gaels shines new light on the ways Irish and Scottish Gaels have left an enduring mark through speech, story, and song.

The evolution of the Fenian tradition of story and song, traced over 1,400 yearsStories about Fionn macCumhaill (also known as Finn McCool) and his roving warrior band, the Fianna, have engaged audiences for more than a millennium. Fionn and the Fianna—Gaeldom’s defenders during a legendary third-century golden age—are the heroes of the most prolific body of narrative in the Gaelic tradition, spanning 1,400 years of oral and written transmission, from the earliest extant records to the present day. In this book, Natasha Sumner traces these stories across the centuries and throughout the Gaelic world, examining the fates of Fionn and the Fianna and investigating the persistent popularity of these tales.Sumner describes the development of the Fenian tradition from early seventh-century texts through the medieval and early modern creation of its greatest literary achievements; the controversy stirred by James Macpherson’s adaptation of Fenian characters and plots in his popular eighteenth-century epic, Ossian; and the Fianna’s place in the modern Irish and Scottish nations, beginning with the Celtic Revival in the 1860s. Part (pseudo) historical fiction, part (proto) fantasy, these stories project perceptions of a bygone Gaelic heroic age through the lens of their contemporary realities. The Fenian tradition, Sumner argues, provides ample space for imaginative engagement with the narrative past, the historical present, and the aspirational future.