Ireland and Wales share more than just geographical proximity: they have deep cultural and linguistic ties. This year marks the centenary of a pioneering work that explored the relationship between the two countries.

Ireland and Wales: Their Historical and Literary Relations was written by Irish scholar Cecile O’Rahilly in 1924. Her legacy in the field of Celtic studies continues to resonate, 100 years after her book was first published.

Welsh and Irish are closely related languages, descended from a common Celtic ancestor. It seems plausible, though much less easy to prove, that Irish and Welsh also inherited cultural and literary features from their Celtic-speaking ancestors.

A striking example is the role of the professional praise poet, a revered figure in Irish and Welsh societies. Classical authors note that the poets of ancient Celtic Gaul (present-day France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, as well as parts of the Low Countries, Germany, Switzerland, and northern Italy) held a similarly esteemed position. The word for “poet” in Gaulish, bardosshares its roots with the Middle Irish word bard and the Welsh bardIt is a linguistic link that underlines their common cultural heritage.

Irish literature offers striking examples that closely mirror classical descriptions of ancient Gallic society. For example, warriors were said to keep severed heads as trophies, and fierce competitions to the death at feasts determined who would win the best piece of meat. These examples have led to the theory that a relatively uniform Celtic culture once extended across the Celtic-speaking regions of antiquity, with Ireland retaining these traditions the longest, partly because it was never part of the Roman Empire.

Wales, on the other hand, was profoundly transformed by its absorption into the Roman province of Britain. The medieval Welsh adopted the Trojan Brutus as their ancestor and idolized the Roman general Magnus Maximus.

The Welsh word Gwyddel (Irish) derives from gŵydd (wild), and thus literally means “savage”. The divide between Irish and Welsh has been facilitated by the fact that major phonological changes (the sounds in a particular language) in both languages ​​have obscured their historical relationship. There is no doubt that the 7th century Irish who borrowed the Welsh word Gwyddel as a term of self-definition (it gives us Gael (today) were completely unaware of its original meaning.

Although the medieval Welsh regarded the Irish as foreigners on a par with the English, they were in frequent contact with them. Irish-speaking communities existed in some areas of Wales as late as the 7th century, as evidenced by bilingual stone inscriptions in Irish and Latin.

Welsh clergymen, such as the family of Sulien of Llanbadarn Fawr, Bishop of St David’s in the 11th century, were educated in Ireland. And Gruffudd ap Cynan, King of Gwynedd from 1081 until his death in 1137, spent his youth in exile in Ireland. He returned to north Wales with Irish soldiers to reclaim his throne. Daily trade across the Irish Sea is also reflected in Welsh and Irish literature.

Cecile O’Rahilly

Born in 1894 in County Kerry, O’Rahilly began her academic journey in Ireland, but her work soon took her to Wales, where she won a scholarship to pursue a master’s degree at Bangor University. She submitted an essay to the Welsh national cultural festival Eisteddfod in 1920 and ended up winning. This essay was the seed that grew into her seminal book, which explores the complex relationship between Ireland and Wales in the Middle Ages.

She remained in Wales, where she taught French at several schools, until 1946, when she accepted a position at the Institute of Advanced Study in Dublin. She subsequently became a professor there, the first woman to hold this position. O’Rahilly lived in the Irish capital with her Welsh partner Myfanwy Williams until her death in 1980. She is best known today as the editor of the Irish epic saga Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cúailnge), published in 1967.

O’Rahilly did not address the issue of the relationship between medieval Ireland and Wales in his writings. His work was nevertheless pioneering, but it also opened up debates that continue to this day.

Debates

Among discussions arising from his work, scholar Proinsias Mac Cana and others have posited a strong Irish influence on Middle Welsh tales such as Branwen, one of the earliest surviving Welsh prose stories.

But given their common heritage, some similarities might go back to prehistory rather than the medieval period. They might also be the product of an independent generation or have been borrowed independently into both traditions from a third source, such as Latin literature, for example. A colleague of mine, Patrick Sims-Williams, has shown that it is difficult, if not impossible, to choose definitively between these possibilities.

Read more: How being Celtic got a bad rap – and why you should care

The rise of ‘Celtoscepticism’ in the late twentieth century challenged traditional understandings of Celtic identity, namely that there was no uniform shared culture among Celtic speakers across time and space. It led scholars in Celtic studies departments to retreat into their own areas of expertise, rather than engage in broader comparative work.

Scholars like Cecile O’Rahilly, who mastered both Irish and Welsh sources and spoke both languages ​​fluently, are increasingly rare. But as new generations of scholars explore these connections, the shared heritage of these two nations continues to offer new insights.

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