Celtic Revival

Active in both the women's suffrage movement and local politics, musician and Gaelic song-collector Marjory Kennedy-Fraser started promoting Scottish Independence, widely discussed at present but front-page news also a century ago, eventually becoming one of its figureheads.

Having begun collecting Hebridean songs in 1905, fired by an ambition both to preserve the musical riches of the Scottish Gaeldom – then considered backward and culturally barren – and to present the material to a wider audience, Kennedy-Fraser gradually evolved from focussing on musical matters to using the music as a means to place the Gaels on the political agenda. Introducing Gaelic songs to fashionable Edwardian audiences, although somewhat provocative, made her efforts socially acceptable and highly esteemed – and thus more usable for propaganda purposes.

Daughter of well-known Scottish tenor David Kennedy, Marjory grew up in Scotland and London when not travelling with her father; later studying music in Milan and Paris. The Kennedys were ardent Liberals and staunch supporters of Irish Home Rule, and she became interested in politics at an early age. A truly British cosmopolitan, she nevertheless always considered herself primarily a Scot.

Her father wished to bring the songs of Scotland to those in the diaspora and toured widely, thus reinforcing the Scots' separate cultural and national identity within the British Empire. Politically aware, the Kennedys appreciated the egalitarian society in Australia and New Zealand, strongly disapproved of the prevalent unequal social conditions in British India, and explicitly refrained from visiting the West Indies where the democracy 'non est'.

My paper will explore how Mrs Kennedy-Fraser used both Scots and Gaelic songs to reinforce a national identity, how she responded to jingoistic currents during the Great War, and how her œuvre began to sink into oblivion in the socially transformed Britain in the years leading up to World War II.

Having heard Marjory Kennedy-Fraser perform Hebridean songs at a house party in 1907, English composer Rutland Boughton brought her work to the attention of his friend Granville Bantock. In 1913, Professor Bantock met Mrs Kennedy-Fraser, and from 1917, they worked intermittently on their 'Gaelic Folk-Opera', "The Seal-Woman", which eventually premièred at Barry Jackson's Birmingham Repertory Theatre in September 1924, conducted by Adrian Boult. Despite some hesitant press reviews, the fourteen performances were well attended, and in 1927, the original cast, including Kennedy-Fraser, reunited for a live broadcast of the opera. Since then, there have been but a few revivals, but "The Seal-Woman" is nevertheless frequently mentioned in works dealing with the emergence and development of a British national opera.

Although Granville Bantock is usually regarded as the opera's composer, his letters to Marjory Kennedy-Fraser reveal that her participation in the creative process was not restricted to the libretto. Instead, they discussed every aspect of the opera extensively, often disagreeing about dramaturgical as well as musical details, and innumerable revisions of text and orchestration were required before they were both satisfied.

My paper offers an outline of "The Seal-Woman" and the inaugural Birmingham production, discusses the creative process behind the opera, drawing on the recently unearthed Bantock/Kennedy-Fraser correspondence, and relates it to similar operatic works. Concluding, I speculate upon why "The Seal-Woman" failed to become a repertoire opera, despite its various inherent qualities, suitably illustrated by several sounding excerpts from a fairly recent but unreleased professional recording of the complete opera.

This paper has its origins a lecture given at the invitation of The Royal Town Planning Institute in Scotland at the Royal Society of Edinburgh in May 2009. It reflects the thinking that finds fuller expression in my book Patrick Geddes’s Intellectual Origins (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). Geddes was one of the key thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His integrated ecological and cultural vision had international impact. Yet despite the fact that his Outlook Tower and Ramsay Garden are prominent and intriguing features of the Edinburgh skyline, the distinctively Scottish intellectual context of his thinking has not been understood. In this paper, which I have taken the opportunity of revise, I place Geddes with respect to his own intellectual background, a background which had interdisciplinarity at its heart. I explore the relevance of that generalist view for his achievements local, national and international. An interview about the book can be found here: https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2020/04/02/interview-with-murdo-macdonald-author-of-patrick-geddess-intellectual-origins/. Full contents list can be found here: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-patrick-geddes-s-intellectual-origins.html

Fed up with the commercial and moral restrictions of the mainstream press, the diverse avant-garde groups of authors and artists of the Aesthetic Movement developed a new genre of periodicals in which to propagate their principles and circulate their work. Such periodicals are known as ‘little magazines’ for their small-scale production and their circulation among limited audiences, and during the late Victorian period they were often conceptualized as integrated designs or total works of art in order to visually and materially represent the ideals of their producers. Little magazines like the Pre-Raphaelite Germ, the Arts & Crafts Hobby Horse and the Decadent Yellow Book launched the careers of innovative authors and artists and provided a site for debate between minor contributors and visiting grandees from Matthew Arnold to Oscar Wilde. This book offers detailed discussions of the background to thirteen major little magazines of the Victorian era, both situating these within the periodical press of their day and providing interpretations of representative items, in doing so, it outlines the earliest history of this enduring publication genre, and of the Aesthetic Movement that developed along with it.


Key Features:
----------------------
* First monograph to focus on the origins and development of the little magazine genre during the Victorian period
* Each chapter provides a representative introduction to the respective little magazines
* Combines new insights with a critical overview of the state of the art on each discussed little magazine

Table of contents
----------------------------
Introduction
1. The Germs of a Genre: The Germ and the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine
2. Mounting the (Century Guild) Hobby Horse
3. The Little Magazine as a Periodical Portfolio: the Dial, the Pagan Review and the Page
4. Selling the Yellow Nineties: the Yellow Book and the Savoy
5. Politicised Aestheticism outside London: the Quest and the Evergreen
6. Little Excursions Outside the Avant-Garde: the Pageant, the Parade and the Dome
(In)conclusions

The Kiss was created by René Lalique during the first years of the twentieth-century. Though it may look like a small and simple piece of jewellery, it demonstrates the artist’s abilities as a sculptor and goldsmith, and embodies a greater meaning. Our aim with this study is not merely to make another analysis of this piece, but to suggest a new interpretation of the subject it portrays.
After a brief presentation of Lalique, we shall describe the artwork in the centre of our study, its materials, techniques, shapes and motifs. The last element will lead us to the study of the theme represented on this jewel: the kiss. It is crucial to understand the presence of this subject in nineteenth-century art, but we intend to go further and recognize its origins. Therefore, we may discuss the influence of literature in this artwork, specifically the medieval tale of Tristan and Isolde.
In this way, by considering different elements, not only related with this particular artwork but also with all of Lalique’s œuvre, our ambition is to provide a new interpretation of The Kiss, suggesting its connection to Celtic culture.

[E-book for non-commercial purposes]

The paper assesses the importance of local geology as an inspiration to the mythology and folklore of County Sligo, Ireland. The contribution of artists Gabriel Beranger and Angelo Maria Bigari; and historians Rev. William Henry and Archdeacon Terence O’Rorke, in raising the monumental and historical profile of the county is discussed. The work during the early 19th century of the officers of the Ordnance Survey (George Petrie, John O’Donovan, Thomas O’Connor and Patrick O’Keefe) in documenting and interpreting Sligo’s ancient monuments is assessed as is the contribution of local collector Roger Chambers Walker. The contribution to the development of scientific archaeology by Sligo antiquarian William Gregory Wood-Martin and his collaborator the artist and scholar William Frederick Wakeman, is noted as is the iconic role of the mythic battle of Moytura in their research and fieldwork. The overall contribution of the mythology, folklore and archaeology of Sligo to the Irish Literary revival, especially under William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory is discussed.

Throughout history, the Druids have always been seen as sorcerers who had a strong bond with nature. Ancestral knowledge holders within Celtic society, directed all religious activity as the highest authority linked to the gods, practiced human sacrifices and festivals organized as Imbolc, Beltaine, Lugnasad or Samain, etc.. all aspects of which are discussed in this article.

This article from 15 years ago, while still valid as an introduction to the topic, serves as a pointer towards the need for a  thorough and far-reaching study of the phenomenon of the 19th/20th -century Celtic revival high cross. A thing of fashion in Irish graveyards for almost a 100 years, it carried layers of meaning and intention in  a country struggling with its identity. Its impact was also felt on graveyard sculpture in Scotland, the UK generally, the Americas, Australia and elsewhere.

This paper analyses and critiques the uses of ancient Egyptian religion by the founders of two modern manifestations of the worship of the goddess Isis. Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, the primary creative genius behind the famous British occult group, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and his wife Moina Mathers established a mystery religion of Isis in fin de siècle Paris. Lawrence Durdin-Robertson, his wife Pamela and his sister Olivia created the Fellowship of Isis in Ireland in the early 1970s. Although separated by over half a century and not directly associated with each other, both groups have several characteristics in common. Each combined their worship of an ancient Egyptian goddess with an interest in the Celtic Revival; both claimed that their priestly lineages derived directly from the Egyptian princess Scota, foundress of Ireland and Scotland according to Irish and Scottish mythology and pseudohistory; and both groups used dramatic ritual and theatrical events as avenues for the promulgation of their Isis cults.

It is argued here that while both the Parisian mysteries of Isis and the Fellowship of Isis are historically-inaccurate syncretic constructions, they exemplify the enduring popularity of the Egyptian goddess Isis who since antiquity has been appropriated and re-fashioned in order to serve as a symbol of the zeitgeist. Already in Pharaonic and Roman Egypt, Isis was a universal goddess within whom other goddesses were subsumed. In subsequent centuries, so flexible was the figure of Isis that she was even claimed to have been a goddess of the Druids.

The tradition of an Egyptian origin of the peoples of Scotland and Ireland, as espoused in the medieval myth of the Egyptian princess Scota, legitimised the Mathers’s and the Durdin-Robertson’s claims of their ancient Egyptian priesthood. In addition to asserting that the Isis cult was brought by Scota, Pharaonic Egyptian, Graeco-Roman, Medieval, Hermetic, and Romantic literary and archaeological sources were utilised in order to construct their understanding of Isis. That Isis was recreated according to the abilities and concerns of the founders of the Parisian mysteries and the Fellowship of Isis is evident from examination of eye-witness reports of ritual performances, occult theatre, personal interviews, missives, and explanatory texts. It is determined that both groups favoured an ahistorical construction of the goddess as an eternal, mysterious, magical figure representative of universal harmony, unity and nature, which appealed to late-nineteenth and twentieth century Pagan sensibilities.

Neither the Parisian mysteries of Isis nor the Fellowship of Isis has been the focus of much critical scholarship to date, and the use of the medieval myth of Scota by these figures has never been analysed. This paper builds upon previous research on the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and contemporary Pagan religions, particularly the author’s examination of its prime movers; Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, Florence Farr, and Aleister Crowley; the Order’s utilisation of ancient Egyptian religion; and its influence on the emergence of the modern Pagan movement in the mid-twentieth century.

Keywords: Isis, Scota, Celts, occult theatre

In John Millington Synge’s dramas The Tinker’s Wedding and The Well of the Saints (1905) and The Tinker’s Wedding (published 1907), peripatetic characters unconscious of ageing, sinfulness or ugliness live in a pre-lapsarian state that is disrupted by contact with the fallen realms of the Church and proprietorship. At the close of both, the by now tainted nomads reject any further dealings with the corrupting and implicitly entwined ideologies of capitalism and established religion and attempt to return to their original condition. The plays both centre on the loss of innocence of the wanderer foolish enough to initiate dealings with God’s representative and the earthly values that he is ultimately seen to uphold. In a reversal of the folkloric associations of the rambler from which the plot of The Tinker’s Wedding derives,  worldliness is represented by the dogmatic churchmen and their nominally pious congregations, naivety and a genuine closeness to real divinity and pre-capitalist artlessness by the animistic peoples of the road. In short, despite their mythic echoes, both of these plays are deeply engaged with Revival-era debates on religious practices, economic transformation, and cultural difference and constitute significant responses by Synge to the wider cultural shifts of late nineteenth-century Ireland.

The work looks at the stained glass work of the Irish artist Harry Clarke, putting his practice in the context of the decorative arts and aesthetic movements at the turn of the twentieth century, and of the Irish Revolution. From Kathleen James-Chakraborty, India in Art in Ireland: Ends of Empire, Medieval Manuscripts to Contemporary Photography (Routledge, 2016).

Folklore, as a historical and cultural process producing and transmitting beliefs, stories, customs, and practices, has always thrived and evolved in the broader context of history and culture. Consequently, tradition and modernity have long coexisted and influenced one another, in particular in the world of folk narratives, orality and literature, storytellers and writers. Since the nineteenth century, folklorists (a category including a variety of figures) have collected, transcribed and published pieces of oral tradition, thus giving folklore a textual form and nature. However, folk narratives continue to be also a living and performed experience for the tradition bearers, a process giving rise to ever new and different expressions, according to the changing historical, social, cultural, and economic conditions. To be sure, folklore – and folk narrative – needs to be constantly lived and performed to remain something actually pertinent and significant, and not only within the oral and traditional contexts. Interestingly, between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, folklore increasingly came to be regarded as and transformed into an inheritance, a valuable, national heritage particularly fitting for those countries, such as Ireland, in search of a strong, national identity. In this light, folklore and folk narratives, beside their routine existence within their original contexts, were consciously " performed " by the official culture, which employed them in politics, education, literature, etc. In the process, it could happen that folk materials were dehistoricised and idealised, " embalmed " according to Máirtin Ó Cadhain, and even trivialised. This situation was turned into a fruitful and significant source of inspiration for the literary parody of Myles na gCopaleen (Flann O'Brien) who, in his Gaelic novel, An Béal Bocht, revealed the funny yet distressing truth of the Irish folklore being misunderstood and betrayed by the Irish themselves.

Resumen. El folklore, como proceso histórico y cultural que produce y transmite creencias, historias, costumbres y prácticas, siempre ha evolucionado en el amplio contexto de la historia y la cultura. Por consecuencia, la tradición y la modernidad se han influido mutuamente a lo largo del tiempo, particularmente en el campo de las narraciones populares, la oralidad y la literatura, los contadores de historias y los escritores. Desde el siglo XIX los folcloristas (que es

This paper draws on the history of the reception of evolutionary theory in Protestant Ireland to situate the innocent but paradoxically bohemian islander of J.M. Synge’s prose masterpiece, The Aran Islands. It suggests that Synge desired to construct Aran as an Eastern, pre-Celtic space outside the capitalist and evolutionary nexus. For Synge to acknowledge that this West of Ireland island group was anything less than a tabula rasa was to admit his fear of the menace posed to the Orientalised “primitive” native islanders by Darwinian theory and the forces of Western modernity.

The history of Irish Travellers is not analogous to that of the 'tinker', a Europe-wide underworld fantasy created by sixteenth-century British and continental Rogue Literature that came to be seen as an Irish character alone as English became dominant in Ireland. By the Revival, the tinker represented bohemian, pre-Celtic aboriginality, functioning as the cultural nationalist counter to the Victorian Gypsy mania. Long misunderstood as a portrayal of actual Travellers, J.M. Synge's influential The Tinker's Wedding was pivotal to this 'Irishing' of the tinker, even as it acknowledged that figure's cosmopolitan textual roots. Synge's empathetic depiction is closely examined, as are the many subsequent representations that looked to him as a model to subvert or emulate. In contrast to their Revival-era romanticization, post-independence writing portrayed tinkers as alien interlopers, while contemporaneous Unionists labeled them a contaminant from the hostile South. However, after Travellers politicized in the 1960s, more even-handed depictions heralded a querying of the 'tinker' fantasy that has shaped contemporary screen and literary representations of Travellers and has prompted Traveller writers to transubstantiate Otherness into the empowering rhetoric of ethnic difference. Though its Irish equivalent has oscillated between idealization and demonization, US racial history facilitates the cinematic figuring of the Irish-American Traveler as lovable 'white trash' rogue. This process is informed by the mythology of a population with whom Travelers are allied in the white American imagination, the Scots-Irish (Ulster-Scots). In short, the 'tinker' is much more central to Irish, Northern Irish and even Irish-American identity than is currently recognised.

The Roman Catholic Honan Chapel, adjacent to the university campus in Cork, Ireland, contains thematically rich iconography in mosaic, glass, enamel and fabric. A full complement of artwork was produced as part of the chapel's founding project but no documentation from the commission, design or making of the chapel reveals the thought behind the choice of imagery and text. The literature interpreting the iconography is limited, overlooking most of the Christian biblical and liturgical meaning presented. Examining the iconography as a unified work. It is argued that a single, principal message was presented to the Catholic students in the then university hostel. The mosaic floor presents the Canticle of the Three Youths in the Fiery Furnace from the Old Testament Book of Daniel in its Western liturgical form, starting non-typically from the altar and leading to the front door. It is dominated by a principal stained-glass window which, along with other iconographic elements, constructs a single message.

There is no unity of views on the term “Celtic revival” in modern Anglo-American historiography – estimates range from the full acceptance of the term to its denial. In Soviet literature, the term was not popular, and only isolated cases of its use are known. In post-Soviet historiography, the relation to the term “Celtic Revival” is rather negative, which  contrasts sharply with the archaeological literature, where it is widely used, but the sense of term is quite different from works of historians.

This article explores the poetry of François Jaffrennou, who published under the druidic pseudonym Taldir ab Hernin, as a case study in decolonized multilingualism. Close readings of Taldir’s writing in Breton, Welsh and French reveal the pressures of negotiating a hybrid Celtic-French identity, as he affirms his Celticity while maintaining a careful relationship with France. Taldir criticizes the French state in his Welsh texts, whereas in French and Breton his critique is more guarded, subtly codified. The Celtic space which emerges here is full of tensions, as Taldir works both within and against the impulse to reconcile Celtic and French identities. I argue that being provincially Other in France requires a delicate balancing act, a special way of being French. I also contend that to work on the local is to work on the global, looking beyond regionalist and postcolonial approaches to Breton writing in an effort to dismantle the monolingualizing tendencies of French Studies.

Nos finais do século XIX assistimos ao culminar do Renascimento Celta que, da mesma forma que o Renascimento Italiano fez com a Antiguidade Clássica, recuperou os mitos, ideologias e as expressões artísticas desta civilização. É também nesta época que nasce a Arte Nova, um movimento artístico que seria um dos antecedentes do Modernismo. Que a arte celta foi uma das inspirações estéticas da Arte Nova, é algo inegável. No entanto, terá essa influência sido apenas local ou global? E será que foi meramente estética? A forte presença da Natureza e da feminilidade na Arte Nova é também um ponto de conexão com a arte e cultura celtas. Poderá, portanto, ter sido através do Renascimento Celta que a Arte Nova encontrou as suas fontes temáticas, ou pelo menos, reforçou a simbologia dos seus motivos. Neste sentido, é possível observar este movimento como a materialização artística de um Renascimento em pequena escala que, embrulhado no oculto e no Simbolismo, fez ressurgir cultos antigos, como o paganismo e o panteísmo.

From the late 1830s, museums in Scotland began to accrue considerable collections of early medieval (post-Roman /pre-Romanesque) sculpture. This comprised not just original stones, but also hundreds of copies — plaster casts that might be produced in multiples for different museums. Of particular note are bespoke collections of ‘Celtic crosses’ made for the 1901 Glasgow International Exhibition and for new museum galleries in Dundee and Aberdeen in 1904 and 1905 respectively. This paper will explore the diverse perspectives of the museums that collected, curated, created, circulated and displayed this material. It will reflect on the impact that their different curatorial objectives had on wider appreciation and use of Celtic art, and the ways such material was being used to shape identities. How this material was valued at the time, and its subsequent fates, sheds light on shifting attitudes to value and authenticity. The context is the ambitions of the expanding National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland, the imperial objectives of the Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art (a branch of the South Kensington Museum, what we now know as the V&A), the desires of the newly founded network of ‘provincial’ museums, and the introduction in 1882 of the first ancient monuments legislation, which exposed the dissonance between the value of carved stones as monuments and as artefacts.

My link to the European Revivals project began in 2009, when I was fortunate enough to present at the first conference – Myths, Legends and Dreams of a Nation.  That conference had an immediate effect on my own work, indeed I made reference to the Kalevala exhibition here at the Ateneum in my paper ‘Art as an Expression of Northernness’ published the next year. Thus the European Revivals project helped to focus my research networks and has continued to do so. What I want to do today is to reflect on that starting point in Helsinki in 2009 and think about future directions. I hope that what I will explore here at the Ateneum Museum in January 2020 will resonate with the experience of others involved in the project.

"A Life of Song": The Autobiography of Marjory Kennedy-Fraser.

Marjory Kennedy-Fraser travelled the world in the second half of the 19th century with her father, the famous Scots singer David Kennedy, and then as an outstanding musician in her own right. She was also one of the most important collectors and popularisers of Gaelic song at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from islands such as Barra and Eriskay. Her arrangements of these traditional songs, undertaken with the Rev. Kenneth MacLeod, were however criticised for departing from the authentic settings of the songs, and her reputation has suffered as a result. A re-assessment is long overdue, and this new edition of her remarkable autobiography, first published in 1929, includes additional illustrations and a substantial re-evaluation of her contribution to the recording and preservation of Gaelic song by Dr Per Ahlander, Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh.

Dublin-born Phoebe Anna Traquair's "The Progress of a Soul" is a central work of the Scottish Arts & Crafts movement. William B. Yeats' 'little singing bird', she is but one of many connections between Ireland and Edinburgh around 1900. Marjory Kennedy-Fraser, from a family where 'Home Rule' was frequently discussed, worked with the eager Celtic Revivalist Patrick Geddes in the 1890s, and was deeply influenced by Yeats' œuvre – 'Land of Heart's Desire' is a well-known song of hers. William Sharp (Fiona MacLeod) met Yeats in London and raved about his work, but Yeats was less enthusiastic, and, with Oscar Wilde, he made witty comments about Sharp. Nonetheless, in 1905, Yeats cast Sharp's horoscope, at the request of his widow, Elizabeth A. Sharp, "Lyra Celtica"'s editor. Yeats' Dundee-lecture in 1905 was organised by Scottish romantic poet Rachel Annand Taylor and her husband – friends of Kennedy-Fraser and of Symbolist painter John Duncan, instrumental to the Celtic Revival in Scotland. On Eriskay, they had all immersed themselves in things Celtic, meeting Fr Allan McDonald, the priest and Celtic scholar. Together with most Edinburgh literati, they also frequented the salon of André Raffalovich, whose sister married Irish MP William O'Brien – Parnell spoke at their wedding – and whose friend, Fr John Gray, once part of the bohemian circles of Oscar Wilde and Yeats in London, was priest to Irish immigrants in Edinburgh. My paper will focus on the connections between Scotland and Ireland around 1900 by discussing a circle of then well-known and influential individuals.

Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, the primary creative genius behind the famous British occult group, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and his wife Moina Mathers established a mystery religion of Isis in fin de siècle Paris. Lawrence Durdin-Robertson, his wife Pamela and his sister Olivia created the Fellowship of Isis in Ireland in the mid-1970s. Although separated by over half a century and not directly associated with each other, both groups have several characteristics in common. Each combined their worship of an ancient Egyptian goddess with an interest in the Celtic Revival; both claimed that their priestly lineages derived directly from the Egyptian princess Scota, foundress of Ireland and Scotland according to Irish and Scottish mythology and pseudohistory; and both groups used dramatic ritual and theatrical events as avenues for the promulgation of their Isis religions.

Does a 'native' have easier access to traditional material than an 'outsider'? A more obvious right to the material as well? But who is a 'native' – how is home defined? A question of nationality, a geographical issue, or perhaps a more intricate social and class oriented issue? Do some individuals have a more obvious right to traditional material than others? In my research on Marjory Kennedy-Fraser, well-known for her arrangements of Hebridean songs but simultaneously ridiculed for publishing 'parlour songs', these questions constantly keep coming back. Kennedy-Fraser was an early music collector in Britain; the first one in Scotland to use recording equipment in the field. She embarked on her Hebridean project in 1905, and over a period of two decades, she collected and published a vast amount of songs. Successful in her lifetime, most of her work seems to have sunk into oblivion after her death in 1930. Not all of her songs, but certainly her more scholarly work, and her endeavours are still somewhat put to scorn. Why? Was she less qualified than her contemporaries? Probably not. Did she lack connections? No, as part of a circle of like-minded people in Edinburgh, including Patrick Geddes and John Duncan, she was a well-known authority on her subject, and officially acknowledged – Honorary Doctor of Music and C.B.E.. Could it be a gender issue? Not really, professional women were not unheard of in Edwardian Britain, and the Suffrage movement was rapidly gaining momentum. But did she not commit the unpardonable faux pas of crossing social boundaries? Perhaps the sheer fact that a professional middle-class woman from a larger city ventured a project in a remote and rural area of the Gàidhealtachd was too difficult to digest? My paper will address these issues, and reflect upon possible rationales.

Granville Bantock initially took notice of Marjory Kennedy-Fraser's work through English composer Rutland Boughton, who had heard her perform some Hebridean songs at a mutual friend's house in 1907. In 1913, Professor Bantock and Mrs Kennedy-Fraser met for the first time, and in 1917–24, they worked intermittently on their 'Gaelic Folk-Opera', "The Seal-Woman", eventually premiered at Barry Jackson's Birmingham Repertory Theatre in September 1924. Despite some hesitant press reviews, the fourteen performances were well attended. In 1927, the original cast reunited to broadcast the opera, but since then, there have been but few revivals, and no recording is available. Nonetheless, the opera is mentioned frequently in works dealing with the emergence and development of a British national opera and performance material is still available on hire.

Even if Granville Bantock is generally considered the opera's composer, his largely unknown letters to Marjory Kennedy-Fraser, held by Edinburgh University Library, reveal that her rôle in the creative process was by no means restricted to the libretto and that the opera was indeed a true collaboration between the two. Both dramaturgical and musical aspects were extensively discussed, down to the minutest details in text and orchestration.

My paper will give a brief outline of the opera and the inaugural Birmingham production, relate it to similar works, and in some detail discuss the creative process behind it, drawing on the recently unearthed Bantock/Kennedy-Fraser correspondence. I will also speculate about why the opera failed to remain in the repertoire, despite its various inherent qualities.

Scottish musician Marjory Kennedy-Fraser (née Kennedy, 1857–1930) is known mostly for her "Songs of the Hebrides". From the publication of the first volume in 1909, her popularity and fame grew – in Scotland and England as well as abroad; her work received official recognition in the 1920s, when she was awarded both the CBE and an honorary Mus.D. (Edinburgh). After her death in 1930, her songs were still widely performed, but her work was increasingly exposed to criticism. While appreciated as a respected, albeit somewhat unfashionable, arranger of songs among musicians generally, both in Britain and beyond, Marjory Kennedy-Fraser was virulently attacked by trendsetting Scottish intellectuals, who accused her of having misrepresented Gaelic songs, publishing what was by then considered romanticized drawing-room arrangements, lacking in authenticity. Though still frequently maligned, her songs have been subject of a renewed interest in recent years, and have slowly begun to find their place among European art songs of the period, a repertoire which is largely based on, or at least influenced by, vernacular folk-songs from the different nations.

Apart from her memoirs from 1929, "A Life of Song", no biography has so far been published of Marjory Kennedy-Fraser. The aim of this thesis is to provide a detailed survey of Dr Kennedy-Fraser's professional life, and, furthermore, by relating her life and œuvre to her own time, to place her in context. It draws extensively on her own, hitherto unpublished working material, held by Edinburgh University Library, a multitude of newspaper articles and biographical publications, as well as letters from a wide range of sources. It thus offers as complete and nuanced a picture as possible of a long, comprehensive, and indeed impressive, career. Following an introductory overview of the Arts & Crafts movement, the mainly chronological biography explores her family background, international concert tours, and music studies in Milan and Paris. Her rôles as performer, teacher, lecturer, and author are assessed, as is her work as a suffrage activist and a parish councillor. The second phase of her career, when a collector and arranger of Gaelic songs, her publication of the "Songs of the Hebrides", as well as her numerous Hebridean recitals, given both throughout Britain and abroad, are all covered in detail. Her interaction with several important individuals of her time, including Sir Patrick Geddes, Dr Frederick Niecks, Dr Kenneth Macleod, Sir Granville Bantock, and Dame Ellen Terry, is also discussed.

This lavishly illustrated book explores in detail the period when Dundee was recognised as one of the major art centres of Britain. In the late 19th century, the city staged the largest exhibitions of art outside London and hosted some of the most ambitious private art collections in Scotland. Following a significant development in art education, the number of professional artists working in the city increased dramatically. Thanks to the unique talents of John Duncan, Stewart Carmichael, George Dutch Davidson and others, Dundee developed a distinctive new style of art, a fusion of symbolism, decorative art and the Celtic Revival. The city also produced exceptional talents working in landscapes and portraiture, such as David Foggie, Frank Laing and W B Lamond. At the same time, there was a boom in commercial art as Dundee became an important centre for newspaper and magazine illustration.
This is the first time that Dundee’s art culture has been studied in depth, placing the city’s artistic outputs in a social, economic and political context. One London critic described Dundee’s artists as a “fiercely independent and individualist school”, which has often led them to be overlooked by art historians. This book seeks to re-establish the significance of Dundee as “perhaps the most vital centre of art appreciation in Scotland.”‌
The book was nominated for the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History 2016. It has been described by art historian Elizabeth Cumming as "One of the most important books on Scottish art to have emerged in a long time" and by critic Duncan Macmillan as "A richly informative book... a valuable addition to the story of Scottish art".

This article is concerned with the revival of the art of illumination in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland within the context of cultural nationalism, the Celtic Revival, and Irish identity. Focusing specifically on one type of artefact, the illuminated presentation address, this article discusses how the revival of illumination communicated Irish identity in the decades leading up to independence and partition. Illuminated addresses are intended for public presentation and, as such, are tangible records of intangible occasions. While the main purpose of the address is conveyed through the written word, the use of signs, symbols, ornament, and other decorative imagery visually communicates a deeper message, often highlighting a specific chosen identity. Within the Irish context, identity is established through specific cultural motifs, landscapes, and portraits drawn from both Ireland’s ‘golden age’ of cultural achievement and the period in question.

Different aspects of Celtic folk culture have been investigated, documented and researched by many individuals and institutions over the years.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a wave of nationalism and interest in vernacular arts and languages swept over Europe. In the folk music area, this interest brought the attention to the treasures of songs and melodies that still existed at the time, but seemed threatened, due to changing ways of life, partially brought about by the industrial development in the western world. Studies and documentation projects were initiated in the Czech and Hungarian areas of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the Finnish part of Russia, and in the Scandinavian countries, just to mention some examples. The Celtic areas of Europe were no exception, and Brittany, Wales, and Gaelic Scotland and Ireland all attracted numerous researchers and musicologists. One of them was Marjory Kennedy-Fraser, who became interested in the Gaelic folk song tradition of the Western Isles and came to spend many summers recording traditional songs, mainly in the Outer Hebrides.

The main focus of this work is to take a close look on Marjory Kennedy-Fraser's musical life and career, and to analyse the material she recorded and later edited, including her opera project together with Granville Bantock. This is, however, not possible without knowledge of Celtic history and traditions, Scottish history, and of the Gaelic world itself. Certain aspects of musical theory are also crucial for the analysis, most certainly the different types of scales represented in Gaelic folk music. My thesis starts with these background factors, continues with a biographical section on Kennedy-Fraser, mainly based on archive material in Edinburgh, and the last part is a musical analysis of her collected material and a short orientation on her position on the Scottish musical scene today.

Compiling and publishing a folk narrative anthology is anything but a trivial, neutral undertaking, especially if this is set in a period of great literary and cultural fervour as was the late nineteenth century in Ireland. With his Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) and Irish Fairy Tales (1892) W.B. Yeats gives rise to a complex narrative system in which, necessarily, heterogeneous, if not contradictory voices and points of view meet, and the editor’s task is precisely to make this polyphony work. In the anthologized stories one observes the overlapping and interweaving of narrative levels that reflect a wide range of ideas, beliefs, knowledge, values from which emerges a picture of cultural and social Irish stratification, as well as of relationships being established between the lower and ruling classes, folklore and literature, orality and literacy. After examining in general the folk narrative anthology as an inherently polyphonic object, this essay proposes a specific reading of the Yeatsian collections, focusing in particular on the paratextual apparatus, namely on the borders, the frames of the text – where interactions take place between several narrative levels, as well as historical, cultural, and social meanings – in order to identify, if possible, elements of unity and coherence in a system constitutively plurivocal and open to a variety of interpretations.
Keywords: anthology, folklore, Irish Revival, storytelling, W.B. Yeats

The recent upsurge of interest in early twentieth-century cultural nationalisms has raised the profile of the Scottish rôle in the cultural and nationalist revival movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Especially during the key period between the 1890s and the First World War, the Scottish Celtic Revival movement witnessed a flowering of artistic, literary, and cultural activities that helped to shape incipient political and cultural nationalisms, both Scottish and pan-Celtic.

This interdisciplinary conference (1-3 May 2014) will be organised by the University of Edinburgh's department of Celtic and Scottish Studies and part-hosted by the National Galleries of Scotland. It will be supported by the Modern Humanities Research Fund and co-sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), and the Centre for Theology and Public Issues (CTPI), University of Edinburgh. The conference will bring together scholars working on the art, music, folklore collection, literary production, scholarship, politics, Gaelic linguistic revival, architecture, and material culture of the period, in order to reassess the role played by the Celtic Revival in the creation of modern Scottish identities. Through an examination of the roots, rise, and withering of the Celtic Revival in Scotland, the conference will reassess the successes - and failures - of the movement in its widest context.

Scottish musician Marjory Kennedy-Fraser (née Kennedy, 1857–1930) is mainly known for the several volumes of "Songs of the Hebrides" she brought out in collaboration with Kenneth MacLeod (1871–1955), based on her years of painstaking work collecting Gaelic songs. Increasingly popular and famous since the publication of the first volume in 1909, her work received official recognition in the 1920s, when she was awarded both the CBE and an honorary Mus.D. (Edinburgh). Gaelic songs were Kennedy-Fraser's second career, however, having previously travelled the world as her father's accompanist, studied music in Milan, in Paris, and – as one of its first women students – at the University of Edinburgh, subsequently building up a flourishing music teaching practice in the Scottish capital. Widowed at an early age, with two small children to support, in the 1890s, the young professional was busy teaching, performing and lecturing in Edinburgh, where she soon became part of the city's artistic avant-garde circles and met with Alexander Carmichael, Patrick Geddes, John Duncan and Phoebe Traquair – leading lights of the Arts & Crafts movement in Scotland. My paper will ask what sparked Dr Kennedy-Fraser's passion for Gaelic music and culture, outline her multifarious undertakings in public life generally, and discuss how her œuvre became increasingly exposed to criticism after her death, particularly in Scotland, where she was virulently attacked by trendsetting intellectuals, who accused her of having misrepresented Gaelic songs. I will conclude by considering the place of the "Songs of the Hebrides" in today's song recital repertoire.