Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Thorkelin (An Icelander among the Gaels: A Study of Grímur Thorkelin (1752-1829) and his Gaelic Manuscripts)
Berichtszeitraum: 2020-08-01 bis 2022-07-31
This project focused on the Icelandic-Danish scholar Grímur Thorkelin (1752-1829) and his contact with the literature and culture of the Gaelic-speaking world in the late-eighteenth century. Commissioned by the King of Denmark to travel through Britain and Ireland in search of historical material relating to the history of Scandinavia, Thorkelin took a particular interest in the Gaelic culture of Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man. This contact is primarily evidenced by his substantial collection of Gaelic-language manuscripts, both medieval and early modern, now preserved in Copenhagen's Royal Library. This project, in the first instance, sought to document and catalogue these manuscripts and to open their contents up to further study. It also addressed a number of questions raised by the collection. These included the dynamic between manuscript and print in Gaelic and in Thorkelin's native Icelandic. Thorkelin's role as as international patron of scribes and collector of manuscripts will also be addressed. As an historian, Thorkelin's framing of Gaelic history, and indeed his framing of Icelandic and Scandinavian history in Britain and Ireland, exerted considerable influence on the eighteenth-century conceptions of ethnic and cultural identity. This project therefore took Thorkelin and his important collection of Gaelic manuscripts, using them as a prism though which to examine questions relating to contemporary eighteenth-century concerns, most especially around literary and scribal culture.
Work performed in this project has included the preliminary cataloguing of the Irish manuscript material in the Royal Library, Copenhagen, as well as a number of focused studies on particular aspects of the manuscript collection and related collections elsewhere (including, for instance in the British Library. Catalogue information in particular will facilitate this valuable manuscript material being more accessible to scholars from a range of backgrounds - and the general public - in the future. Published outputs include a significant chapter charting the relationship between a 'Thorkelin manuscript' and the some of the earliest printed poetry anthologies in Irish, as well as a number of forthcoming articles in peer-reviewed journals.
In opening up the manuscript material through cataloging, the project has further added to our understanding of post-classical Irish manuscript production and dissemination as an inherently international affair.