Tag: early and medieval Irish

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Masterly Reflections

I handed in my thesis this week which means, for those keeping track at home, that I’ve now finished my MA.

It’s an odd feeling: anticlimactic, for one. During undergrad, we all finished at the same time — after a brief, intense period of exams there was May Week, and then results came out, and then we graduated, which saw us all off the premises with appropriate pomp and grandeur. There was a finality to it, and plenty of opportunities to say goodbye to everyone.

By contrast, the small handful of us on this course are all finishing at slightly different times, with the majority handing in from a distance, having already left Cork. They’re long gone, scattered to the four winds; those of us who remain attend seminars as quasi-students, no longer required to be there but remaining out of habit, and one by one we complete our theses and disappear. Thanks to Covid, I know almost nobody outside of this particular course, so the list of people to say goodbye to is short, but it still feels odd, this strange winding down of things.

I’m not the partying type, nor did I have the money to go to half a dozen May Balls in undergrad to blow off steam post-finals (I went to the Ulidia-Finn conference on Skye instead, because I’m a nerd, and then a single June Event). But there was something about that week of social events and frivolities to celebrate the end of the year that made all the hard work I’d done feel more real — that made it clear that yes, it really was over. Now, without that marker, I’m half convinced somebody’s going to pop out of the woodwork to tell me that I’ve missed something, that I haven’t finished after all.

I hoped that taking photos around campus would make it feel more real, but honestly, it hasn’t. Although maybe this process would be even weirder if I hadn’t.

UCC has been a very different experience from Cambridge. At times, it’s hard to know how much that’s because the two universities are so very different, how much it’s the difference between undergrad and postgrad, and how much it’s simply that I’m older and in a very different headspace. I’ll be honest: I was miserable most of the way through undergrad. By contrast, postgrad me has only very occasionally cried over work, even if I’ve cried over other things. That’s an improvement, right?

I took two years out after finishing undergrad, convinced I was leaving academia. That evidently didn’t turn out to be the case, but those two years were important in teaching me that there was a life outside studying. It gave me a useful sense of perspective, which I think has helped when I felt overwhelmed, although I also think I’ve simply been a lot less overwhelmed. An MA might be more challenging than a BA in some regards, but the Cambridge workload and course structure was… pretty nightmarish, to be honest. The first time I realised I was only expected to write a couple of essays a semester here, it blew my mind. Sure, so the essays counted and they actually had to be good — my undergrad supervision essays certainly weren’t — but there were so few of them! And they were on topics I was actually studying!

The year has had other challenges. We bounced from one set of Covid restrictions to another, and all the while I’m living alone, lacking opportunities to socialise. Living alone was a new experience in itself, since I’ve always had housemates or family around me before this. For the most part, I’ve enjoyed it, though it’s encouraged many of my bad habits; I’ve been to bed at 5am more times than is wise for anyone, and my flat’s a mess, with no particular reason to deal with my clutter resulting in me simply… not dealing with it. But I’ve been lonely, at times, and the run-up to last Christmas was particularly bad, as I anticipated a day spent alone, a long way from family.

I’ve missed dance. My flat is tiny, and the studios were shut for the most of the year. (They’re open now, so inevitably I have an injury that limits my ability to walk, let alone dance. Thanks, body.) I’ve missed feeling in control of my body, having a chance to de-stress that doesn’t involve looking at a screen, and the social element that came from regular dance classes. I’ve struggled with increased injuries and pain because my muscles are deconditioned, and that’s been pretty miserable. So the lockdowns have definitely proven a major challenge in that regard, even if I have appreciated the total lack of food-based socialising. (It’s been a great year and a half of not getting poisoned in order to feel included in a group!)

And of course, getting a book deal was a dream come true, but one that complicated matters: balancing academic deadlines with edits meant I never really got a break. My thesis was originally due in September, extended to December because of disruption caused by Covid. It wasn’t the pandemic that meant I needed it, though: it was The Butterfly Assassin. I don’t think there’s any way I could have got my thesis and my edits done on time according to the original deadline without completely giving up on sleeping, which would have been bad. I have fatigue and chronic pain, so I spend a lot more time horizontal than most people do; juggling an MA and a debut novel with such limited hours of function each day is… maybe not ideal.

I still managed to write 115k of the sequel in the last two weeks before thesis hand-in, though, because sometimes when I’m stressed it manifests as words. Just as I suddenly translated a lot more early modern Irish when I was stressed about publishing — playing the two causes of stress off against each other proved a pretty effective way of keeping each in check, and I would highly recommend academic deadlines as a way to stop checking your emails while waiting on publishing news.

(And I’m lucky that my supervisor was not only patient with my deadline-juggling, but invested in my book and the publishing journey: during most of our meetings he would ask how it was going, and where we were at in the process, and what was coming next. At times, these were a cathartic opportunity to vent about the inscrutability of publishing and the powerlessness one can feel as a debut author; at other times, it was a chance to celebrate progress. Mostly the former, though, not gonna lie.)

I don’t know what I’m doing next. For some people, the absence of firm commitments would feel liberating. For me, it feels slightly like stepping off the edge of a cliff. I have nothing pinned down at all for the next couple of months, and it’s going to be a strange experience, to be without constant deadlines hanging over my head. There are a couple of opportunities I’m pursuing, but it’s entirely possible (in fact, it’s likely) that neither of them will work out, so I can’t plan for the future. The Butterfly Assassin comes out in May; that’s more or less the only thing I know about next year.

I know that some of my supervisors are hoping I’ll do a PhD, or at least, they think I’m more than capable of one and it would be a shame if I didn’t. A few years ago, I’d have scoffed at the idea; now, I’ve considered it enough to have researched some of my options, looking at where I might go and what I might do. I enjoy research, even if I complain endlessly about the process of academic writing (fiction feels so easy by comparison), and I can’t see myself being done with medieval Irish lit any time soon… or perhaps early modern Irish lit, my most recent research having very much taken the “periodisation is fake” approach to my official degree title (Early and Medieval Irish) and wandered a long way into the seventeenth century and beyond.

But funding deadlines for a 2022 start are imminent, and without a proposal in mind, I won’t be rushing in an application. Despite the sense of vague inevitability about it — I seem to be the kind of person that academia just happens to — I’m not committing to anything at this point. In truth, I’ve got no plans to stay in academia long-term for work; I’m not interested in the constant grind of short-term highly competitive jobs that would have me ricocheting all over the country/world, never able to settle down for more than a year, and these seem par for the course for early career researchers. That means it’s not worth doing a PhD just for the sake of it, because I don’t “need” it. But if I find I have a topic in mind, then that’ll change things.

I came back to do an MA because I had a thesis topic and wanted the support and resources to research it. Since I firmly intend to continue my medievalist shenanigans informally the way I did post-undergrad, it’s plausible I’ll stumble on something that would make a viable PhD thesis. And that’ll change things. In the meantime, I’m keeping my mind and options open, and looking at other ways I might utilise my research skills and experience.

Is there a job that involves teaching geese about medieval Irish literature? If so, consider this my application.

And as for my MA thesis topic? Well, I think I did what I set out to do. I wanted to write about Láeg mac Riangabra, Cú Chulainn’s charioteer, because he’s interesting and has been neglected in academic discussions before now. I came in with a pretty clear idea of the texts I wanted to look at and the directions I planned to go in, and many of these proved to be correct; there were no dramatic revelations that completely changed my angle. At the same time, there were new facets I hadn’t considered and texts I wasn’t familiar with. My conclusions now are not the same as they would have been a year ago, because I learned more: this is good, and expected. But they aren’t wildly different either: I arrived pretty firmly on the path, probably by virtue of having two years to play with my ideas before I started.

My goal was to come out the other end of this degree knowing more about Láeg: I do. I also know more about palaeography, a skill I regretted not developing in undergrad, and believe it or not, I’d hazard my medieval Irish grammar has got better too — though my spelling has got worse, as a result of spending too much time in the orthographic hellscape of the early modern period. My modern Irish hasn’t improved as much after a year in Ireland as I’d hoped, but lockdown can be blamed for that: I find language-learning over Zoom intensely difficult, and opportunities to speak to people IRL have been few. It’s something I plan to work on over the next year, though whether this is more self-teaching or whether I’m able to find classes will very much depend on where I end up living past the next few months.

What I’ve most valued about my time at UCC hasn’t been the subject matter, though. I’ve enjoyed being part of an academic community. My supervisors and lecturers have been encouraging and enthusiastic. Specialising in the thing I was best at during undergrad (medieval Irish lit) has given me the chance to gain confidence as a scholar. Good things have come in twos: I’ve given two undergrad lectures, presented at two conferences, had two papers pass peer review and be accepted for publication. And while it would be easy to dismiss my higher grades as a discrepancy between Cambridge and UCC’s standards — something I’ve been tempted to do on numerous occasions, because I love to put myself down — I think that’s doing myself a disservice. I know I’m a better scholar than I was during undergrad. I know more, I care more, and being less overwhelmed gave me the time to focus on the things that matter.

I don’t know what my final grade will be, or even when I’m due to receive it. I don’t know when graduation is, and therefore at what point I officially become a Master. But I know this: I’m coming out of my MA more confident in my knowledge and skills, and with a totally different attitude towards academia than the one I left undergrad with. I may be burned out from months of back-to-back publishing and academic deadlines, but I’m not an exhausted husk determined never to return. I have plans to mine my thesis and coursework for articles; I’ve spent time in the library this week scanning texts I want to translate and work with in my own time; and I’m looking forward to having the time and space to make videos again.

Whatever else happens, it’s clear Celtic Studies isn’t free of me yet.

But oooh, boy, I’m sure going to miss academic library access.

Checking references, library goblin style.

You can support me in accumulating my own personal academic library by buying me a coffee. Alternatively, if you want to support me in having a less void-like future that involves an actual career, now is a great time to pre-order The Butterfly Assassin.

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One Semester, Mastered

This week marked the end of my first semester at UCC studying the MA in Early and Medieval Irish. On the one hand, it feels bizarre that I’ve already been living here in Cork for more than three months. On the other hand, the semester occasionally felt endless, and by the end of it I was very ready for a break…

Of course, inevitably I don’t now have a month to do absolutely nothing — I’ve two assignments due on the eighth of January, an article deadline of the eighteenth, translation to do for my thesis, and a number of personal projects I want to get done. But there’s still a certain freedom that comes from no longer having classes, and knowing that I made it this far, including surviving three in-class tests (one of which is continuing to haunt me with the knowledge of mistakes I probably made).

Returning to academia after two years has been an odd experience — no stranger than I imagined, but still, there’s been a lot of flailing around as I try and figure out what the expectations are and how to meet them. Part of this is that UCC is a wildly different institution to Cambridge, and so how I’d approach things at Cambridge doesn’t necessarily carry over to how they’re done here. (Going from an 8-week term to a 12-week one was rough in itself!) And of course, there’s the fact that I’ve moved to a new country and am living alone during a pandemic that’s seriously curtailing the amount of in-person socialising that’s happening.

But I was expecting that, and honestly, I’ve been lucky — the tiny class sizes on my course have meant we’ve been able to continue with face-to-face teaching for the majority of modules. Without that, I think I’d have struggled a lot more. It’s given me a chance to meet most of my fellow MA students and get to know them on a level that would have been a lot more difficult via online classes, but also, at the most basic level, it’s given me a reason to leave the house and an opportunity to speak to other humans, which I might not otherwise have had.

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Even if some of the rooms on campus are so cold I started bringing a blanket to class.

Still, it’s been a strange semester. At times it felt weirdly easy — without the weekly essays that haunted my undergraduate years, the workload felt a lot more manageable, and without in-person societies, I had a lot more time to myself. That’s probably why I wrote two novels this semester, a first draft of one and a second draft of another, although I’ll admit that was also a desperate attempt to keep reality — and therefore anxiety — at bay. As we accelerated towards the end of term, though, my decision to spend November and early December writing frantically caught up with me, with three assessments and two assignments looming. Turns out that’s the disadvantage (?) of not being constantly stressed throughout the semester: it takes you by surprise when it does come.

I still think I benefited from not feeling like I was constantly drowning, though. Don’t get me wrong: I learned a huge amount in Cambridge, and there are some advantages to the supervision system. But with my health, the non-stop pace of it and the impossibility of taking a few days off here and there to recover always ended up screwing me over.

There are also some things that the Cambridge system didn’t prepare me for, on a more subject-specific level. Yes, we translated a lot of texts in language classes, so to have gone from covering five different texts in the course of a year to spending all semester on two pages of one story felt like a shock. But when it comes to doing things in depth, and specifically, doing grammar in depth… oof.

See, I never really got the hang of Old Irish grammar. The textbooks seemed to be written with the assumption that we’d have done Latin or some other language with a case system; that we’d understand what a preterite was and what a predicate was and why they weren’t the same thing; that we’d know why it mattered for a word to be an o-stem or a u-stem, etc etc. It never clicked. It wasn’t until last year that I found out what those stems even mean and why it was relevant (while studying Modern Irish, and encountering declensions).

But that was okay, because the way our course was structured meant that language and literature exams were combined, and my literature essays were usually good enough to make up for the fact that I don’t really understand verbs and have never memorised a paradigm in my life.

Pain and suffering, in the form of revision for my Old Irish exam.

And even if I had understood it, or learned it in enough depth… well, that’s the kind of thing we’d have done in first year. Which was now six years ago. Not to mention the fact that my mental and physical health were such a disaster — undiagnosed autoimmune conditions will do that to you — that most of 2015 is a blank in my memory, so frankly, if I ever got the hang of the subjunctive, I’d have lost it a long time ago. That’s a fun thing to realise — that you literally have to relearn things from the ground up because it’s not just ordinary forgetfulness that’s done for them, but the result of ongoing brain fog and the effect that has on your brain. Plus, you know, I couldn’t actually read during undergrad: me and my orange glasses are trying to make up for lost time now that I’ve been given the gift of reading slowly.

And the way UCC approaches Quin’s Old Irish Workbook is to nail those grammatical concepts in a lot more depth — and while it’s useful and important and will probably solidify my skills a lot, I’ve sometimes felt I’m scrambling to catch up. Because while I can just about keep on top of the new concepts we’re encountering, anything that was in the first half of the textbook (here covered in beginner’s Old Irish, and in Cambridge, covered more rapidly in the first term of first year) is still, largely, a mystery to me. Thus when the textbook triumphantly proclaims that the long-e future uses the subjunctive endings and so we don’t have to learn new endings, I can only stare at it dismally and wonder if there’s some kind of magic spell I can do that will transform me into the kind of person capable of memorising paradigms.

And I’m trying. In particular, I’m trying not to say that I can’t do grammar. Just that I haven’t yet found a method of learning it that actually works for me. Which, okay, you’d think after six years that if there was one I would have figured it out, but I’m attempting positivity here, go with it.

So yes, I have probably spent a fair amount of this semester staring in despair at my too-pristine copy of Strachan’s Paradigms and sensing that probably, after this many years, it should look somewhat tattier (don’t worry, I’ve managed to mess up the cover a fair bit by now). It’s probably had more use in the past month than it did in the entire four years of my undergrad studies, because it turns out, when you don’t race through the material at a breakneck pace in order to cover as much as possible as quickly as possible… you actually have to learn it properly.

Funny, that.

But, for all it’s shown up what I don’t know, my first semester here has also given me the opportunity to use what I do know — I gave two lectures for an undergrad module about gender in medieval Irish texts, introducing them to gender and queer theory and talking about Cú Chulainn’s unconventional masculinity in the Táin, which is the kind of thing I can talk about until the cows come home. I’m miles ahead with my thesis — and only my thesis, but it’s still a win — as a result of having spent about a year and a half thinking about it before I even got here, and my supervisor keeps warning me that if I’m not careful it’ll turn into a PhD thesis in terms of length/scope, which… yeah. Is anyone surprised?

Plus I’ve had the chance to tackle palaeography, which was completely new to me and which I regretted not having taken it in undergrad. My experiences of rare books as a librarian were handy, but for the most part it was all new info, and in the space of one semester, insular minuscule has gone from an impenetrable code to something I can pretty much read (slowly) (with help from lists of abbreviations). There’s something very satisfying about sharing my screen with my parents on Zoom so I can show them the manuscript I’m working with and explaining the letters to them, like I’ve cracked some kind of cipher.

A glimpse of RIA D.IV.2, the focus of my palaeography assignment

And I guess, most importantly, I’ve survived. Living completely alone (no housemates) for the first time, in a city I’d barely visited, in another country, during a pandemic, when my mental health was rocky to start with — it’s a lot. And there’ve been some darker moments. But for the most part, I’ve been doing a hell of a lot better here than I was earlier this summer when I retreated to my bed in Cambridge and spent weeks as a depression slug. Having a focus has helped. Making new friends has helped. Learning new things has helped. Teaching others has helped.

I miss dance (my tiny one-bed isn’t vastly suited to it). I miss seeing my family and friends back in England. I’m not going home for Christmas because it doesn’t feel safe, and that’s going to be pretty tough, too. But it’s been a much better semester than I feared, and a much more normal one, too, for which I’m very grateful.

So here’s to surviving, and to a few more days of procrastination before I actually sit down and do those assignments — because if one thing hasn’t changed, it’s my approach to deadlines.