Strange Beauty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Landscape

The New Middle Ages

by Alfred Kentigern Siewers

Strange Beauty brings the developing discipline of environmental literary criticism to bear on narratives of nature and the Otherworld from early cultures around the Irish Sea. Reflecting on an Otherworld associated with human experience, Siewers uses texts such as the Ulster Cycle and the Mabinogi to relate views of nature, symbolism and language. This book uncovers early syntheses of Christian and indigenous Insular cultures which express an integration of the spiritual and physical landscapes that are marginalized in later medieval thought. Strange Beauty opens a window on distinctive alternative views of the relation of culture to nature still relevant today.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Medieval

238 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2008

Reviews

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

Print is so tiny this is going to take a long time to get through-but I'm hooked. Let us adore the Lord, Maker of wonderful works: Great-bright heaven with its angels; On earth the fair-waved sea.

There are some, although few indeed, to whom divine grace has given power to contemplate the whole orb of the earth and the sea and heavens around it, brightly and most manifestly, with scope of mind miraculously enlarged in one and the same moment as if beneath a single ray of the sun.(Columcille of Iona)

What is this book about? I thought I was going to see a lot of pictures of beautiful Ireland, Scotland and Wales where Celtic monks contemplated. Not so. It is about worlds that exist simultaneously with ours in the same space. Through an examination of Celtic traditions the connection between the story and the environment is made.