Just to be SO clear: it frustrates me when terms like "folklore" are used imprecisely not because I think folklore is "lesser" than medieval literature, but because I respect the work that actual folklorists do and *know that I am not doing it*. Conflating our sources does neither of us any favours.

EVERY. TIME. It drives me bonkers. I see it in scholarship too: French or English sources are "literature", but Celtic-language texts are "folk tales" or "folklore", regardless of their origins or audience.

A noble's manuscript collection derived from the work of professional court storytellers and bards ain't "folklore" because it's in Welsh

There's a tendency in some non-specialist sources to stick the "folklore" label on anything from a medieval Welsh manuscript and...no? Unless you're fine with me calling the Canterbury Tales folklore too

really scraping the bottom of the barrel in a genre (reboots) that is already all about scraping various parts of the barrel

was anyone going to tell me they're doing a Highlander reboot film or was I just supposed to find that out myself

Fs in the chat :'-(

in addition to Killboy, What We Are Seeking, and The Heart of the Nhaga, my other most anticipated books for the year are the sequel to Caskey Russell's The Door on the Sea and the last book of Kim Sung-il's Bleeding Empire trilogy, both of which come out in November!

Calls for Reviews & Essays: January 2027

the shifting agency and valence of the last line of "stùc an lochain / lochan toupie / the tarn’s top", too, not to mention the shift in speaker in the Scots section — really good!!

so we go back to the English and think: oh, not only the "finance" but also the "capital" should make us think of Marx; and we reach the "capietal" in the Scots and are primed to think both of Edinburgh and of primitive accumulation and the Highland Clearances.

where "capital" in the English section and "capietal" in the Scots both read, by default, only in the sense of "capital city", the use of the adjective "calpach" in Gaelic forces a reevaluation: it ONLY has the sense — unexpected based on the English and Scots — of "capitalist(ic)".

[...] to the sprawled ikeas and libraries of my own good capital of finance [...] [...] gu ikeas is paircean is leabharlannan a’ bhaile mhaith chalpaich agam fhìn [...] [...] doun the a seventy-eight tae the bonnie ikeas an leebraries o me capietal toun [...]

the one that really jumped out at me is the middle of "rear wing / sgiath chùil / hinderweeng":

and if you do read all three languages it quickly becomes apparent that in fact each language serves as a commentary / variation on the others, drawing out different resonances and meanings that are not necessarily apparent if you only read one language. these ARE trilingual poems.

all three languages do, in broad strokes, say "the same thing", but even if you don't read all three languages there are visible differences in formatting and lineation that bely the idea that they can be read as just "equivalent" texts.