This essay uses Samuel Johnson's characterization of Gaelic culture as an essentially airborne phenomenon as the starting point for a wide-ranging consideration of the links between atmospheric and Celtic discourses during the Romantic era. This period has been deemed foundational to the literary ‘appearance’ of air and the conceptual formation of Celticity, but these two cultural phenomena have rarely been considered in tandem. Beginning with a discussion of the atmospheric ideas that underpin the Poems of Ossian's infamous mists, the essay argues that critics have largely ignored the complexity of Macpherson's medicalized ecologies of air. The essay then moves on to consider the development of comparable cloudy symbolism during the Welsh cultural revival of the 1790s, when overcast skies became an organising metaphor used to express the cultural benightedness of Wales. The often-unexamined cliché of ‘Celtic mistiness’ is revealed as a vital metaphor for the allure and imperfection of intercultural mediation.
This article details the Romantic-era reception of mediaeval Welsh poetry ascribed to the bard Llywarch Hen, which was first translated and published by William Owen Pughe in the early 1790s. Llywarchian poetry, under-acknowledged by the anglophone critical tradition, is revealed as a significant overlooked source within Romantic-era bardic revivalism, in part thanks to Owen Pughe’s prominence in Romantic literary networks. Owen Pughe’s translations are positioned in relation to Macpherson’s Ossian, and interpreted as attempts to capitalize on the allure of Ossianic tropes whilst simultaneously placating anti-Ossianic scepticism. The article then goes on to examine the use of these translations in works by Robert Southey, Walter Scott, and Felicia Hemans, all of whose receptions of the material were mediated by Owen Pughe himself. Throughout, the ambivalence of critical and authorial pronouncements on the translations is contrasted with the evident fascination they elicited in Romantic authors, with this tension examined in relation to recent critical debates about authority and revivalist efficacy in Romantic literary antiquarianism. The article ends by using R. S. Thomas’s reception of Llywarch in the 1970s to connect Romantic and modern adaptations of this material, establishing a Llywarchian chain of influence in archipelagic British literature that deserves further critical engagement.
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