Some Nifty Resources

Here’s a couple of nifty resources I discovered recently, of the audio variety.  I went to a presentation & performance about  Tobar an Dualchais or Kist o Riches (meaning Well of Heritage). It is a archive full of recordings of traditional Scottish Gaelic & Scots  music, poetry, speeches on history, folklore, stories and traditions. Ethnic You can search for specific songs, artists, key words, etc.  Folklorists have been collecting recordings since the 1930’s, and they are in the process of being digitized and uploaded to the website. I haven’t even explored it yet, but it sounds amazing!

Since most of what I know of Irish (and other Celtic) history is from the pre-Christian era, I wanted to learn more about later periods. But to a Yank, with only a 300-some year old country  it is such a  long history, I didn’t know where to start. When I searched “Irish history” in the St. Paul library catalog, I got hundreds of hits. So I poked around online and found a the Irish History Podcast. The fellow who does it, does a great job of explaining things- I particularly enjoy  how he discusses what everyday life was like.  For the next step in this journey, I will pick a time period or topic that especially interests me (women’s role in history for example) and read more on that.

 

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Revamping the Blog

I decided to do some re-vamping of this blog- I probably spent a half hour mulling over which background theme to use! I’m going to focus the blog less on politics, partly because I’ve started another, mainly on the subject of disability rights.  I can never resist a pun, hence the new title 🙂  In the past, I’ve posted book reviews of various kinds on Roots Leaves & Threads, but I think it makes more sense to put religion, culture, history books here.  I found some good Celtic Recon/Gaelic Polytheist blogs to add, and I’m also going to put up some pages of resources (books, links etc)