Research Staff:
Dr Oliver Padel
Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic
- Currently President of the English Place-Name Society, and vice-president of the Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland.
- Editor of the Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall.
- Member of Council of the Devon and Cornwall Record Society.
Contact
Department of ASNC, Faculty of English, 9 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DP
(+44-1223-335079)
Email: ojp10@cam.ac.uk
Research Interests
Welsh:
- a chapter on Early Welsh Englyn Poetry, for a general introduction to Medieval Welsh literature, edited by Nerys Ann Jones. A chapter, `Aneirin and Taliesin: sceptical speculations', for a volume on Scotland and Early Welsh Poetry, edited by Alex Woolf. An student's edition of Early Welsh Arthurian Poems.
Cornish:
- an expanded translation of Henry Lewis's Llawlyfr Cernyweg Canol (1946), as A Handbook of Middle Cornish (grammar, texts, glossary).
- An edition, with translation of the entries, analysis of the personal names and historical discussion, of the Bodmin Manumissions (entries recording the liberation of slaves at Bodmin in the tenth and eleventh centuries).
- An edition of the 1327 Lay Subsidy Roll for Cornwall (lists of taxpayers, parish by parish), with analysis of the surnames occurring in it.
- The death of Cornish in eastern Cornwall (different kinds of evidence showing when the language died out there).
- A study of the syntax of Cornish, and its evidence in relation to Brittonic sentence-patterns.
General:
- Editor of the Place-names of Cornwall for the English Place-Name Society; A History of Dark-Age Cornwall (seventh to twelfth centuries).
Recent Publications
- `Local saints and place-names in Cornwall', in Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West, edited by Alan Thacker and Richard Sharpe (Oxford, 2002), pp. 303–60. [A study of local saints' cults in Cornwall, and their reflection in place-names.]
- `Names in -kin in medieval Wales', in Names, Time and Place: Essays in Memory of Richard McKinley, edited by Della Hooke and David Postles (Oxford, 2003), pp. 117–26. [Welsh names in -kin contribute to understanding of the use and meaning of this suffix in Middle English.]
- `The charter of Lanlawren (Cornwall)', in Latin Learning and English Lore: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature for Michael Lapidge, edited by K. O'Brien O'Keeffe and Andy Orchard, 2 vols (Toronto, 2005), II, 74–85. [Fifteenth-century text of a tenth-century Cornish charter (Sawyer, no. 1207), with updated discussion.]
- `Oral and literary culture in medieval Cornwall', in Medieval Celtic Literature and Society, edited by Helen Fulton (Dublin, 2005), pp. 95–116. [The relationship between oral and literary culture in the county; evidence for any input from oral story-telling into the literary texts, including the recently-discovered Cornish play, Bewnans Ke `The Life of St Ke'.]
- `Geoffrey of Monmouth and the development of the Merlin legend', Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 51 (2006), 37–65. [Reinterpretation of Welsh poems ascribed to Myrddin; how the `two Merlins' arose; Geoffrey's connection with St Asaph; Gerald of Wales's interest in Merlin.]
- `Evidence for oral tales in medieval Cornwall', Studia Celtica, 40 (2006), 127–53. [Including the legends of Arthur and Tristan, the Sunken City, King Gerent.]