Abstract
In James Fenimore Cooper’s nineteenth-century American novel The Deerslayer, the hero Natty Bumppo and a friend approach the lake at the headwaters of the Susquehanna River, a huge watershed at the heart of what used to be the great Eastern Woodlands of America:
The motion of the canoe had been attended with little or no noise, the frontier-men from habit getting accustomed to caution in most of their movements, and it now lay on the glassy water, appearing to float in air, partaking of the breathing stillness that seemed to pervade the entire scene.1
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Notes
For more detailed theoretical and historical background to this discussion, see Alfred K. Siewers, Strange Beauty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Landscape, The New Middle Ages (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Terry Eagleton, “The Irish Sublime,” Religion & Literature 28 (1996): 25–26, 29.
Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior, Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (New York: HarperCollins 2009), pp. 40–41.
Timo Maran, “Towards an Integrated Methodology of Ecosemiotics: The Concept of Nature-Text,” Sign Systems Studies 35 (2007): 269–94.
The importance of environmental empathy in human self-realization, proposed in deep ecology, is argued in terms of neuroscience and environmental phenomenology by Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 382–411.
Patrick SimsWilliams, “Some Celtic Otherworld Terms,” in Celtic Language, Celtic Culture, A Festschrift for Eric P. Hamp, ed. A. T. E. Matonis and Daniel F. Melia (Belmont, MA: Ford & Bailie, 1990), pp. 57–81.
John Carey, “The Irish ‘Otherworld’: Hiberno-Latin Perspectives,” Éigse 25 (1991): 154–59.
About Irish aerial ships, see John Carey, “Aerial Ships and Underwater Monasteries: The Evolution of a Monastic Marvel,” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 12 (1990): 16–28. References to other items in this list are given later.
See, among other works by Benjamin Hudson, Irish Sea Studies 900–1200 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006).
Michael Schellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, The Death of Environmentalism (2004), http://www.thebreakthrough.org/images/Death_of _Environmentalism.pdf. Accessed October 1, 2009, p. 34. See also Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Janis Tomlinson and Graham Burchell III (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 105.
Peter Hallward, Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation: Out of this World (London and New York: Verso, 2006).
John Carey, A Single Ray of the Sun, Religious Speculation in Early Ireland (Andover, MA, and Aberystwyth, UK: Celtic Studies Publications, 1999), p. 29.
Séamus Mac Mathúna, ed. and trans., Immram Brain, Bran’s Journey to the Land of the Women: An Edition of the Old Irish Tale with Linguistic Analysis, Notes and Commentary (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1985), pp. 39–40.
See Edward S. Casey on Irigaray’s work in relation to landscape in The Fate of Place, A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 321–30.
John Carey, Ireland and the Grail (Abersytwyth, UK: Celtic Studies Publications, 2007), pp. 60–65.
Edgar Slotkin, “Medieval Irish Scribes and Fixed Texts,” Éigse 17 (1977–1979): 437–50.
Hildegard Tristram’s work on Taín Bó Cúailnge, including “The Cattle-Raid of Cuailnge between the Oral and the Written. A Research Report (SFB 321, Project A 5, 1986–1996),” Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 51 (1999): 125–29.
Benjamin Hudson, “Time is Short,” in Irish Sea Studies 900–1200 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006), p. 173 [172–96].
John Carey, “Tara and the Supernatural,” in The Kingship and Landscape of Tara, ed. Edel Bhreathnach (Dublin: Four Courts Press for The Discovery Programme, 2005), p. 48, note 90 [32–48].
Gearóid Ó Donnchadha, St. Brendan of Kerry, the Navigator: His Life and Voyages (Dublin, Open Air: 2004), pp. 8–9.
Jennifer Neville, Representations of the Natural World in Old English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999), p. 37.
Kay Muhr, “Water Imagery in Early Irish,” Celtica 23 (1999): 208 [193–210].
Colin Ireland, “Penance and Prayer in Water: An Irish Practice in Northumbrian Hagiography,” Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 34 (Winter 1997): 54–55 [54–66].
Fergus Kelly, “A Poem in Praise of Columb Cille,” Ériu 24 (1973): 1–34.
Nerys Patterson, Cattle-Lords and Clansmen, the Social Structure of Early Ireland, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), p. 94. Patterson’s overall approach needs to be supplemented by Robin Chapman Stacey’s The Road to Judgment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994).
Fergus Kelly’s Early Irish Farming (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1997).
T. M. Charles-Edward’s Early Irish and Welsh Kinship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). See also Lisa Bitel’s critique of Patterson’s book, Speculum 71.1 (1996): 188–90. Many of Patterson’s overall conclusions, nonetheless, are in sync with T. M. Charles Edwards’s more recent work.
Sebastian Brock, ed., The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1987), p. xxviii.
Nikolaos Loudovikos, A Eucharistic Ontology: Maximus the Confessor’s Eschatological Ontology of Being as Dialogical Reciprocity, trans. Elizabeth Theokritoff (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2010), p. 234.
Micael Ross, “Anchors in a Three-Decker World,” Folklore 109 (1998): 63–75.
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Siewers, A. (2012). Desert Islands: Europe’s Atlantic Archipelago as Ascetic Landscape. In: Hudson, B. (eds) Studies in the Medieval Atlantic. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137062390_2
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