Ancient Web: Mary Jones Collected Medieval Celtic Myths With a Font Warning

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A homepage with an encyclopedia of Celtic mythology is already a substantial project. Mary Jones also needed visitors to install the right fonts before they could read some medieval manuscript characters.

Visit AKA Mary Jones.

Jones introduces two central undertakings: collecting medieval Celtic texts or links to their surviving editions, and writing a Celtic encyclopedia. Her homepage has the quiet voice of a researcher showing the contents of a personal filing cabinet, not a company offering Celtic-themed merchandise.

The practical advice is an artifact in itself. The site recommends Code2000 and Andron Scriptor to display specialist characters found in manuscript transcriptions. It even warns that a large ZIP archive may require an alternative extraction program on Windows 7. Those instructions preserve the obstacles that early digital humanities projects faced when standard computers did not reliably support old languages.

An encyclopedia arranged by letters

The Celtic Encyclopedia is organized from A through Z, with additional appendices, maps, and a bibliography. The index links discussions of Lebor Gabála Érenn, the medieval Irish account often translated as the Book of Invasions, including a concise overview and genealogy prepared by Lloyd D. Graham.

Its bibliography shows the source mixture behind the project. It names editions of Silva Gadelica, The Mabinogion, The Voyage of Mael Dúin, early Welsh genealogical tracts, and other scholarly works. Some entries link to CELT, the University College Cork corpus of Irish texts; others record print editions or personal research websites.

The publication dates of modern books in the bibliography do not date the entire project. The encyclopedia index itself displays a 2005 copyright, while the homepage preserves a notice about an online Celtic-studies master's program dated July 2006.

This is a personal resource, not a peer-reviewed critical edition. Readers should consult manuscript scholarship before using its summaries to make historical claims. The usefulness of the site lies in showing its sources openly and making neglected texts more discoverable.

Even a broken older font link teaches something about preservation: the text and the software needed to display it both require care.

Browse the alphabetized encyclopedia and its bibliography.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.