REPRINTING

Looking at the Mermaid
A Cornish Reader 900–1900

Edited by Alan M Kent and Tim Saunders

Francis Boutle Publishers
ISBN 1 903427 01 0
Paperback 198 pages

The book

This reader contains extensive selections from the great works of Cornish literature – the Ordinalia, Beunans Meriasek, Pascon agan Arluth and The Creacion of the World – and brings together for the first time a multitude of poems, letters, proverbs and songs in Cornish from a variety of sources, all newly translated. Dozens of additional texts in English and translations from Latin, Anglo-Saxon and French, ranging from the twelfth-century Prophecy of Merlin to the observations of Edward Lhuyd, W.S. Lach-Szyrma and Sabine Baring-Gould, provide a continuous commentary on the Cornish language and culture over a millennium.

The editors

Alan M Kent was born in St Austell and grew up in the china clay mining region of mid-Cornwall. He is a poet, novelist and dramatist. In 1998 he was awarded a doctorate for his research into Cornish, Cornu-English and Anglo-Cornish literature. He is has recently completed a new verse adaptation of the Cornish mystery play trilogy known as Ordinalia.

Tim Saunders is one of the leading poets writing in Cornish today. He is the author of poetry and jounalism in Welsh, Irish and Breton as well as Cornish and he is the editor of The Wheel –an anthology of modern poetry in Cornish 1850–1980. He is a bard of the Cornish Gorseth.

Free teaching aids based on this book

See our teaching aids section for free programmes of study based on this book for Key Stages 2–4 and Advanced Level