Finnegan’s Wake

I’m reading Finnegan’s Wake by Jame’s Joyce. This page contains a collection of assorted links and resources that I’ve found helpful in  for understanding the imagery and allusions in this dreamtime narrative. It definitely helps having a background in the study of Tarot, Mythology, Symbolism, and History, along with just having read enough and liking entymology and linguistics enough that this novel feels like “listening to people talking with a thick dialect”. It would help even more if I was familiar with Dublin. 🙂

• A Skeleton’s Key to Finnegans Wake – Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson
• Language as Prayer in Finnegans Wake – by Colleen Jaurretche (Author), 2020, University Press of Florida, ISBN: 9780813066370

Full Text Editions

• www.finwake.com – Glosses of Finnegan’s Wake. Annotated full text of Finnegans Wake. Essential if you are working your way through this tome.
• www.joyceproject.com – An annotated online edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses. 

Study Guides and References

• www.finnegansweb.com/wiki – Finnegan’s Wiki. A Wiki-based Study Guide to Finnegans Wake
• joycewords.com – Joyce Word Dictionary. An evolving open access dictionary of Joyce’s words and their multiple meanings.

Religion & Bible Studies

• Biblehub.com – Topical, Greek and Hebrew study tools, plus translations, concordances, commentaries, dictionaries, sermons and devotionals.
• strongsconcordance.org – An exhaustive concordance of the King James Bible with Hebrew and Greek lexicons. Relevant especially because the KJV was the version available to Joyce.
• wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_Bible_translations – List of complete and partial bible translations, including dates and source language(s).
• clausenbooks.com/bible.htm – A non-sectarian chronological history of the bible including unique & significant editions and historical milestones. Dates range from the invention of cuneiform writing (3500 B.C.E) to modern day publications.

Dictionaries

• askdifference.com – Dictionary for word comparison and meaning, showing definitions along with the subtle differences and nuances between words.
• etymonline.com – Online Etymology Dictionary. Etymologies are explanations of what our words meant, how their meanings evolved, and how they sounded in the past.
• www.oed.com – The Oxford English Dictionary. A guide to the meaning, history, and usage of over 500,000 words and phrases
• wiktionary.org – Wiktionary – a free-content multilingual dictionary with definitions and descriptions in English.
  Wiktionary includes a thesaurus, a rhyme guide, phrase books, and extensive appendices, along with etymologies, pronunciations, sample quotations, synonyms, antonyms and translations.

Additional Reading

• esotericarchives.com – Twilit Grotto: Archives of Western Esoterica – This site contains a collection of books on a variety of esoteric subjects. James Joyce wrote an essay on the works of Giovanni Bruno, and Finnegan’s Wake incorporates in its foundation themes expounded on by Bruno in his book “Heroic Frenzies“, which is available on this site.