Dál Riata c. 1000: Genealogies and Irish Sea Politics

Abstract

Recent scholarship has identified the last decade of the tenth century as a period of special significance in the transmission of genealogical texts related to the early medieval kingdom of Dál Riata. Some of those responsible for the preservation of these texts seem to have been especially concerned to assert the ancestral link between the kings of Scotland in their own time and the earlier rulers of Dál Riata. This paper argues that the interest shown in this genealogical connection, the accuracy of which has been doubted, arose in response to specific political circumstances. Although Dál Riata disappeared almost entirely from the contemporary record at the end of the eighth century, its reappearance in historical and pseudo-historical texts written in Ireland during the late tenth and early eleventh centuries suggests that several parties from across the Irish Sea world were then competing for authority in the region. In this context the heightened interest in their descent from the rulers of Dál Riata apparent in texts of the 990s can be understood as an assertion of the political rights of the kings of Scotland in the face of contemporary challenges from Ireland and the Isles.