North Wales, Ireland and the Isles: the Insular Viking zone

Etchingham, Colmán

doi:10.1484/j.peri.3.434

Cited by 36 publications

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“…Colmán Etchingham has stressed that the western Scottish seaboard and the Irish Sea constituted a single 'Insular Viking Zone', so one understandable response to this could have been increased contacts between those on the receiving end of this Scandinavian activity. 105 In the late ninth or early tenth century it would have been desirable, and perhaps seemed natural, given their long histories as inhabitants of the island, to project shared contemporary interests back into the distant past, by giving the Picts and the Britons a close common ancestry. It has been suggested by Edward Cowan that the concept of Albanus as a brother of Brutus was intended in the tenth century to demonstrate common ancestry between the peoples of northern Britain, including the men of Strathclyde.…”

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Cultural contacts and ethnic origins in Viking Age Wales and northern Britain: the case of Albanus, Britain's first inhabitant and Scottish ancestor

Evans

2015

Journal of Medieval History

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Albanus, an eponymous ancestor for the kingdom of Alba, provides an example of the extent to which the creation of an ethnic identity was accompanied by new ideas about origins, which replaced previous accounts. Through an analysis of the Historia Brittonum's textual tradition and Welsh knowledge of early Roman history and medieval ethnic groups, this article establishes that Albanus was added to the Historia Brittonum in the late ninth or early tenth century as an ancestral figure for the new kingdom of Alba in northern Britain. This was potentially a result of shared political situations in Gwynedd, Alba (formerly Pictland) and Strathclyde in relation to Scandinavian power at this time, which encouraged contacts and the spread of Alba-based ideology to Gwynedd. The later development of this idea and its significance in Alba itself, Geoffrey of Monmouth's account and English claims to supremacy over Scotland are also traced.

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Cultural contacts and ethnic origins in Viking Age Wales and northern Britain: the case of Albanus, Britain's first inhabitant and Scottish ancestor

Evans

2015

Journal of Medieval History

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Traveling monastic paths: Mobility and religion at medieval Irish monasteries

Alonzi

Daly

Gordon

et al. 2019

Journal of Anthropological Archaeology

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Multilingualism in Early Medieval Britain

Brady

2023

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In the words of its own historians, pre-Norman Britain held five languages and four peoples. Yet in modern scholarship, Old English is too often studied separately from the other languages that surrounded it. This Element offers a comprehensive synthesis of the evidence from the pre-Norman period that situates Old English as one of several living languages that together formed the basis of a vibrant oral and written literary culture in early medieval Britain. Each section centres around a key thematic topic and is illustrated through a series of memorable case studies that encapsulate the extent to which multilingualism appeared in every facet of life in early medieval Britain: religious and scholarly; political and military; economic and cultural; intellectual and artistic. The Element makes an overall argument for the dynamic extent of transcultural literary and linguistic culture in early medieval Britain before the arrival of the Normans.

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North Wales, Ireland and the Isles: the Insular Viking zone

Cited by 36 publications

References 0 publications

Cultural contacts and ethnic origins in Viking Age Wales and northern Britain: the case of Albanus, Britain's first inhabitant and Scottish ancestor

Cultural contacts and ethnic origins in Viking Age Wales and northern Britain: the case of Albanus, Britain's first inhabitant and Scottish ancestor

Traveling monastic paths: Mobility and religion at medieval Irish monasteries

Multilingualism in Early Medieval Britain

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