Thirty years’ work in Irish history (II)

Abstract

It is a sad admission that the historical work of the past thirty years on the first seven centuries of Irish history can be very rapidly surveyed. Eóin MacNeill, who first laid the foundations for the serious study of early Irish history (and indeed of the Gaelic world down to its dissolution), expended his scholarship in many learned articles and brilliant essays. The task of weaving a consecutive narrative was left to the over-enthusiastic hands of Mrs Alice Stopford Green, since whose time no one has ventured to write a full-scale history of the period before the Norman invasion.

Between apathy and antipathy: the Vikings in Irish and Scandinavian history

“…41 However, it was not Mac Neill, but his enthusiastic admirer, Alice Stopford Green, who was to become the archetypical nationalistic historian with the publication of her book A history of the Irish state to 1014 in 1925. Later historiographers have preferred to view it as an unfortunate parenthesis, 42 but Green's book was reviewed very favourably, even by Mac Neill. He lauded her for imbuing ‗the people of Ireland with the spirit and hope of a sound future development'.…”