Book Review: Early Medieval Ireland 400-1200

Early Medieval Ireland 400-1200 (Longman History of Ireland Series)
Dáibhí Ó Cróinín

This is one of those books that's great for the history buff, and it's certainly one of the more readable tomes on the subject. Anyone looking for a good introduction to the early Medieval period in Ireland, this is probably the book I'd recommend you pick up first.

No, it's probably not the most exciting bedtime reading, but for considering what it aims to deliver to the reader, it does a fine job. It's primarily aimed at university level students or the serious amateur historian, so it offers a good introduction to pretty much all of the key areas you'll want to know about, and it's well-referenced if you want pointers to further reading. It's not too heavy on Teh Big Wurdz and jargon so you won't be stuck reading the same paragraph again and again, trying to figure out what the hell it's supposed to be saying - always a plus in my book.

The areas covered include the beginnings of Christianity, the Church and its influence, the growth of early Medieval Irish literature, society and law, the Vikings, and then a bit about the political landscape. Each chapter covers a specific topic and is fairly self-contained, and provides a good introduction to the main points and issues surrounding that particular subject.

In addition to all of this, because it's fairly wide-ranging in its scope it makes a good place to start if you want to get an idea of the basics without having to spring for several lengthier books that go into more detail. It gives a solid foundation before you think about going on to the more specialised (denser and perhaps drier) books like Kelly's Early Irish Law, Patterson's Cattle Lords and Clansmen, Byrne's Irish Kings and High Kings, or McCone's Pagan Past and Christian Present, and so on...Educational and efficient! Nobody could complain about that in today's economic climate, eh?

You won't find much in here about pre-Christian Ireland, although there is a good discussion on the arguments for and against the pre-Christian origins of ogam. The lack of anything particularly meaty about pre-Christian Ireland might be off-putting to some, but what it does do is give a good idea of the kind of things surrounding the time when the tales were being written down, and how influential the Church came to be, and so on. This is all good stuff to know, even if it doesn't help in giving any practical ideas.

There isn't much that detracts from the book in terms of content; I'm sure some could criticise parts of it for not going into enough detail here and there, but at the end of the day, it's an introduction and it can't cover everything. It's not necessarily the cheapest book you'll find, especially if you buy it new, but otherwise if there's just one book you want to splurge on for introducing you to medieval Irish history, then I'd probably recommend this one.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Another bout of tweaking, this time some reorganising of the Resources section.

The links section has been a bit of a mess for a while now, so I've done some tidying up and reformatting there; any dead links should be gone now, and I've added in some more bits and pieces, but also removed some to keep the focus more tightly on Gaelic Reconstructionist Polytheism. I've decided to stick to what I know, as it were, to avoid confusion.

In the process of all that I decided to split off the pdf and .doc files into a new page:

Article Downloads

And then I decided to reorganise the Big Book List. That involved splitting off the older books into a list on its own:

Antiquarian Books

This is mainly because these are often the kinds of books that are problemmatic in one way or another, and it's unwieldy to have them lumped all together with the more reliable ones. They can still be useful but I think it's better to get a solid footing in the more modern works first.

Anyway, that's it for now...

Some changes and tweaking

With the kids back at school and some time to myself again, I've started concentrating on writing and research in my spare time again. I spent most of the summer trying to come up with some ideas of what to do next but nothing's really inspired me yet. Instead, I kept coming back to the idea of cleaning up what's already there; some of the older stuff on the website is in need of tidying up and redoing, especially in light of the progress I've made elsewhere, and I decided that some reorganisation was in order, too.

Since I started on this incarnation of the website in 2008 I've added quite a lot of articles and it's getting really unwieldy. There's not really much I can do about that right now, but after the latest slew of articles focusing on the gods, spirits and ancestors, I've kept thinking they need to organised a little better so I've finally split them off from the Cosmology section where I originally stuck them, and put them in their own section titled 'Gods'. I've also moved my old dissertation on the Dagda, and the article on the Cailleach into that section, seeing as they come under that heading too.

The biggest changes are in the Introduction section, though. As time goes by my thoughts on certain things are solidifying, I suppose, and lurking around various parts of the internet as I do I've seen some questions come up repeatedly. I've also seen some comments on what I've already written (and have been 'accused' of being American on one site, which amused me greatly. I'm not sure which amuses me more, though - whether it's because it seemed like that would be a bad thing, or because they decided I 'sound' American...) and some good points were made, so I decided to expand on the 'Celtic' Reconstructionism? article to address those. Some of it's just trying to clarify or explain things a bit better. Some of it I've added in to try and address the questions I see popping up a lot - like the differences between CR and Druidry.

The Scottish Reconstructionism article that followed on from 'Celtic Reconstructionism' has now been renamed and reworked a little too. I decided to rename it to Gaelic Reconstructionist Polytheism to better reflect where I'm at right now (and had been thinking about doing it for a while) - a bit of a mouthful, but the 'reconstructionist' bit seemed necessary to distinguish it from other kinds of Gaelic Polytheisms that aren't reconstructionist, like Sinnsreachd. Terminology: It's complicated.

There are some minor tweaks to the next article that's still up there - How To Get Started - and for now there's another article I've taken down while I decide what to do with it...There's a lot more that needs doing over all, especially for the links section, but I need to figure out how I can do that properly.

As ever, comments are welcome...

Frankenstein's ancestors...

Now here's something that's really interesting for you...

Ten ago the remains of several mummified corpses were found during a dig on South Uist - something that was exciting enough on its own, perhaps, but not least because they were then found to date from the Bronze Age. The evidence suggested that the corpses had been deliberately mummified, and had been placed in a bog for at least a year before being removed and then kept for many generations before they were finally buried.

Aside from being unique at the time, the find was exciting on a number of levels - providing evidence on Bronze Age burial practice, giving clear hints at what was presumed to be ancestor worship, as well as the implications as far as a belief in an afterlife are concerned, amongst other things.

The bodies were identified as male and female. Recent testing, however, has revealed that the mummies are in fact composites, made up of several different individuals and not all of the same sex:

A team from the University of Sheffield first uncovered the remains of a three-month-old-child, a possible young female adult, a female in her 40s and a male under the prehistoric village of Cladh Hallan.

But recent tests on the remains carried out by the University of Manchester, show that the "female burial", previously identified as such because of the pelvis of the skeleton, was in fact a composite.

It was made up of three different people, and some parts, such as the skull, were male.

Radiocarbon dating and stable isotope analysis showed that the male mummy was also a composite.

From the Beeb

Aside from there being implications in this new discovery as far as ancestor worship/veneration is concerned, it's also thought that:

"These could be kinship components, they are putting lineages together, the mixing up of different people's body parts seems to be a deliberate act," [Prof Parker Pearson] said.

(Somehow I doubt the various body parts came together by accident, so er, yeah...definitely deliberate). So not only is there possible evidence of ancestor worship here, the mummies could also be evidence of how social bonds were formed and maintained within a community - or one way in which that was done, at least. The find also raises some interesting questions about sex and gender in Bronze Age communities - is the mixing of sexes significant, relating to their function? Or perhaps the sex of the various corpses that were incorporated was incidental, and their status or role in the community was more significant...

Who knows. It's speculated that there are other mummies out there that may have been overlooked in the past - due to the state of their preservation, or whatever (once they're put in the ground, the mummified flesh wouldn't survive unless the conditions were just right, so you wouldn't necessarily realise that straight away). But given the fact that Bronze Age burial practice is something that seems to have continued into the the early Iron Age, there are some interesting questions there too.

More on the Laois bog body

Following on from my previous post about the bog body from Laois...Good news everyone, it's not a woman, it's a sacrificed king! OK, it could be. Let's be clear on that.

What was originally thought to have been a pair of well-preserved female legs, with the rest of the body being in poor condition (having been placed in a leather bag), turns out to have been a mistake. Further analysis has shown that the body was simply in a very contorted position, and the 'leather bag' was actually the man's torso.

Naturally, it's now being speculated that this is a sacrificed king, as per The Golden Bough era of interpretation:

“Irish kings in the ancient period were replaced after a number of years. The old king would be sacrificed and a new king chosen. It ties in with their religious beliefs surrounding the solar deity (male) and the deity of the land (female). The king ties in with the solar cycle – the waxing and waning of the sun.

The idea was that the king was married to the sovereignty, or the land. The goddess would become old and withered and she would need a new young consort to return her to youth and vigor and beauty. So the old king would be killed and a new one take his place. They wouldn’t have been that old, either.”

Irish Central

But that's not all! Remember the article about Old Croghan Man, with the nipples "representing the life-giving sun" being cut off? Yup. The article about the Laois bog body has the same expert commenting:

They will be pay [sic] particular attention to the bog body’s nipples. Whether or not his nipples have been cut could indicate whether he was a king. 

Kelly explained “The kissing or suckling of a king’s nipples was a gesture of submission,” Kelly said. “So by cutting the nipples, the king was being decommissioned.”

Irish Central

Other researchers have apparently claimed that the state of Old Croghan Man's nipples could be nothing more than the result of damage to delicate tissue from the waterlogged conditions, and aren't necessarily purposeful or the result of ritual, so it's not really clear that the nipples are a marker of ritual activity at all.

Either way, once again there's nothing particularly substantial offered in the Laois bog body article to concretely link the body with a human sacrifice or kingship. It's assumed that this is (or is likely to be) a king; it's assumed that this is (or is likely to be) a sacrifice, but very little is offered to support or even counter those points in order to provide a little balance. Yes, bogs are liminal places, and it's well-known that such liminal places - neither one thing another (land or water, in this case) - are often a focus of ritual activity or mythological symbolism. But it's equally the case that bogs by their very nature provide conditions where bodies are more likely to be preserved, and so the very idea of 'bog bodies' being a ritual thing could really simply be the result of accidents of preservation skewing our view.

All in all, it's not a very balanced article. The issue of human sacrifice is by no means universally accepted because it's notoriously difficult to prove conclusively. We can compare the Irish or the Celts as a whole to other cultures at the time who were also said to have practiced human sacrifice at some point or other, and say that on the balance of evidence it's likely that the Celts did too. But we can't really prove that what we find in the bogs is indicative of sacrificial intent. We can see that many of these bodies were dispatched in very specific ways. We can see there might even be a lot of similarities in the method (the so-called 'triple-fold death' method).

All too often these things get wrapped up in assumption, without considering the other side of the coin - the skeptics, those who are a little more cautious to leap to such conclusions (that doesn't make for such an exciting article, though, does it?). Sometimes people get a little too caught up in the imagination and then you end up with claims like Lindow Man being sacrificed by druids at Bealltainn simply because some mistletoe pollen was discovered in the contents of his stomach.

I was trying to find an article on this called 'Did they fall or were they pushed? Some unresolved questions about bog bodies?' by C. S. Briggs - well worth a read if you want a good, balanced view of the for and against, in ands outs of human sacrifice. I couldn't find that available online but I did find these ones that cite him, and look like they have some interesting things to say:

'Humans as ritual victims in the later prehistory of Western Europe,' by Miranda Green
Bodies from the Bog: Metamorphosis, Non-human Agency, and the Making of 'Collective Memory,' by Stuart McLean
Lindow Man