A key argument of this book is that it is impossible to separate the growth of any one of the insular origin narratives from that of the larger corpus of historical and pseudohistorical writing which contained them. This initial chapter therefore presents the evidence for the textual connections between these works in one place, while the chapters to follow will analyse the historical, literary, and cultural implications of these connections. A crucial part of this discussion will of course centre around known connections between texts in the corpus of insular historical and pseudohistorical works, and so this chapter outlines the sources and later reuses of each major work under consideration. This survey is, by necessity, in part a synthesis of the work of previous scholars. It is presented here because while studies of the individual texts discussed below are generally well-aware of their connections to other works in the insular corpus, broader scholarship on the early medieval period still treats so-called ‘Irish’, ‘Welsh’, ‘Anglo-Saxon’, and ‘Scottish’ literary and historical traditions as disparate. Yet as Robert W. Rix has noted, ‘the understanding of the end product is enriched by making sense of the sources utilized to create its authority’.Footnote ¹ In compiling scholarship on the transcultural nature of the works which contained insular origin material and explicating the layers of textual connection between them, this chapter follows the methodology of scholars such as Goffart, Plassmann, Coumert, and Reimitz in overturning the common perception that the authors of these texts were working in proto-national isolation and instead revealing the textual connections that shaped the intellectual landscape of the early medieval insular region.Footnote ²

Compiling this information in one place, moreover, allows me to make the new connections and conclusions which form the bulk of this chapter’s arguments. My focus is on three simple yet important points, whose impact has not yet been fully appreciated. The first is that three out of the four early insular origin legends are first recorded in a work whose author was writing outside that group itself. In other words, the Anglo-Saxon origin legend is first recorded by the British Gildas; the Pictish origin legend by the Anglo-Saxon Bede; and the Irish origin legend by the British author of the Historia Brittonum. The textual ghosts on which these authors drew shed invaluable light onto the web of intellectual connections within the corpus of works containing early insular origin material, as they reveal moments where a given text has got its information from a source that no longer survives.Footnote ³ They also show us that early insular authors were not as interested in writing the histories of their ‘own’ people in a vacuum as much as they were with filling in gaps in the historical narrative from every available source.

My second simple point is the frequency with which moments of direct connection between texts in the corpus of early insular works containing origin material are acknowledged within these works themselves; that is, moments in which a text declares that it has got its information about a given episode from another source. When these moments are compiled, their cumulative weight and commonplace nature both demonstrate the intellectual connectivity of this corpus and underscore the extent to which its authors sought out all available information as they wrote. The third and final point that this chapter explores is that these texts draw no value distinctions between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ versions of a given people’s origin story. In other words, the author of the Historia Brittonum does not prioritise ‘the tradition of our elders’ over ‘the writings of the Irish and the English’.Footnote ⁴ The narratives of early insular origin legends were not treated as codified by the texts that preserved them. Any information that added knowledge was welcomed, demonstrating the important role of the corpus of insular historical works as a whole in shaping the growth of these narratives. Together, these patterns of textual transmission underscore the interconnected nature of the corpus of works containing origin material in the early medieval insular region.

Before I turn to the texts themselves, it is important to clarify the terminology used throughout this book. My focus is the origin stories of the peoples who inhabited the islands of Britain and Ireland from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. As we have seen in the Introduction, early medieval insular authors recorded their understanding that contemporary Britain and Ireland were inhabited by four distinct gentes, around each of whom, as this book demonstrates, increasingly complex origin legends gradually began to accrete. As the author of the Historia Brittonum wrote:

Here delineated as four gentes, the insular peoples were also commonly distinguished by language, as in Bede’s remarks that

Following the vocabulary of my sources, I have used the terms British, Irish, Pictish and Anglo-Saxon to refer to the four gentes depicted in insular origin narratives. To be clear, the present study is an analysis of these origin stories and the texts containing them. By no means can it be extrapolated that early medieval peoples who spoke a common language would have understood themselves to have a shared an ‘ethnic’ identity. Much good work has underscored the reality that in the early medieval period, insular peoples identified primarily with kinship or dynastic groups (and later kingdoms or regions).Footnote ⁷ However, the authors who wrote early medieval histories and pseudohistories collected within them the origin stories of four distinct gentes. Let me explain what I mean, and do not mean, when I use the words ‘British’, ‘Irish’, ‘Pictish’, ‘Anglo-Saxon’, and other associated terminology throughout this book.

‘Britain’ and ‘Ireland’ refer to the islands of those names (Latin Britannia and Hibernia) as they were known during the early medieval period, not to any modern political entities. The term ‘British’ is used throughout texts containing early insular origin material and consequently throughout this book to refer to speakers of a language in the Brittonic family living in southern Britain from the post-Roman period to the twelfth century. Following the conclusions made by Huw Pryce in his seminal article ‘British or Welsh? National Identity in Twelfth-Century Wales’, I use the term ‘Welsh’ to refer to those Brittonic speakers who inhabited western Britain after the arrival of the Normans and ‘Wales’ for the region, following an internal shift in preferred terminology.Footnote ⁸

As is evident in the passages from the Historia Brittonum and Bede discussed above, early medieval authors writing in Latin used the term Scoti or Scotti to refer to the Gaelic-speaking peoples who inhabited Ireland, parts of northern Britain, and the Isle of Man. Because this term would eventually come to signify the Scottish kingdom and people of northern Britain after the ninth century, I follow a scholarly convention which avoids confusion by offering more precise translations. The term ‘Irish’ encompasses Gaelic speakers living in Ireland who were characterised as belonging to a shared gens by contemporary sources. ‘Gaelic’ is used when referring to the entire Gaelic-speaking population of the insular region as a whole, and the Dál Riata to the Gaelic-speaking kingdom that stretched across Britain and Ireland.Footnote ⁹ In insular texts, the ‘Picts’ are a distinct gens who inhabited northern Britain in the early medieval period. After the ninth century, the Pictish and Gaelic inhabitants of northern Britain formed one kingdom, known first as Alba and later Scotland, for which I use the terms ‘Scotland’ and ‘Scottish’.Footnote ¹⁰

Finally, the phrase ‘Anglo-Saxons’ refers to speakers of the Germanic language known as Old English who inhabited southern Britain before the arrival of the Normans in the eleventh century. Bede describes the ‘Anglorum siue Saxonum gens’ (the race of the Angles or Saxons) using the singular gens, writing, ‘aduenerant autem de tribus Germaniae populis fortioribus, id est Saxonibus, Anglis, Iutis’ (they came from three very powerful Germanic tribes, the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes).Footnote ¹¹ Early medieval sources preserved this origin legend that the purported ‘Anglo-Saxon’ gens sprang from disparate locations (as opposed to the British, Irish, and Pictish gentes). Throughout the pre-Norman period, individual kingdoms populated by Old English speakers continued to be identified as ‘Anglian’ or ‘Saxon’, and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and analogous phrases were used, both internally and externally, to describe the collective of those kingdoms in pre-Norman Britain, inhabited primarily by Old English speakers and thus perceived by their contemporaries as distinct from the regions which were populated primarily by speakers of Celtic languages. I use the terms ‘England’ and ‘English’ to refer to the same population during the period following the Norman Conquest.

When it came to the Brittonic-speaking inhabitants of southern Britain, Pryce was able to answer the question ‘British or Welsh?’ by surveying the frequency with which these terms were used over time. For the Old-English-speaking inhabitants of pre-Norman Britain, the answer to the analogous question ‘Anglo-Saxon or English?’ has been made more complicated by the fact that sorting the evidence is often a case of ‘translator’s choice’: ought ‘Anglian’ and ‘Saxon’ to be translated as ‘Anglian’ and ‘Saxon’, or as ‘English’?Footnote ¹² The point in time at which a sense of ‘English’ national identity began to develop has been much discussed.Footnote ¹³ I have outlined the shaky foundations of attempts to project a unified ‘English’ identity back into the pre-Norman period in the Introduction above. This book is an analysis of origin legends as they were written by early medieval authors and not of any real-world process of ethnogenesis. Nonetheless, it is worth restating my objections to claiming early medieval texts as evidence of supposedly ‘national’ or proto-national identities. First of all, our sources are so limited that any arguments towards a unified ‘English’ (or ‘British’, or ‘Irish’, or ‘Pictish’) identity can only apply to a tiny, elite fraction of the overall (male) population. Secondly, the documentary evidence which does survive from the early insular world reveals that violence and warfare took place ‘internally’ as often as ‘externally’ when it came to these purported ethnic groups. Irish kingdoms fought against other Irish kingdoms far more often than they did against Anglo-Saxon ones, and vice versa. As I have argued elsewhere, language cannot be understood as a proxy for political alliance.Footnote ¹⁴ In sum, then, while the origin legends treated in this study appear in larger works which are often understood as ‘historical’, it is important to bear in mind that the origin narratives themselves are literary objects. This book is not a study of real-world identities, but rather, it investigates the ways in which insular authors wrote about the origin legends of the four gentes whom they understood to inhabit Britain and Ireland in the pre-Viking period.

Part I: Gildas’s De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae and the Origin Legend of the Anglo-Saxons

A remarkable illustration of the interconnected nature of the corpus of early insular works containing origin material is the fact that three out of four of these origin legends were first recorded in a work from the literary-historical tradition of another people. These stories, moreover, were preserved in reverse ‘historical’ order. According to the corpus of insular origin legends – which, needless to say, do not reflect historical or archaeological reality – the ancestors of the British, Irish, Pictish and Anglo-Saxon peoples were perceived to have come to the insular region in that order. Yet the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, the ‘newest’ inhabitants of the region, is first recorded in the British Gildas’s De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, the oldest text in the insular corpus of works containing origin material. The supposed second-most-recent arrivals, the Picts, have their origin story first preserved by the Anglo-Saxon Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, the second-oldest text in the corpus. Finally, the origin legends of the peoples said to be the oldest inhabitants of the region – the Irish and the British – are first preserved together in the third-oldest text in the insular corpus, the British Historia Brittonum. The chronology in which these origin stories were recorded is our first indication of the highly literary, intertextual nature of the corpus in which they were preserved. The body of works containing origin legends as a whole began by recording current history before working backwards to fill in the gaps in knowledge, underscoring the literary and constructed nature of this corpus.

The earliest work in the corpus of insular texts containing origin material is Gildas’s De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae. Gildas was by his own admission British, but little else about him or the De Excidio can be stated with confidence: as Patrick Sims-Williams puts it, ‘all trustworthy information about him comes from his own words’.Footnote ¹⁵ The De Excidio has traditionally been dated to the mid-sixth century, but this is based on rather slender corroborating evidence, in which ‘all we can say is that by the early tenth century an Irish annalist thought that Gildas flourished in the mid-sixth century and that his opinion was acceptable to a Welsh annalist’.Footnote ¹⁶ An earlier date cannot be ruled out, as Guy Halsall has noted:

I follow current consensus in referring to Gildas as a ‘sixth-century’ author. As Sims-Williams writes: ‘I shall be content to regard the De Excidio simply as a sixth-century work, written earlier than Columbanus’ reference to it c. 600, and later than the fifth century, because of Gildas’s vagueness about the known history of the early part of that century’.Footnote ¹⁸ When discussing the De Excidio, it is also important to bear in mind that this is not a work of history which conforms to our modern understanding of such. Rather, it is most frequently (and accurately) characterised as a jeremiad. Gildas’s De Excidio is rich in biblical allusions and forms a cri de coeur against the sins, as Gildas understands them, of his fellow Britons, which have brought about their downfall from a height of Roman civilisation to the despair of contemporary times.

This singular work is the first insular text to preserve the origin story of the Anglo-Saxons.Footnote ¹⁹ Gildas situates their arrival to Britain in the aftermath of Roman departure, when the Picts and Scotti from the north were attacking the Britons:

The aim of De Excidio is to explicate the moral decline of the British (as Gildas sees it) which brought about the divine punishment of the Saxon invasion. De Excidio is a highly allusive and difficult text, and there are still many points throughout this long invective where the historical background to Gildas’s words remains unclear.Footnote ²² This is because, as Sims-Williams has aptly stated,

Though as T.M. Charles-Edwards reminds us, Gildas ‘thought of himself as both prophet and historian’.Footnote ²⁴

In the narrative of the De Excidio, then, the coming of the Saxons is understood as a divine punishment for the Britons’ sinful behaviour, explaining Gildas’s allusive language. Despite these difficulties, we can see that the fundamental core of the Anglo-Saxon migration legend is present in his account: three ships full of mercenaries arrive from the continental Germanic lands at the invitation of the Britons and remain to lay waste to increasingly greater swaths of southern Britain as a whole. Gildas’s De Excidio preserves the earliest recorded version of this origin legend, which – as we shall see – would come to be widely reproduced throughout the corpus of insular texts containing origin material. It is worth pausing to consider the fact that the earliest extant version of the Anglo-Saxon origin legend is preserved in a British source. This underscores the clear interest that all origin stories held for the authors of early insular historical and pseudohistorical works. Those who wrote these texts were interested not only in the origins of their own people, but also of everyone else who inhabited the region.

Yet while the British Gildas was the first insular author to record the Anglo-Saxon origin legend,Footnote ²⁵ details in this narrative reveal the textual ghost of his now-lost source(s).Footnote ²⁶ The story of the adventus Saxonum clearly drew upon an external source – whether written or oral – that had been in some amount of contact with Germanic peoples. Several key pieces of evidence indicate that Gildas did not invent the Anglo-Saxon origin story out of whole cloth. Linguistic evidence – that Gildas knew the Old English word cyules (keels) – suggests an Anglo-Saxon source. So too does the cultural evidence that he was familiar with their particular custom of auguries.Footnote ²⁷ Historical evidence – Gildas knew that the Saxons were collecting tribute from the church in Britain – also suggests that he was in close contact with their culture.Footnote ²⁸ Origin legends are of course ‘notoriously unreliable’ as historical sources, as this book is one of many studies to demonstrate.Footnote ²⁹ Yet in focusing on what Gildas’s account of the Anglo-Saxon origin story reveals about the process of textual transmission rather than historical fact, it is clear that some external source stood behind Gildas’s version of this narrative, and there are good reasons to suspect that it was an Anglo-Saxon one.Footnote ³⁰ Thus, even the earliest text in the corpus of insular historical writing relied on an external source for its origin material. Gildas’s early work illustrates the process by which the corpus of insular origin narratives grew: absorbing external pieces of information from all available sources in order to relate a coherent narrative of the history of the region as a whole.

Another key point first illustrated by Gildas’s De Excidio which is carried on throughout the corpus of early insular works containing origin material is the extent of intertextual connectivity that these works possessed. As Michael E. Jones has pointed out, ‘Gildas “Sapiens” enjoyed great learned repute in the Middle Ages, but he subsequently came to be seen as an isolated, obscure, and peculiar Latin stylist.’Footnote ³¹ Yet Gildas was not writing in isolation, as has been painstakingly demonstrated by a host of scholars, particularly François Kerlouégan and Neil Wright.Footnote ³² As their work has confirmed, Gildas was familiar with a wide range of texts, which he drew on as he composed the De Excidio. These included (or potentially included) the following works: the Bible, Jerome (De Viris Illustribus, the Epistolae, and the Vita S. Pauli), Euagrius’s translation of Athanasius’s Vita S. Antonii, Sulpicius Severus’s Vita S. Martini, a lost Passio S. Albani, a Pelagian tract on virginity which may have been composed by a British author, Eusebius’s Historia Ecclesiastica via the Latin translation by Rufinus, and Orosius’s Historia aduersum Paganos. The De Excidio also contains potential parallels to the works of Livy, Cicero, Juvenal, Persius or Martial, and Claudian, as well as certain borrowings from Virgil’s Aeneid (and potentially the Georgics as well) – to say nothing of those texts which his style parallels.Footnote ³³ Thus, although Gildas has often been characterised as working in intellectual isolation, the De Excidio was actually in conversation with a number of prior and subsequent works. As Charles-Edwards has commented,

In participating in these broader intellectual conversations, Gildas’s De Excidio models the process of composition of the corpus of works containing insular origin material as a whole.

In turn, the De Excidio became very well known throughout early medieval Britain and Ireland in the centuries after Gildas wrote. As is the case for many other early medieval texts, ‘the existing manuscripts of the De excidio are all considerably later than the composition of the text itself’.Footnote ³⁵ The oldest manuscript of the De Excidio is London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A.vi, which dates to the mid-tenth century.Footnote ³⁶ Other important manuscripts include Avranches Public Library, MS no. 162 (twelfth century), Cambridge University Library, MS Ff. I. 27 (thirteenth century), and Cambridge University Library MS Dd. I. 17 (c.1400).Footnote ³⁷ However, we know that Gildas was well known and used throughout the early insular world thanks to references and excerpts in subsequent works. As Thomas D. O’Sullivan notes, ‘the oldest important witnesses to the text are the extensive quotations in the Venerable Bede, which however are sometimes paraphrases, and the glosses on De excidio which are preserved in the late eighth century Leyden and Corpus glossaries’.Footnote ³⁸ Gildas’s De Excidio became a foundational text for many later authors, both those who were and were not interested in the origins of insular peoples in their writings. A sampling of early medieval authors who were familiar with Gildas’s De Excidio and used it in their own writing includes Columbanus, Bede, Alcuin, Theodore and Hadrian at the Canterbury School, the author of the Historia Brittonum, Wulfstan, and Geoffrey of Monmouth.Footnote ³⁹ These reuses of Gildas’s text further underscore the interconnected nature of the corpus of early insular historical writing and the willingness of early medieval authors to utilise every available source at their disposal.Footnote ⁴⁰

These intellectual chains of connection, moreover, continued throughout the centuries. Within the corpus of early insular texts containing origin material, Bede drew upon Gildas,Footnote ⁴¹ the author of the Historia Brittonum drew upon both Gildas and Bede,Footnote ⁴² and this material in turn spread from the Historia Brittonum into Irish tradition through the Lebor Bretnach and the Lebor Gabála Érenn, as will be explicated further below.Footnote ⁴³ There exists, in other words, a consistent pattern of connection to earlier works that runs throughout the corpus of early medieval insular texts containing origin material. These intertextual connections underscore the development of the corpus as a whole over time, with regular references back to earlier works.

As Gildas’s De Excidio is thus the earliest text in the corpus to demonstrate, three out of four insular peoples’ origin legends were first recorded not by a historian of their ‘own’ people. This fact highlights the interest within the corpus of early insular historical and pseudohistorical texts about the origins of the region as a whole. Such textual ghosts – moments in which we know an author was relying on an earlier source that is now lost – also showcase the intertextual nature of the corpus, in which no work was written in intellectual isolation. So too does the fact that no distinction is drawn between ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ sources of information in the De Excidio, a pattern that likewise holds true throughout the rest of the corpus. While Gildas was relying on an Anglo-Saxon source for his account of their migration legend, he does not dismiss their historical traditions as worthless or biased, but rather incorporates this narrative into his history without commenting on its source. Gildas’s De Excidio is the first of many texts to illustrate the key ways in which the insular corpus of historical writing was built upon a complex web of intertextual connection.

Part II: Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum and the Origins of the Picts

Gildas’s De Excidio is the earliest surviving work in the corpus of texts containing insular origin material by two centuries. The next work in this corpus is the Anglo-Saxon monk Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, which he completed in 731.Footnote ⁴⁴ Bede spent his life as a monk at Wearmouth-Jarrow in Northumbria after joining the community at age seven. He was a prolific writer – the Historia Ecclesiastica is one of over forty works authored by Bede, and he has enjoyed a reputation as an eminent scholar and historian from his own time to the present day.Footnote ⁴⁵ The Historia Ecclesiastica covers the history of (southern) Britain from the time of Julius Caesar’s first invasion in 55 BCE until Bede’s lifetime, focusing on the gradual conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity after the Roman mission of Augustine to Kent in 597 CE. The Historia Ecclesiastica has always been an important source for the history of early Anglo-Saxon England. While earlier studies tended to take Bede’s statements at face value, more recent scholarship has underscored the biases inherent in the Historia Ecclesiastica, most notably its Northumbrian-centric focus. Deeply learned and steeped in late antique and early medieval intellectual traditions, Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica draws on Gildas and other authors to relate the prehistory of Britain in a way that situates the origin legend of the Anglo-Saxons in broader world history.

It is here that the origin legend of the Picts – the second-most-recent people to arrive in the insular region, according to legendary tradition – was first recorded. Like the Anglo-Saxon migration story first documented in Gildas, the Pictish origin legend was first preserved in the historical tradition of another people, which itself drew on now-lost external sources. Yet Bede draws no value distinction between the historicity of the Pictish and Anglo-Saxon origin legends even though (as discussed further below) the Pictish origin legend derives from either a Pictish or an Irish source which now no longer survives. The Pictish origin legend has often been treated as exceptional because it depicts a ‘lost people’ from whom very little native textual material survives.Footnote ⁴⁶ However, one of the aims of this chapter’s survey is to suggest that even if early Pictish historical narratives did survive, they would likely not depict the Pictish origin narrative much differently than did Anglo-Saxon or Irish works. Texts containing early insular origin legends drew information from wherever they could without making value distinctions between ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ source material. Understanding the process via which these origin legends grew makes clear the intertextuality of the corpus of insular origin material as a whole.

Of the Picts, Bede writes:

As was the case in Gildas’s De Excidio, Bede’s use of an external source for the Pictish origin narrative is not made explicit here. Yet as a number of scholars have demonstrated, it is nonetheless likewise clear from the contents of this passage.Footnote ⁴⁸ As A.H. Merrills states, Bede

This intricately constructed origin legend was thus, again, not invented by Bede out of whole cloth but rather incorporated into the Historia Ecclesiastica from a non-Anglo-Saxon source.

While the external nature of Bede’s source is thus clear, there has been some debate over whether the source(s) in question for this particular passage were Pictish or Irish. Those in favour of a Pictish source have pointed to the narrative’s sustained focus, also noting that Bede seems to imply firsthand knowledge of Pictish culture with his statement that ‘it is well known that the custom has been observed among the Picts to this day’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Pictish expert Molly Miller even-handedly concluded that Bede’s version of the Pictish origin legend was ‘polite in manner and literary in mode, historically it is Pict-centred, but could have come to Bede immediately from a Pictish, north-country Brittonic or Dalriadic source, secular or ecclesiastical, or have been common to all’.Footnote ⁵¹ The case for a non-Pictish source for this narrative relies on its similarity to Irish pseudohistorical writing and the fact that apart from Bede, the Pictish origin legend is preserved only in Irish texts. These, however, are much later in date than the Historia Ecclesiastica and are in actuality much likelier to have sourced the Pictish origin story from Bede than the other way around (discussed further below). The details of the narrative itself are also suggestive of an ultimate Irish origin for this tale. What Bede presents us with is not simply a legend about the origins of the Picts. Rather, it is a complicated narrative about the relationship between the Picts and the Irish in which the Irish are depicted as having gained a significant political upper hand in this encounter: they are able to both prevent the Picts from settling in their lands and ensure that future Pictish kings will be of Irish descent. In this legend, as I will discuss further in Chapter Four below, taking wives from another people seems to place political power into the hands of those who provided them.

This interpretation of the narrative would seem to point towards non-Pictish tradition as the ultimate source for this origin legend. Such a reading has indeed been suggested by Alfred P. Smyth, who writes that this origin story was ‘foisted on the Picts by the Irish’.Footnote ⁵² Yet at the same time, James E. Fraser has argued that this narrative can be interpreted within the context of contemporary Pictish politics. He writes:

Thus, there is a case to be made for either a Gaelic or a Pictish source for this legend, or – as is perhaps most likely – a blend of both, thanks to the proximity of Pictish territory to the kingdom of the Dál Riata in early medieval Britain.Footnote ⁵⁴ (The close intellectual ties between these regions are discussed further below in the context of the Lebor Bretnach’s place of composition.)

Yet regardless of precisely where Bede’s narrative of Pictish origins came from, the fact that the Anglo-Saxon author’s Historia Ecclesiastica is the earliest text in the insular corpus to preserve this material underscores the desires of early medieval historians to draw together the origin stories of the region as a whole. Bede’s reliance upon an external, now-lost source for the Pictish origin legend reflects the level of intertextuality in the corpus of early insular historical writing while also reminding us how much written material has simply been lost from the early medieval period. Yet at the same time, such connections to now-lost texts demonstrate that a burgeoning corpus of insular origin material already existed at the time that Bede was writing. As he incorporated this material into the Historia Ecclesiastica, he did not distinguish between the value of Anglo-Saxon, Irish, Pictish, or British source texts. Rather, the Pictish origin legend simply became part of the history of the early medieval insular region.

Bede also drew heavily on Gildas’s De Excidio while writing the Historia Ecclesiastica, continuing the chain of connections between texts in the corpus of insular historical writing.Footnote ⁵⁵ Like Gildas, Bede was in turn also used heavily by later texts. The Historia Ecclesiastica was immediately and widely popular in the medieval period, and very early manuscript copies have survived: ‘Bede’s History is one of the very few works written in Latin before the Carolingian renaissance which have come down to us in copies virtually contemporary with their authors.’Footnote ⁵⁶ There are over 160 surviving manuscripts of the Historia Ecclesiastica from both insular and continental Europe, where Bede enjoyed wide respect as a historian throughout the whole of the Middle Ages.Footnote ⁵⁷ The Historia Ecclesiastica served as a source for the author of the Historia Brittonum,Footnote ⁵⁸ and Bede’s work was also more widely known throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, incorporated into a variety of later works in the centuries after his death.Footnote ⁵⁹ The Historia Ecclesiastica was also known to Irish scholars: though it has been little discussed outside of Irish scholarship, a fragmentary Irish translation of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica survives.Footnote ⁶⁰ It was incorporated into a manuscript containing the Lebor Bretnach, which in turn became a source for the Lebor Gabála Érenn. These two later Irish texts were crucial in promulgating the spread of insular origin narratives, as discussed in greater detail below. Like Gildas, Bede was an exceptionally learned author who drew heavily on numerous external sources while writing the Historia Ecclesiastica.Footnote ⁶¹ Yet the Pictish origin story reminds us that while many of Bede’s sources are known and survive elsewhere, that is not the case for all of them. Many have either been lost or were originally oral in nature, and crucially, by no means were all of them Anglo-Saxon.Footnote ⁶² Although Bede is now remembered as the quintessential Anglo-Saxon historian, his presentation of the Pictish origin legend underscores the extent to which the corpus of insular origin material was multilingual, transnational, and heavily intertextual in nature.

Part III: The Historia Brittonum and the Origins of the Irish and the British

Within the body of insular origin tales, the Irish and the British were the two peoples believed to have inhabited the islands of Britain and Ireland for the longest period of time. The complete narratives of both Irish and British origins are first preserved in the third-youngest-surviving text to contain insular origin material, the ninth-century British text known as the Historia Brittonum, written a century after Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica in 829–30, the fourth year of the reign of Merfyn Frych, king of Gwynedd.Footnote ⁶³ Like the Historia Ecclesiastica, the narrative of the Historia Brittonum encompasses the history of Britain from prehistory to Roman Britain to the early medieval period. Unlike Bede, however, the author of the Historia Brittonum did not extend his history forward to the present day (the most recent events discussed are in the late seventh century). As Charles-Edwards writes, the Historia Brittonum was

In constructing this insular narrative of world history, the Historia Brittonum included the origin legends of the British and Irish gentes. Yet continuing the pattern we have already seen for the origins of the Anglo-Saxons and Picts in the works of Gildas and Bede, the British and Irish origin narratives in the Historia Brittonum came not from British sources, but from now-lost external ones. Yet here, too, the presence of the Irish origin narrative in the Historia Brittonum alongside that of the British and Anglo-Saxons underscores the desire within insular historical writing as a genre to including the history of the region as a whole, even within works which ostensibly focused on one gens.

In the Historia Brittonum, moreover, both the Irish and the British origin legends are given conflicting, competing versions, illustrating how much of this material was circulating in the region at the date when the Historia Brittonum was composed. These competing origin narratives are also a testament to the value that was placed on all information within the insular historical corpus. Even though these legends were contradictory, no attempt was made to reconcile them into one cohesive narrative. At the point when the Historia Brittonum was written, competing versions of the same people’s origin story were incorporated unproblematically alongside one another because all information on the history of the region was equally valued. Indeed, as was the case with Gildas and Bede, the author of the Historia Brittonum does not make value judgements between the worth of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ sources to his narrative. The Historia Brittonum, like the works of Gildas and Bede before it, illustrates the continued intertextual nature of the corpus of insular origin writing as it grew over time.

The Irish origin narrative in the Historia Brittonum is confused and contradictory because it originally came from a now-lost Irish source and was preserved as best as possible in its earliest surviving form within this British text. The Historia Brittonum, when discussing the origins of the Irish, writes:

Like the origins of the Anglo-Saxons in Gildas’s De Excidio and the Picts in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, this legendary history of the Irish in the Historia Brittonum most likely came from an external source that no longer survives, in this case an Irish one. As many studies have demonstrated, the Irish origin legend had already undergone many layers of accretion that combined native Irish, classical and late antique, and contemporary medieval sources to create the form that this narrative takes in the Historia Brittonum by the time this work was composed in the early ninth century.Footnote ⁶⁶ Work by scholars such as Heinrich Zimmer, Kuno Meyer, A.G. van Hamel, R. Mark Scowcroft, and John Carey has demonstrated that while the Irish origin legend undoubtedly preserves much native mythological material, it was shaped equally by the influence of imported intellectual tradition, notably biblical history, Jerome’s translation of the Chronicle of Eusebius, Orosius’s History against the Pagans, the writings of Isidore of Seville, and even the Historia Brittonum itself.Footnote ⁶⁷ Carey’s work has shown that while the Historia Brittonum preserves the earliest complete prose copy of the Irish origin legend, there are earlier poetic references to the figures in this narrative, indicating that the Irish origin narrative was circulating before it was recorded in its surviving form in the Historia Brittonum.Footnote ⁶⁸ A recent important study by Michael Clarke has also demonstrated the likelihood of Carolingian influence on insular origin material, including the British and Irish origin legends in the Historia Brittonum as well as the Lebor Gabála Érenn, discussed further below.Footnote ⁶⁹ Yet these early texts are allusive, and no earlier complete narrative of the Irish origin legend has survived. The fact that the first place to preserve it is the British Historia Brittonum again illustrates the intertextuality of the corpus of insular origin material and the vibrant intellectual community that existed in this region during the early medieval period.

The evidence surrounding the Irish origin legend in the Historia Brittonum gives us a clearer picture of that which can only be filled in from the negative impressions left in the texts of Gildas and Bede, namely that there was a substantial corpus of earlier origin material that no longer survives circulating widely throughout the insular region and that the growth of individual origin narratives was contingent upon that of the corpus as a whole. As Carey writes, the ‘Historia Brittonum gives us only the outline of what was already a flourishing tradition of legendary speculation’ at the time of its composition.Footnote ⁷⁰ Even the earliest surviving narrative of the Irish origin legend shows the influence of the accretion of layers of material over time. The Historia Brittonum’s version of this narrative is so confused because, as many scholars have painstakingly demonstrated, it underwent patterns of narrative doubling as it grew.Footnote ⁷¹ By the time that the surviving version in the Historia Brittonum was written down, Ireland had not one eponymous ancestor, but rather several waves of invaders.

These waves of invaders would only continue to grow over time. By the time the Lebor Gabála Érenn was compiled a few centuries later (discussed below), Ireland was believed to have been populated by six groups. First came a wave of settlers accompanying the antediluvian Cessair, then those following Partholón, then those of Nemed. After them came the Fir Bolg (descendants of Nemed’s people who had left Ireland, been enslaved in Greece, and returned), the supernatural Tuatha Dé Danann, and the Milesians or the sons of Míl Espáne. As numerous studies have shown, the influence of other texts stands behind these ancestral groups. Carey writes that, ‘Partholón and Míl Espáne look like scholarly constructs, the figments of men steeped in Jerome and Isidore; but Nemed and the Fir Bolg cannot be so easily accounted for, and they appear to reflect – at whatever remove – indigenous memories and speculations about the peopling of Ireland.’Footnote ⁷² Partholón is the Irish form of the Christian name Bartholomew. As Meyer first argued, this name was likely given to the first man to settle in Ireland after the flood because it was interpreted by the early church fathers as meaning ‘the son of the one who holds up the waters’.Footnote ⁷³ The Milesians also owe their existence to the corpus of circulating origin material rather than to native Irish tradition. As Carey has argued, ‘the name Míl Espáne is neither more nor less than a direct borrowing into Irish of the Latin phrase miles Hispaniae which we find in the Historia [Brittonum]’,Footnote ⁷⁴ meaning that ‘the sons of Míl themselves seem much likelier to be the creations of medieval scholars than the heroes of a primordial tradition’.Footnote ⁷⁵ As van Hamel first suggested, the original impetus for this moment of genesis can in turn be traced back to late antique intellectual tradition – he noted that the Spanish ancestry of the Irish might come from Isidore of Seville’s depiction of Spain as the ‘mother of races’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Carey has built on these conclusions to demonstrate the influence of Orosius’s History against the Pagans in connecting Ireland and Spain geographically and as a source for the tower of Bregon episode in the Lebor Gabála. He also finds Isidorian influence behind the idea that the Irish originally came from Spain, via Isidore’s derivation of the Latin name of Ireland [(H)ibernia] from that of Spain [(H)iberia].Footnote ⁷⁷ Thus, even this earliest extant version of the Irish origin legend reflects the influence of a corpus of material that developed together as the legend grew.

So too does the continued lack of value distinction between internal and external source material. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in the Historia Brittonum, which unproblematically presents two versions of the origin stories of both the Irish and the British side by side. The Historia Brittonum was thus less concerned with ensuring its information was ‘correct’ or its narrative perfectly synthesised than it was with collecting as much material on the history of the insular region as possible. Both versions of the British origin story, discussed further below, focus on the eponymous ancestor Brutus, who is given an alternate genealogy in the second variant. The two Irish origin narratives are quite different from one another: while the first, as we have just seen, combines native Irish with classical and late antique intellectual traditions to describe waves of invaders coming to the island, the second is modelled around Christian and biblical history and makes the Irish into a second tribe of Israelites.

However, a close reading of these two narratives reveals that this doubling is not actually contradictory. Rather, within the narrative of the Historia Brittonum, these origin stories are attached to two different Gaelic populations, one in Ireland proper and the other in Britain in the kingdom of the Dál Riata, as an apparent attempt to separate two conflicting origin legends for the same people. The second Irish origin tale in the Historia Brittonum reads as follows:

The author of the Historia Brittonum was clearly familiar with two origin legends for the Irish, since this passage begins by characterising itself as the origin narrative for Ireland, Hibernia. Wanting to include both, yet aware that they conflicted with one another, he appears to have split them and attached one to the Gaels in Ireland and the second to the Gaels in the Dál Riata. This doubled legend reminds us that early insular authors wanted to include as much information as they had, even when their sources conflicted with one another. It also underscores the extent to which the corpus of insular origin material was growing and spreading, even in the early ninth century when the Historia Brittonum was written. Finally, this origin story for the Gaels of the Dál Riata underscores the ways in which insular origin legends were deliberately crafted to match biblical and Christian history, shaped to parallel them over time.

The Irish origin legend in the Historia Brittonum, then, continues the patterns we have seen throughout the corpus of texts containing insular origin material. Its earliest surviving occurrence was in a text written by a British author, reflecting the existence of an extended corpus of origin narratives which has since been lost. In mentioning his use of these Irish sources, the author of the Historia Brittonum also demonstrates the intertextuality of this corpus. The fact that no distinction is drawn between the validity of the two different Irish origin legends underscores the Historia Brittonum’s interest in compiling all known information together. The Historia Brittonum, like other works containing origin material in the early insular region, has often been characterised as a synchronising history, a work that seeks to combine ‘all the available, and often wildly contradictory, witnesses into a slick, coherent, and “official” whole’.Footnote ⁷⁹ While the Historia Brittonum certainly can be seen to compile its evidence into a narrative which tells the story of the insular region over time, this text is less concerned with constructing one unified vision of insular history than has often been assumed. Indeed, the Historia Brittonum has so often been unfavourably compared to Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica precisely because of the multiple and contradictory accounts of given events still present in this text, as its author seemingly sought to incorporate all or most of the information at his disposal into his work. This text illustrates the complex layers of connection between the works containing early insular origin material.

In addition to its narratives of Irish origins, the Historia Brittonum was also the first place to preserve the origin story that the British are descended from eponymous ancestor Brutus of Troy. This legend enjoyed significant popularity in the Middle Ages thanks to its inclusion in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s influential De gestis Britonum.Footnote ⁸⁰ Yet it was first recorded in the Historia Brittonum, where like the Irish origin legend, it was introduced in two contradictory accounts which derived from external, now-lost sources. The narrative runs as follows:

This legendary narrative, like the others presented in this chapter, underscores the intertextuality of the corpus of works containing insular origin material. When introducing the Brutus narrative, the author of the Historia Brittonum writes: ‘Si quis scire voluerit quo tempore post diluvium habitata est haec insula, hoc experimentum bifarie inveni. In annalibus autem Romanorum sic scriptum est … ’ (If anyone wants to know when this island was inhabited after the Flood, I find two alternative explanations. The version in the Annals of the Romans is …).Footnote ⁸² The direct source of this first legend is unknown, though reference to the ‘Annals of the Romans’ is also made in the eighth-century Hiberno-Latin Collectio Canonum Hibernensis.Footnote ⁸³ Dumville writes that, ‘whether or not it had an origin before the writing of Historia Brittonum is unknown, although if the author’s words be taken at face-value he derived it from an earlier source, annales Romanorum’.Footnote ⁸⁴ As Charles-Edwards has explained, the ‘Annals of the Romans’ ‘must have contained an origin-legend of the Britons’, namely, ‘a narrative outline of the events commemorated in Virgil’s Aeneid’.Footnote ⁸⁵ While the exact source of this first episode is lost to us, here we see that the author of the Historia Brittonum unproblematically incorporates two competing versions of the British origin legend into his text. No value distinction is drawn between them, but rather each is included to create as comprehensive a historical narrative as possible.

This is reiterated when the Historia Brittonum’s author introduces the second British origin narrative by commenting, ‘aliud experimentum inveni de isto Bruto ex veteribus libris veterum nostrorum’ (I found another explanation about Brutus in the old books of our elders),Footnote ⁸⁶ repeating after he has related this version that ‘hanc peritiam inveni ex traditione veterum’ (this learning I found in the tradition of our elders).Footnote ⁸⁷ The author of the Historia Brittonum cites his sources, but does not draw value distinctions between them. This second narrative of British origins derives from an early medieval genealogical tradition dubbed by its most recent editor, Walter Goffart, as ‘The Supposedly “Frankish” Table of Nations’.Footnote ⁸⁸ A recent study by Patrick Wadden has underscored the myriad ways in which the Frankish Table of Nations’ genealogical tradition was put to use within different recensions of the Historia Brittonum as well as throughout insular historiography in general.Footnote ⁸⁹ While this second tradition is included in the Historia Brittonum ‘almost begrudgingly’, as Wadden puts it, its presence is nonetheless a reminder that the author of the Historia Brittonum was reluctant to jettison any information, no matter how contradictory it appeared.Footnote ⁹⁰

This pattern is even more obvious when multiple versions of events are included despite the fact that they are not just contradictory, but distasteful. After the version of the Brutus narrative said to be from the Roman annals, a side comment in some manuscripts of the Historia Brittonum notes,Footnote ⁹¹ ‘haec est genealogia istius Bruti exosi, nunquam ad se, nos id est Britones, ducti, quadoque volebant Scotti, nescientes originis sui, ad istum domari’ (this is the genealogy of that Brutus the Hateful, who has never been traced to us, when the Irish, who do not know their origin, wished to be under him).Footnote ⁹² Why would an early medieval author not want to be connected to Brutus, or consider him hateful? The explanation is found in his competing genealogies. In the version from the ‘Annals of the Romans’, we read, ‘Brutus vero fuit filius Silvii f. Aschanii f. Enee f. Anchise f. Capen f. Asaraci f. Tros f. Erectonii f. Dardani filii Iupiter, de genere Cam filii maledicti videntis et ridentis patrem Noe’ (Brutus was the son of Silvius, son of Ascanius, son of Aeneas … of the race of Ham, the accursed son who saw his father Noah and mocked him).Footnote ⁹³ There is thus good reason why a gens would want to distance themselves from an ancestral figure who is part of the race of Ham. Thus, in the alternative explanation of British origins, said to be from ‘the old books of our elders’, Brutus’s genealogy is different. The full passage reads:

In this version of British origins, Brutus remains the founding ancestor, yet his genealogy is switched from the shameful race of Ham to that of Japheth, from whom all the peoples of Europe were believed to descend. It is easy to see why Brutus’s genealogy was altered in this way, yet my larger point is that both versions of his origins were nonetheless included in the Historia Brittonum. Another illustration of the same point can be seen when the author of the Historia Brittonum writes, ‘in veteri traditione seniorum nostrorum septem imperatores fuerunt a Romanis in Brittannia, Romani autem dicunt novem’ (in the ancient tradition of our elders, there were seven emperors in Britain, but the Romans say there were nine).Footnote ⁹⁵ The complexities of the Historia Brittonum’s sources underscore the intertextuality of the insular corpus as a whole.

In crafting his own work, the author of the Historia Brittonum drew upon Gildas and Bede, but also a wide range of other sources that have not yet been fully investigated: Roman annals, the Annales Cambrie and the ‘Chronicle of Ireland’, and Continental sources including Jerome’s translation of the Chronicle of Eusebius, continued by those of Prosper and Isidore.Footnote ⁹⁶ As Dumville has summarised,

He also notes that ‘what is perhaps most striking about our author’s source-material is the extent to which it is derived from Ireland and England. This writer was notably outward-looking: it remains unclear whether his attitude was the result of choice or of necessity.’Footnote ⁹⁸ Not only the information contained within the Historia Brittonum, but also its structure, drew inspiration from external sources: ‘Irish pseudohistory provided a model (perhaps one among several) for the integration of an origo gentis with world-history … more particularly, the Irish national pseudohistory provided a model for the integration of a latinate world-history with national legend and a detailed example of synthetic method.’Footnote ⁹⁹ Collectively, then, the Historia Brittonum’s patterns of source use illustrate the extent to which early insular texts drew upon as wide a range of sources as possible to compile comprehensive histories of the region.

Finally, like Gildas and Bede before it, the Historia Brittonum had a long afterlife. It was a popular text which survives in about thirty-five manuscripts (not including the five main manuscript witnesses of the Lebor Bretnach, discussed further below).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Our understanding of the Historia Brittonum is complicated by the fact that these manuscripts represent a number of distinct recensions, the most important of which are the Harleian, Chartres, Vatican, Nennian, Gildasian, and Sawley recensions.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The oldest manuscript of the Historia Brittonum, Chartres, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 98, was destroyed during World War II. It has been dated by various editors to the ninth/tenth and more recently eleventh centuries.Footnote ¹⁰² In terms of recensions, there is general consensus that the Harleian recension ‘preserves best the work as it was originally composed, probably in the year 829–30’, and thus it is this text which has been used throughout the present study.Footnote ¹⁰³ Also of note is that there has been significant debate over the authenticity of a preface to the Historia Brittonum, found only in the Nennian recension, which attributes authorship of this work to someone named Nennius. Dumville has argued strongly that the Nennian preface is a later interpolation to the Historia Brittonum, but more recent arguments for its authenticity have been made by P.J.C. Field and Ben Guy.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The Historia Brittonum was widely known throughout the medieval period. Most germane to the focus of this book is the fact that the Historia Brittonum was the basis of the vernacular Gaelic translation known as the Lebor Bretnach, which in turn influenced the Lebor Gabála Érenn and subsequent works of Irish pseudohistory, as discussed below. Most famously, the Historia Brittonum would later serve as a significant source for Geoffrey of Monmouth’s wildly influential De gestis Britonum.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The Historia Brittonum thus continued the synchronising process of writing history that we have witnessed throughout the early medieval insular region.

Part IV: The Lebor Bretnach, the Lebor Gabála Érenn, and the Continuation of the Corpus

All of the origin legends discussed in this book have now been introduced, but not yet all of the texts that contain them. The last main works to be discussed in this book, the vernacular Lebor Bretnach and Lebor Gabála Érenn, engage in the same process of pseudohistorical synchronisation of a broad pool of sources into one cohesive narrative. The Lebor Bretnach is a translation of the Historia Brittonum into early Middle Irish.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ It has received less attention than many of the other texts in the insular historiographical corpus because it is a translation, yet this work is more than an Irish duplication of its Latin source. Extant manuscripts of the Lebor Bretnach reveal significant alterations to the text of the Historia Brittonum in both form and content, via the rearranging, omission, and addition of material. The differences between the Irish and Latin texts have of course been observed, but scholarship on the Lebor Bretnach has largely focused on its value for reconstructing an earlier Latin recension of the Historia Brittonum and as a source for the legendary history of the Picts, which is nearly the sole focus of its additional material. While these approaches have much to offer, the text of the Lebor Bretnach has been less often discussed as a unified vision of insular history in its own right.

The Lebor Bretnach, like the Historia Brittonum, has a complicated textual history that has impeded its study: no single manuscript contains the complete Irish translation of the Historia Brittonum and the additional material that together create the ‘Lebor Bretnach’ as it appears in modern editions. As A.G. van Hamel, the text’s most recent editor in 1932, states the problem: ‘We shall divide the “complete” Lebor Bretnach into twenty-two sections; it must be borne in mind, however, that these are found combined in none of our MSS’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The Lebor Bretnach is attributed to Irish historian Gilla Coemáin and was composed in the eleventh century,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ to when the earliest of its five main manuscript witnesses, Leabhar na hUidhre, can also be dated. These five manuscripts contain six individual copies of the Lebor Bretnach, representing three recensions of the text.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Each of these recensions includes additional material on the legendary history of the Picts, but none contains all of the added material in its entirety. As Dumville remarks, ‘it is an interesting coincidence … that both sides of the tradition attracted Pictish material: “Version I” (La) has §4 and “Version III” has §§4, 6, and 7; “Version II”, on the other hand, has §§47-53’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The additional material in Versions I and II consists of a brief prose Pictish origin legend and Pictish king-lists. Version III also contains one of these king-lists in addition to longer prose and poetic versions of the Pictish origin legend and a narrative on the miracles of St Cairnech (discussed further in Chapter Three below).

In sum, the surviving manuscripts of the Lebor Bretnach preserve three versions of the text, one fragmentary and two fairly complete, each of which includes additional material not present in the Historia Brittonum but none of which includes all of that additional material. Dumville has argued that ‘the position of §§4, 6–7, and 24–25 as interpolations’ means that ‘these must be dismissed from the text presented by a new edition’.Footnote ¹¹¹ Similarly, he writes that the texts of Version II

While these points that the Pictish material was not part of the Lebor Bretnach in its earliest iteration are important, the text as it stands nonetheless shows us how the Gaelic-speaking world perceived insular history. The Pictish material became quickly linked to the Lebor Bretnach by those who recopied and circulated the vernacular version of this text, and as the following chapters discuss in greater detail, these additions altered the narrative of insular history in some significant ways.

Thomas Owen Clancy has convincingly argued that the original translation of the Nennian recension of the Historia Brittonum into Gaelic as the Lebor Bretnach took place in Scotland rather than in Ireland.Footnote ¹¹³ His conclusions further underscore the extent to which engagement with the corpus of texts containing origin materials stretched across the insular region. The Lebor Bretnach is an intellectual output of the Gaelic-speaking world, which encompassed both Britain and Ireland in the early medieval period. This text illustrates the circulation of historical and pseudohistorical material throughout the insular region, as Gaelic intellectual tradition in both Scotland and Ireland valued the Historia Brittonum enough to translate it and circulate that translation widely. Of similar relevance is the survival of a fragmentary Irish translation of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica.Footnote ¹¹⁴ While its incomplete survival means that we know less about this text than the Lebor Bretnach, its existence likewise reflects the circulation and value of historical material across the insular intellectual world.

The Lebor Gabála Érenn, the last text chronologically in the corpus of insular works containing origin material, also represents the connectivity of this body of material. The Lebor Gabála Érenn is a compilation of Irish origin material which was first put together in the eleventh century but which clearly drew on older literary traditions that no longer survive independently in addition to the known material that it incorporates.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The Lebor Gabála incorporates a wide range of sources including classical and late antique geographical and encyclopaedic works, biblical texts, contemporaneous Irish material, and the other texts in the early insular corpus of historical and pseudohistorical works. Bart Jaski has recently demonstrated the complicated extent to which the Lebor Gabála drew on a wide range of insular texts as sources,Footnote ¹¹⁶ and as Clarke has recently argued, there is also a strong likelihood of significant Carolingian influence on the structure of the origin material in this text.Footnote ¹¹⁷ As Scowcroft has pointed out, the textual history of the Lebor Gabála is so complex that

Unlike most classical and some medieval works in which an initially ‘clean’ authorial text becomes confused through inexpert copying over time, there was never a sole initial authoritative version of the Lebor Gabála. As Donnchadh Ó Corráin has pointed out, ‘the MSS exhibit re-workings of many kinds, creative and otherwise – re-writings, re-arrangements, contamination of differing versions (extant and lost), interpolations, &c. – and they represent rather specimens of a copious and dissonant written tradition from which modern scholars struggle to reconstruct “originals” often of their own imagining’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Each medieval recension willingly added new material that only became synthesised when Ó Cléirigh set out to compile a comprehensive version of the work in the early modern period. These difficulties are compounded by those of working with R.A. Stewart Macalister’s mid-twentieth-century edition: in Scowcroft’s words, ‘woefully incomplete, riddled with errors, and all but impossible to read’ and a publication which has ‘inhibited rather than encouraged critical enquiry’ into the Lebor Gabála.Footnote ¹²⁰ Two important studies by Scowcroft have greatly clarified the situation, dividing the Lebor Gabála’s numerous manuscripts into four main recensions and providing a concordance to Macalister’s edition.Footnote ¹²¹ Although the Lebor Gabála – like Gildas’s De Excidio, Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, and the Historia Brittonum – is primarily a history of one people, it nonetheless draws together a significant range of sources to compose this history. It, like the rest of the works in the corpus of insular historical writing, underscores the intellectual connectivity of this region in the early Middle Ages.

Conclusions

This chapter has explicated the intellectual connectivity within the corpus of works containing insular origin material. Individual texts both borrowed from earlier works and in turn themselves became the source material for later authors as the corpus grew over time. Illustrating this pattern of growth and influence, we can see the expansion of the origin narratives themselves over time as well. In our first text, Gildas’s De Excidio, only the Anglo-Saxons – the newest inhabitants of Britain – are given an origin story, while the British, Irish, and Picts who predate them are presented as if they have always lived in Britain and Ireland. Bede provides origin stories for the Anglo-Saxons and Picts, and the Historia Brittonum for the Anglo-Saxons, British, and Irish. Over time, every one of the insular gentes was provided with a complete origin narrative, including ancestors and a story of exile from an original homeland. These legends were written in response to one another, as a gap in insular history – where one gens had an origin story but their neighbours did not – led to curiosity about what events might have filled that gap.

The above discussion has drawn on textual evidence to articulate the ways in which early insular origin legends were created and preserved as part of an entangled corpus of history and pseudohistory. The next three chapters examine these connections more deeply through an extended study of three themes that grew to be particularly important in the origin stories of this region: exile, kin-slaying, and intermarriage and incest. This chapter has already introduced some of the ways in which origin legends gave each people in the insular region ancestral figures and a homeland from which they had originally come. The next chapter explores the concept of exile, the reason why a people’s ancestors were said to have left that homeland in the first place. Chapter Three focuses on the concept of kin-slaying, which grew to become understood as the reason why that exile had originally taken place. Chapter Four is an extended study of the significant political roles that intermarriage between groups of peoples and incest within a group came to play after they arrived in their new insular homes. Studying these themes explicates the continued growth and mutual dependency of these origin narratives in the early medieval insular world.