CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

VIKINGS IN INSULAR

CHRONICLING

David N. Dumville

E

ach of the different cultural zones of what used to be called ‘The British Isles’
(namely Britain and Ireland, with their associated smaller islands; Davies 2000 ) had
its own tradition or traditions of chronicling in the Viking Age. Nor should we forget
Brittany, a complex Continental polity of Insular Celtic heritage situated alongside a
predatory Frankish empire (Dumville 2007 c). It is certain that these zones interacted
variously. Because of shared ecclesiastical history there were significant, especially
generic, points of similarity. But different interactions and differing local cultures
generated chronicles whose character and tone differed between the cultural zones.
When the Viking Age began, with apparent suddenness in the chronicle-records, shared
experiences nonetheless seem to have provoked a range of generically different responses
(see Dumville 2002 c).
Some individual chroniclers are less difficult to isolate stylistically than others (on
‘The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’ see Clark 1971 , Keynes 1978 ; on ‘The Annals of Ulster’
see Dumville 1982 ), but in no certain Insular instance can we put a name or specific
identity to any Viking Age chronicler, in spite of various attempts to recognise the work
of Asser of St Davids (Hughes 1980 : 68 , 86 – 7 ) or King Alfred (see Shippey 1982 ) or
Alcuin of York (Stubbs 1868 – 71 , vol. 1 : xi; Lapidge 1982 : 121 and n. 74 ). We certainly
do have literary work from the hand of each of these, in which vikings are mentioned:
but only Asser’s biography of King Alfred (datable, as it survives, to 893 ), with its
translations from ‘The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, approaches the chronicling genre
(Stevenson 1904 ; Cook 1906 ; Keynes and Lapidge 1983 ). What all Insular chronicling
of this era does share is annalistic structure.
The annal, however it may be distinguished from its immediate neighbours, is, as
the record of one year, these chronicles’ essential structural unit (Dumville 2002 a: 6 ;
1999 : 104 ). Constituting it there may be nothing more than the annal-marker, whether
an. (for annus, ‘year’) or kl. (for kalendae Ianuarii, ‘the first day of January’), sometimes
accompanied by a sequence-number or an ad date or a complex series of chronological
notations; or there may be a single entry of information, or any number of such entries
(of immensely various length and complexity, from a single word to some pages of
modern print) though rarely many more than a dozen. The hierarchy of content is
therefore constructed from individual entries (or items) which are joined to form the