one who ensured that things ran true in his domain. There was a sacral aspect
to his office, but religious ritual was determined and administered by a separ-
ate priesthood (see below).
In anthropological terms he would seem to have been a ‘chief ’, ‘that is the
principal executive officer with some centralizing functions in what is still
essentially a tribal society, based on kinship relations and often incorporating
various smaller kinship-based social units. Thus a chiefdom is an autono-
mous political unit, usually comprising a number of clans living in settled
villages or pastoral communities under the leadership of a paramount chief.’^9
The evidence of several early Indo-European societies –– Hittite, Vedic,
Roman, Celtic, Germanic –– suggests that the kingship may originally have
been not hereditary but elective.^10 After all, the previous king’s son might
have been too young, or otherwise unsuitable, to act as an effective chief in
an era before there was a developed apparatus of court officialdom or civil
service. In any case the king depended in practice on the support and good
will of a community of arms-bearing men. Generally it seems that the
candidacy became limited, by custom or statute, to a particular family or
group of families, and there must have been agreement on who elected the
king and by what procedure. There would often be an heir presumptive
during the king’s lifetime. Iranian and Irish evidence indicates that he bore
the title ‘Second after the king’.^11
The QueenIn many stories the kingdom comes with a woman: a man becomes king by
marrying an existing queen or the widow or daughter of a king. Margalit
Finkelberg has shown that this is a recurrent pattern in Greek heroic
mythology, and there are numerous instances in early Irish history.^12 Saxo
(^9) R. M. Rowlett, JIES 12 (1984), 193, with a reference to R. Carneiro in G. D. Jones–
R. R. Kautz (edd.), The Transition to Statehood in the New World (Cambridge 1981), 37–79.
Rowlett’s article (193–233) is a survey of archaeological evidence for early Indo-European
chieftains.
(^10) Cf. K. Ohkuma, JIES 14 (1986), 231–43; Sergent (1995), 272 f.; for the Hittites, Trevor
Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites (Oxford 1998), 91 f., 114; for Gaul, Strabo 4. 4. 3 cited above;
for Germania, D. H. Green (1998), 121; for Ireland, Campanile (1981), 42 f. According to the
Togail bruidne Dá Derga 11 (lines 122ff. Knott) the men of Ireland would hold a bull-feast, ‘that
is, a bull used to be killed by them and one man would eat his fill of it and drink its broth and a
spell of truth was chanted over him in his bed. Whoever he would see in his sleep would be king
and the sleeper would perish if he uttered a falsehood’ (Koch–Carey (2000), 168 f.). Cf. Serglige
Con Culainn 22; McCone (1990), 168.
(^11) Campanile (1981), 43–7.
(^12) M. Finkelberg, CQ 41 (1991), 303–16; ead. (2005), 65–71, 91 f.; Bart Jaski, Early Irish
Kingship and Succession (Dublin 2000), 69–71.
414 11. King and Hero