Ár gennte la firu Humhaill.
Ár Conmaicne la gennti.
Ár Calraighi Luirgg la Hu Briúin.
Ár Corco Roídhe Mide la Hua Mac Uais.
Ár gennte la Mumain, id est la Cobthach
mac Maele Dúin, rí Locha Léin.A slaughter of heathens by the men of Umall.
The slaughter of the Conmaicne by heathens.
The slaughter of the Calraige of Lurg by Uí Briúin.
The slaughter of Corcu Roídi of Mide by Uí Moccu Uais.
A slaughter of heathens in Mumu, viz. by Cobthach
son of Mael Dúin, the king of Loch Léin.It would be hard to argue from these five successive entries that vikings were being
singled out and made to play stereotype. In this record their only difference from
the native population-groups is that they are at once known but not known: they are
heathens but they cannot be (or, at any rate, are not) described more precisely. We also
need to ask whether these are blazing tabloid-newspaper headlines or tediously sober
statements: if they are the former, then five successive instances of the same formula
must have severely blunted their impact. In sum, chroniclers cannot carry the weight of
accusations of cripplingly hostile bias. History-writing in highly coloured, imaginative
prose is a much later phenomenon in respect of vikings – late tenth-century at the
earliest and thirteenth-century in its more spectacular development. It is hard to fault
the rather dry writing of Gaelic annalistic chronicles – which deliver copious quantities
of information – except on aesthetic or frustratedly historiographical grounds. ‘The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’ is an easier target, but detractors have often lacked the skills
which could land damaging blows on it.
Even the blandest text can be innocently corrupted, however. I close with some
instructive – but not necessarily generalisable – examples arising in later medieval
manuscripts.
(a) ‘The Annals of Ulster’, 701 :
Conall mac Donennaigh, rex nepotum Finngenti, moritur.
‘Conall, the son of Doinennach, the king of the descendants of the Finngenti
[Old Heathens], dies.’A copyist, dreaming of vikings or having recently copied a text about them, sub-
stituted Finngenti for Fidgenti, the name of an early mediaeval Irish dynasty (Mac
Airt and Mac Niocaill 1983 : 160 – 1 , annal 701. 10 ).(b) ‘The Annals of Tigernach’, 752 :
Taudar mac Bile, rex a Lochlandaid...If this has meaning, it is that Tewdwr ab Beli (who died in 752 ) was ‘king from
Lochlann’, a name referring to a viking-homeland and not known to have been used–– David N. Dumville––