This book marks a turning point in the historiography of Early Ireland. In it, the author reconciles the archaic nature of Irish political life with the brilliant civilization that flourished around it. He argues for the Irish landscape as being a major factor in the evolution and preservation of both archaic tribal institutions and the brilliant cultural achievement. We are shown a country barricaded and divided by great tracts of impassable forest, mountain and bog, which facilitated the survival of hundreds of tribal kingdoms long after the demise of similar territorial units elsewhere in Europe. However archaic these little kingdoms were they ensured that Ireland had a proliferation of kinds in the Indo-European tradition, and consequently royal patronage was on a scale out of proportion to the size of the tiny territories in which artistic achievement and scholarship were encouraged to flourish. In addition to reconstructing the Dark Age landscape of Leinster, the author provides an Historical Atlas of sixteen plates which breaks new ground in the field of Irish historical geography. The work includes four color plates including early manuscript maps of Irish territories, and numerous antiquarian line drawings are accompanied by a text which has carefully avoided repeating information in the main body of the book. This is a book which will open up new vistas to the historian, historical geographer, archaeologist, and anthropologist alike. It is an outstanding work of uncompromising scholarship, intended not only to inform the specialist, but also to give pleasure to all who are interested in the dawn of European civilization.

Celtic Leinster: Towards An Historical Geography of Early Irish Civilization 500 - 1600 A.D.

History

Smyth, Alfred

Europe

Irish Academic Press

Basing his work strongly on documentary and archaeological sources, Alfred Smyth covers traditional topics in a thoroughly unconventional manner. Winner of the 1985 Spring Book Award for Literature (Scottish Arts Council)

Warlords and Holy Men: Scotland AD80-1000 (New History of Scotland)

Religion & Spirituality

Edinburgh University Press

This book provides a unique work of reference cutting across ancient cultural divisions within Dark Age Britain, and it enables the reader to follow the careers of people as far apart in time and place as the early Kentish kings and Viking earls of Orkney. Entries range from well-known characters such as Merlin, Alfred the Great, the historian Bede and the Danish warlord Cnut to the more obscure Pictish kings and abbots of Iona. Each entry is presented in a succinct and compact form in an easily accessible A to Z format. Here experts on a multitude of early historic peoples in Britain have brought together a dossier of scholarly findings on all those whose lives can be reconstructed from an examination of early source material, incorporating the very latest research. Englishmen from Wessex to Northumbria, Welshmen and Cornishmen, Northern Britons, Scots and Picts, Scandinavians from the Danelaw and York as well as from the Viking earldom of Orkney and the Southern Isles, all take their place in this wide-ranging survey of the people of Dark Age Britain. This detailed work of reference, supplemented by chronological and genealogical tables, will be an essential tool for all those with an interest in Dark Age Britain.

A Biographical Dictionary of Dark Age Britain: England, Scotland and Wales c.500 - c.1050 (Seaby Biographical Dictionaries)

Williams,Ann

Kirby, D.P.

Biographies & Memoirs

Routledge

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