4 - Shared items in the ‘Annals of Ulster’ and the Clonmacnoise group, A.D. 912–1100

Summary

The preceding chapters have largely been concerned with determining the location of the chronicles underlying AU, AT and CS, and how the Clonmacnoise-group text may have been altered to create the versions which now exist. However, there is still a major textual issue about the chronicles in the tenth and eleventh centuries to be resolved: the existence of items from 912 to 1100 (particularly before about 1060) written with substantially the same vocabulary, phrases, and content in both AU and the Clonmacnoise group, which would not be expected in chronicles written completely independently (see appendix 2 for a list of these items). In order to understand these seemingly problematic items it is necessary to consider wider issues about the production of the Irish annals, with the result that the study has potential implications not only for the significance of the shared items, but also for how we perceive the Irish annals in terms of their reliability.

There are a number of items in the period from 912 to 1100 which are found in AU and the Clonmacnoise group in similar wording, suggesting that AU and the Clonmacnoise group were not reporting these events independently. These items were commented on and briefly discussed by Kathryn Grabowski, who wrote that:

From perhaps the middle of the tenth century, and lasting for about a century, a different relationship may be observed between AU and the Clonmacnoise group. Sufficient entries exhibit close similarity or identity to indicate either the use of a common source or, perhaps more likely, contamination of AU by a Clonmacnoise-group text now lost (just as later the bulk of the collations which constitute AU2 derive from the comparison of AU with another such text).