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The growth of origin narratives throughout a wide swath of literary and historical genres demonstrates their important role in constructing a particular vision of the present by linking it to a carefully constructed narrative of the past during the medieval period. It also underscores the intellectual connections that this book argues were widespread in the early medieval insular region. Such textual connections were not limited to the more comprehensive historical works which have formed the focus of this study. Local origin stories also drew on the same narrative patterns and motifs. The conclusion examines four brief dynastic origin legends that incorporate some of the themes explored in this book: the brief genealogical treatise of the Dál Riata known as Senchus Fer n-Alban / Míniugud Senchusa Fher n-Alban; the legendary piece of Uí Néill dynastic propaganda known as Echtra mac nEchach Muigmedóin; the legend of ancestral figure Cunedda and his sons expelling the Irish from Gwynedd which is embedded in the Historia Brittonum; and the story of legendary Danish ancestor Scyld Scefing from the opening lines of Beowulf. These narratives underscore the importance of movement within the corpus of insular origin material, even on a local level.
Ireland, Scotland and Wales were all Celtic countries, but their respective medieval populations did not know this and their Celticity is not the reason for grouping them together. The tenth century Dublin-York axis brought commercial urbanism to Ireland, the eleventh-century kings used its resources to fund their ambition to rule the entire island of Ireland, and this great struggle was the leitmotiv of Irish history until the Norman attack. Monasteries formed federations in the late seventh and eighth centuries. Society is seen, from an aristocratic perspective, in class terms: kings, lords and commons. In 700 the kingdom of Scotland was occupied by three peoples, Dál Riata, Britons of Strathclyde and Picts, and under pressure from a fourth, the Northumbrians. In Wales rex is the universal term for king, in literature and epigraphy. Like Ireland, Wales was raided from the Irish Sea. In the eleventh century, Wales became an unstable land of unresolved segmentary struggles and quick-moving dynastic warfare.
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