Early Middle Ages

Churches in Early Medieval Ireland

Michelle Markey Butler Leave a comment

So I’m reading this book at the moment:

I will probably will be reading it for months.  It’s vast.  But I’ve learned some seriously interesting stuff so far.

From the very first page:  the high, pointy roof construction of most early medieval Irish churches means that the height difference between the churches and round towers beside them would be much less noticeable originally than it seems now, when in many cases the round tower is intact but the church is gone.

From chapter 1:  Written and art sources suggest that many early Irish churches were wooden, but of course wood churches are considerably less permanent than stone ones.  O Carragain mentions a recent excavation, though, at Balriggan, County Louth, which probably is the remains of one.  This is of course nifty both for itself and for being in my favorite county in Ireland.  For both the wooden churches and high-gabled stone ones, the pitch of the roof is so steep that the church ends up being as high as they were long.

There’s more in chapter one, but the next bit is so awesome I think I’ll save it for its own post.

Vikings of the Irish Sea (David Griffiths)

Michelle Markey Butler Leave a comment

(Why, yes, school DID just start again…it’s no accident I haven’t posted since June 13th, when school got out for the summer.  It’s difficult to think, let alone type, with children chattering at your elbow.  So many of their sentences this summer started with “HeyMomCanI..” I was beginning to think I’d acquired a new nickname..  Anyhoo.  Back for the school year…)

It’s taken me several months to read David Griffiths’ Vikings of the Irish Sea (2010) but that’s my fault, not the book’s.  Mostly.  It is a detailed, academic treatment, possibly not a good fit for a general audience and certainly not a place to begin reading about the Vikings’ forays into the British islands.  And absolutely not a book to be trying to get through with short people chanting “HeyMomCanI…” in the background.  Your brain starts blinking Insufficient attention available at this time.  

That said, the book is very good at what it’s meant to be–a corrective to how we usually think about Vikings and their interaction with the British islands.  Griffith makes the point that crossing the Irish sea is much easier and faster than, say, crossing Ireland by land. Trading and raiding–and not just by Vikings–crisscrossed the Irish sea, and we would do well to adjust our thinking accordingly.

The added bonus for anyone interested in Linn Duachaill is that this book came out as the first-round excavations were planned or perhaps underway, and so is a snapshot of the state of our knowledge just before that significant discovery.  It’s worth noting that Griffiths had enough information at his disposal even before the discovery of the longphort  to caution against assuming that Lisnarann was where the Vikings made camp:  “the longphort…could equally well be associated with the monastery, as also seems the case at St. Mullins” (32).

This, of course, has turned out to be precisely the case.

Now, of course, I want to do some reading about St. Mullins as an analogue for Linn Duachaill.

Estonian Viking Burials, Revisited

Michelle Markey Butler Leave a comment

So here’s another, longer article about the Viking Ship burial, complete with ill-fated crew, discovered in Estonia in 2008.

I have a soft spot for Estonia.  We visited in 1998.  The medieval city walls of Talinn were stunning.  Also, the sea was rough and the ferry bounced a lot.  For months after you could ask my then-2 year old son, “What happened on the boat?”  and he would say sadly, “I coughed.”

This burial may cause us to rethink our dates for Viking activity.  Traditionally we talk about Viking raiding as beginning late 8th century, but these burials are from roughly 50 years earlier.