Imposter syndrome, academia, and heathenry

I intended for this blog to be a semi-professional venue for my work in both academia and heathenry, putting out essays on various topics once a month. I missed January and I'm about to miss February, for similar reasons, so I thought I would try something new. Something is better than nothing and, as I'm finding on social media, honesty about the process is scary but important.

Two very important things happened at the end of January and beginning of February. The later one was that I gave a forty-minute presentation to my department that was received very well. It was my treatment of one source in the manner in which my entire thesis is structured, and my success is valuable affirmation that my work is comprehensible. I won't publish anything from that here yet because I hope to present pieces of it at ICM in Cork in June and the ICCS in Bangor in July.

The other important thing was that the kindred I helped to found, Kindred of Mann, has reached its tenth anniversary! It is hard to believe that something which my now-husband and I sort of threw together when I was twenty-one years old is now in its second decade. I meant to write about this in January (the official anniversary is the 24th). But as often happens, I felt blocked about being boastful in public, as if stating the fact that our kindred is ten years old is arrogance. Who cares? Who am I? What kind of accomplishment is one that I can achieve?

Concurrently, over the past few weeks I've been chewing on the concept of imposter syndrome ('IS'). I had something of IS during my masters programme at the University of Connecticut and then a much worse version of it during my first PhD programme in art history at Temple University. In both cases I felt like I had to always be 'on' and perform impeccably, which was very hard to navigate as someone whose parents never went to university, let alone graduate school.

I operated on the edge of being 'discovered' because, frankly, I was trial-and-erroring my academic career. I didn't even know what a salary was until I was in a Masters programme (you can get paid for just...having a position? Your work matters, not the hours put in? What sorcery is this!?). So forget about understanding what postdocs are, how tenure works, what conferences are for, or how to publish an article in a peer-reviewed journal.

This third round in the graduate sphere has intentionally been low-performance, high-production. I don't wear nice clothing or makeup unless I'm presenting, and I don't hide tattoos or piercings any more. Instead, I put in the hours writing, applying for things, and politely but forwardly networking at lectures and academic events. I don't pretend I'm the next great scholar or will ever be a full professor. I'm just a mature student here for a PhD and enough jobs to string together into a career. I'm not faking anything, so there's nothing to be exposed. I can't have IS, or so I thought.

IS, I have found, is also a chronic under-evaluation of the self and one's achievements. It's a Tetris board in my head: mistakes pile up, while successes disappear. I struggle to fit my qualifications into a one- or two-page CV, but when I look at them laid out like that, it seems like another person's work. How did I ever get all that done? Who did I trick into winning that award or giving that paid lecture? Yet I still acutely feel failures from previous graduate work... undergraduate... even high school rattling around in my chest as the 'true' me.

My goalposts are perpetually shifting so that I am never satisfied. If I keep up what I've been doing, then I'm stagnating. If I accomplish something new, then it immediately becomes the new normal because I did it. I better keep up with it or else I'm failing. The baseline is perpetually just below where I operate. I set ambitious but concrete goals and check them off impassively, happy in the moment but deeply unmoved. If I can do it, then it's not that difficult; if I can achieve it, then it's not that great.

And so my academic career goes, as well as my path in heathenry. I thought these were separate but over the past few weeks I see how entwined these two core aspects of my identity are.

When I went to my first blót in 2006, internet heathenry was Yahoo groups, LiveJournal, and a couple of Geocities sites. Few people had undergraduate degrees in heathen topics, let alone postgraduate courses or qualifications. I was already keen on medieval history; I had been studying Latin for five years at this point. Seeing the value of scholarship for and by heathens, however, pushed me firmly into my field of the 9th-13th century North Atlantic.

In some ways I am happy with what my work has done. My research led directly into the making of Kindred of Mann and many of our traditions, along with lots of Icelandic research from our skald Kevin. I've also formalised and refined scholarship at East Coast Thing as the chair of the Workshops Committee for the past four years. I've served as a resource for dozens of heathens with questions big and small about Norse society, language, and literature. It's not nothing.

But in many ways I feel like internet heathenry has moved past what I can offer. The information is certainly out there for people to teach themselves Old Norse and read editions of the textual sources in the original language, read archaeological reports, examine high-quality images of artefacts, and read open-access journal articles on up-to-the-minute theory. But it's buried in insurmountable piles of repetitive, derivative, misleading junk that's out of date, sexist, and racist.

Keyboard Vikings chest-thump to Bro-halla in self-important echo chambers and what feels right wins out over what is best supported by current understanding of the sources. Pop culture is treated as lore and asking for documentation is gatekeeping. The authorities are the ones who are loudest and online most often. Funny how I can't spend much time arguing with strangers about heathen history because I'm writing my doctoral thesis in history and raising my heathen family.

I have the credentials, but flashing them is classist/ableist/arrogant. I have the ability to teach and guide heathens who are genuinely interested in the sources, but I don't have the time to do so, or patience to distinguish the curious from those seeking an argument. Just as with my secular scholarship, doing what I've been doing feels like stagnation because everything else is moving too fast. And trying to achieve anything new seems futile, because who do I think I am to have novel ideas?

Ten years ago, a Norse-Gaelic synthetic kindred in the East Coast heathen community was damn near heretical. Germanics and Celts had nothing to do with each other! (Yes, I'm being facetious.) Nowadays Kindred of Mann is one of the oldest groups in the region. It took a lot of planning, hesitation, action, and standing our ground to be here, and it all started from academic curiosity and rigorous scholarship.

We still have loads to do: public holidays have taken a hit since I moved to Dublin (although honestly they've gone down ever since our son was born) and we've had a prototype website kicking around offline for years. But there's a camaraderie there I am slightly more willing to acknowledge, a group pride rather than individual. At the very least, my husband deserves the accolades as the glue and backbone of the kindred from the very start. Thanks, sweetheart!

So whence from here? I have to acknowledge that IS and this goalpost-shifting achieves nothing but personal anxiety and minimisation. I'm in the very real danger of actually finishing this damn PhD (in a couple years) and feeling nothing after the viva, continuing my trend of cheapening accolades that I attain. That's a lot of work and sacrifice for a pretty shit reward. And the kindred has pushed our ten-year anniversary celebrations forward, to either Midsummer or maybe even a late Boaldyn depending on my flight home. I will feel accomplished, damn it! 

Most importantly, however, I see how receptive my son is to my actions and consequentially my thought patterns. This way of existence sucks and I do not want IS to be his inheritance. Nor do I want him affected by my dolorous dismissal of my goals. I give him unalloyed praise for the things he works for, his improvements, and his genuine attempts despite their outcome (not his traits, an important distinction!). Time to turn that around and try to give myself that witness to my work.

Heathen Dublin II: Objects

The first part of this two-part series is located here: Landscape.

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Part II: Objects

Sites like burial mounds and sacred groves are powerful signs of ownership that can be used and re-used by subsequent leaders of an area. While not as immediately visible to all, portable objects can also be used as symbols of power. The Uí Néill king Mael Sechnaill II subjugated Dublin in 995, just a few years before Brian Boru. This subjugation included the possession of two artefacts from the Norse, described as the Sword of Carlus (cloidhemh Carlusa) and the Ring of Thor (fail Tomair). 

Who 'Carlus' was is not known for sure, but it is likely a version of Frankish 'Carolus'. Duffy remarks in his 2014 book that this name appears among the Dublin Norse in the form of a Carlus mac Amlaíb (*Karlus? Óláfsson) whose death is recorded in the Irish annals in 868 (201). Therefore the Sword of Carlus may have been his literal sword, or ascribed to him, or he and the sword had the same namesake. In any event, the sword of Carlus, whose name was recorded over a century after Carlus mac Amlaíb’s death, was likely kept for ancestral veneration and/or a sign of military authority, lending it authority as a symbol of Dublin.

The second artefact is described as Fail Tomair, the same 'Tomair' that we saw is the Irish rendition of the Norse god Þórr or Thor. 'Fail' in Middle Irish can refer to a number of circular or round objects, and it is usually translated in this case as an arm-ring; it could potentially also refer to an enclosure, but it sounds like an object that was taken into Mael Sechnaill’s possession. The Fail Tomair was almost certainly part of a heathen tradition of sacred rings used in the swearing of oaths that were specifically associated with the god Thor. Colm from Irish Archaeology does an excellent job discussing the Ring of Thor in his page on Caill Tomair, so I quote in full:

This item…may have been a heathen cult object similar to the Thor’s ring described in the Kjalnesinga Saga. This Icelandic text describes a large ring, which was located within a temple dedicated to Thor. ‘On the altar was to lie a great armband, made of silver. The temple priest was to wear it on his arm at all gatherings, and everyone was to swear oaths on it whenever a suit was brought’. The use of this Thor’s ring in oath-swearing ceremonies mirrors contemporary Irish society where saint’s relics were often used for pledging oaths and making legal treaties.

Both the ancestral sword of Carlus and the godly arm-ring of Thor were likely used in oath ceremonies, particularly of a liegeman to his lord. This is a prominent plot point in Germanic medieval literature from Icelandic sagas to Beowulf to Old High German romances. Mael Sechnaill receiving the Sword of Carlus and the Ring of Thor was a symbol of his takeover of the town, a transfer of ruling power from the king of Dublin to his new over-king. 

Unfortunately the sword and ring are no longer extant, or at least not yet recovered in archaeology or identified. There are, however, items of interest housed in the National Museum of Ireland that hint at heathenism in Dublin on an individual level. While unfortunately not currently on display, there is a fragment of an iron staff recovered from Kilmainham, dated on account of its contemporary artefacts to the ninth century. 

Iron Staff Fragment, Kilmainham, Dublin. From The Viking Way (2002), drawing based on Boe (1940).

In his first edition of The Viking Way, Neil Price includes it among several dozen artefacts found across the Norse world that he believes to be staves utilised in heathen magical practices (199). These ornamented iron objects, frequently buried in wealthy graves, have been mis-categorised as cooking spits and whip shanks, but Price argues that they are too decorated to be practical implements. 

Further examples from The Viking Way.

Furthermore, these staves fit numerous descriptions in medieval literature of a Norse witch or seer’s magical staff. Incidentally, one of these narratives is the aforementioned Cogadh, which includes the dramatic scene of a prominent Viking chieftain’s wife giving oracles from atop the church altar of Clonmacnoise, Co. Offaly, in the ninth century:

…is and do-bered Ota ben Turges a [h-uricli]/[frecartha] ar altoir Cluana mic Nois.
…the place where Ota, the wife of Turgeis, gave her [audience]/[answers] was upon the altar of Cluain Mhic Nois.

‘Audience’ is the word used in one copy of the Cogadh of three extant, whereas ‘answers’ is found in both the oldest/least complete and the youngest/most complete copies. Either way, both refer to magical practices that appear in Norse sources where a (typically) female seer occupies an elevated position and answers questions or makes pronouncements for her audience, based on her ability to perceive a spirit-world or after-life from her seat. The most famous example of this in Norse literature occurs in Eirikr saga rauðr.

As previously mentioned, heathenism did not conceive of itself as a religion until it encountered opposition. Heathenism became self-aware with the presence of Christian missionaries in Scandinavia, including Iceland. Archaeology shows the manufacture of pendants shaped like ‘Mjölnir’ or Thor’s hammer to be worn as a symbol of heathenism, as opposed to the Christian cross or crucifix which Christians and missionaries would wear. Observe this soapstone mould from Denmark, which allowed the silversmith to generate a cross or a hammer depending on what their client wanted:

Photo from Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen; from Anders Winroth, Age of the Vikings (2014).

While heathenism is polytheist and thus involves many gods, Thor is described in Norse literature as a particular friend and protector of the people. One of the holy symbols of Thor - the hammer he utilises to keep nasty giants away from humans - serves as a synecdoche, or part to represent the whole, of heathenism. Heathens who wanted to complement the cross of Christians chose a stylised Mjölnir to wear. As we have seen Thor’s name is associated with both a wood and a sacred object for the Norse at Dublin. He may have been the focal god for the families that settled in Ireland, whether from their ancestral homeland or as members of the Irish-Norse community. In fact, within poetry in the Cogadh, the Norse in Ireland are referred to as muintir Tomair - the tribe or family of Thor.

The use of pendants to mark one’s religion is not a certainty as to someone’s beliefs, but then again, nothing in archaeology really is. Nonetheless, it at least indicates that someone wants to depict themselves as such. Therefore, the existence of a Mjölnir pendant, whether buried with a body intentionally or dropped into the floor of a house accidentally, indicates that someone wanted to show themselves as a heathen. While the National Museum of Ireland doesn’t officially have any Mjölnir pendants in its collection, nevertheless it houses several objects that could be reconsidered as potential hammers or symbols of heathenism. 

Mjölnir pendants come in several different varieties. This is a very simplified type chart from Wikipedia: 

The A-type includes a conflation with a Finnish religious symbol of the Ukonvasara or hammer of Ukko, a god of thunder with similar properties to Thor in Finnish mythology. These Ukko’s Hammers appear at the same time as Thor’s Hammers and served the same purpose as a religious marker in complement to Christianity. The B-type is most common, and also includes objects that are somewhere between types A and B. The C-type is also considerable, and we’ll be taking a closer look at this wolf-headed Mjölnir from Iceland:

Þjóðminjasafn Íslands

It is possible that some conflation with the hammer occurred with Christian crosses, particularly the ‘tau’ cross that is essentially a T-shape. The most famous example of this is the Fossi ‘wolf cross’ from Iceland, which has engendered interpretations ranging from a purely Christian object rendered in a Germanic idiom, to a heathen object hidden behind a cross-like shape that would pass muster after Icelandic law requiring public adherence to Christianity. The similarity to an equally enigmatic artefact with this three-lobed shape is also notable. Is this a gaming piece, an idol of Thor, an image of Christ, or something else? 

Þjóðminjasafn Íslands

Either way, this shape also appears in Norse Dublin, in the form of a small amber pendant currently on display at the National Museum of Ireland on Kildare Street:

Author photograph, NMI Kildare Street.

In a 2015 book chapter entitled ‘Meagre lead’, Patrick F. Wallace, the former director of the National Museum, reclassifies a number of items that had previously been categorised as lead fishing-line weights. (Incidentally, they are still labeled as such, but I can’t blame them not wanting to open up the case to fix a single line of text!) 

Author photograph, NMI Kildare Street.

Instead of pragmatic items, Wallace now describes these lead-alloy objects as cross pendants and ‘anchors’, specifically ‘…functionless ornaments - a kind of 3D doodle’ (271-2). I find it difficult to accept that the production of cross pendants alongside these hammer-looking objects is purely coincidental. If an artisan is creating cross pendants in Norse Dublin, why cannot we consider that they are also creating Mjölnir type-A pendants?

In conclusion, while Norse Dublin was considered to have been well aware of Christianity for centuries, from their Gaelic Irish neighbours as well as in continental trade, nonetheless it contained heathen elements in its landscape, and its residents would not have necessarily considered themselves entirely Christian before the eleventh century. And even then, all we have is archaeology - landscape and objects - to suggest what those who had authority wished to display.

The 'oldest' church in Dublin is Christchurch Cathedral, originally founded by King Sitric Silkiskeggi or 'Silkenbeard' after his pilgrimage to Rome in 1028. Christchurch looked to Canterbury in England rather than to local Irish church authority, so while there were Gaelic churches in the area previously, this served as Norse Dublin’s first church of its own. Sitric was the first man in Ireland to mint his own coins, on an Anglo-Saxon model, and his sponsorship of Christchurch is in line with his desire to emulate English and continental Christian kingship. But this is a display of power and authority, not necessarily a sweeping stamp of the religious practices and faiths of all residents of Norse Dublin at the time.

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Part II Works Cited
Duffy, Seán, Brian Boru and the Battle of Clontarf. Dublin, Gill & Macmillan, 2014.
Price, Neil. The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia. Uppsala, Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University, 2002.  

Wallace, Patrick F. ‘“Meagre lead”: the ubiquity of lead in Hiberno-Scandinavian Dublin.’ In Purcell, Emer, et alia, eds., Clerics, Vikings, and High-Kings. Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2015, pp. 263-275.

Winroth, Anders. The Age of the Vikings. Princeton University Press, 2014.

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Thank you very much to the Friends of Medieval Dublin, especially Dr. Aíne Foley and Dr. Caoimhe Whelan, for hosting my talk. 

Heathen Dublin I: Landscape

This was originally written for a general public audience for the Friends of Medieval Dublin lecture series hosted in Dublin City Council’s Wood Quay Venue. As such, there are many important points of contention leapt over in the name of public outreach! Further sources on Norse Dublin and conversion in northern Europe are available that treat the issues raised here with far more sophistication. This is an introductory essay rather than an academic publication.

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Part I: Landscape

When the Norse settled in Ireland from the beginning of the ninth century onwards, they came from a region of Europe that had not been previously been part of Roman imperial administration. As such, there was a lack of social institutions that were found in other areas on the Continent that had been maintained, if not by the Roman Church directly, then by local Christians in a desire to emulate and stay connected with the trade, status, wealth, and security that Christianity provided to medieval Europe after the Roman Empire. Far northern Europe, including today’s Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, functioned in a social order described as ‘pre-Christian’. 

The Late Roman Latin term for this way of life was paganus, meaning ‘of the countryside’ and therefore also ‘rustic’ or perhaps ‘culchie’; it also had connotations of a civilian, versus a self-labelled soldier of Christ. Medieval writers codified ‘pagan’ and other terms to denote non-Christians in history and literature, both about prior conversion efforts and contemporary non-Christians. 

The term used for this concept in Germanic medieval literature was heiðinn, most likely a calque or direct translation of ‘pagan’: a heath- or countryside-dweller. ‘Germanic’ here refers to cultures speaking a language from the Germanic family, languages that include today’s English, Dutch, Swedish, and German; as well as ancient languages such as Old Norse, Saxon, and Gothic. While ‘heathens’ did not have a name for themselves, Germanic Christian writers gave them one that has endured to the present day. 

This is one of the most frustrating aspects of any attempt to study or understand heathenism: it was an oral culture for which recording theological or even legal material was alien. So far I’ve used ‘pre-Christian’ and ‘heathen’ to describe the religion of the Norse who came to Dublin, but what was it exactly? Unfortunately as it was a pre-literate culture - indeed, one that prized oral memory and recitation - we have nothing about heathenism that was written down by a heathen. Apart from a handful of quasi-magical carvings called runes, all literature from Germanic Northern Europe came firmly after conversion, from the hands of Christian authors. 

However, the editorial weight of these writers varied, and we believe that we have fairly substantial hints at pre-Christian beliefs encoded in poetry, literature, and even law texts. We also have archaeology: objects from homes and workspaces, inhumations or burials, and sometimes entire landscapes from pre-Christian Europe. Marrying medieval literature with archeological discoveries, and applying anthropological principles to these analyses, yields glimpses at a fairly comprehensive heathen theological system. 

Germanic Northern Europe was polytheistic; that is, its religion included multiple gods. These are household names due to popular films as well as the days of the week - Tiw’s Day, Thor’s Day, and so on. While these gods mostly came from the same family - Thor was Odin’s son, for instance - polytheism can accommodate different cultures, and medieval literature tells of people who worshipped Christ alongside other Norse deities. Heathenism also involved veneration of ancestors and the dead, as well as landscapes and spirits of nature. It appears that reputation and honour were key motivations in heathen theology. 

However, calling this a ‘religion’ is imposing a standardised system onto an ill-defined and highly localised world-view. Heathens did not set up a pantheon of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ gods, or compose holy books about what to believe, or insist that there was a single ‘truth’ about the world that only some people held. They performed their local customs in the belief that they were the right way to go about things. And the ‘right way’ may have varied from valley to fjord, or even from one farmstead to another. 

Not until institutionalised Christianity appeared, that is, an organised religion that required communal faith and worship, did heathens even start to think of their practices as a philosophy. We’ll see some evidence of this concept in the archaeology later on.

An interesting thing about heathenism is that, while tied into nature and the landscape, it apparently travels well. Iceland was essentially unpopulated before Norse settlers arrived in the late ninth century, and then functioned as a majority-heathen society for over a century, including the establishment of sacred areas in previously uninhabited land. The famous Eiríkr rauði or Eric the Red was a heathen, to his Christian wife’s chagrin, and the two lived separately in their preferred ways in Greenland. Centuries earlier, the Angles and Saxons brought their heathen practices to Britain and instituted Germanic holy sites and place-names. Where heathens went, their practices followed. Therefore, it is not at all surprising that heathenism came to Dublin along with its Norse inhabitants.

Extract from IHTA no. 11, Dublin, part I, to 1610 by Howard B. Clarke, Map 4, Medieval Dublin: c. 840 to c. 1540. (Courtesy Royal Irish Academy)

This is evident in the set-up of the Norse town, elements of which persisted through the early modern period or even to the present day. The precise layout and limits of the pre-Norman town are still under consideration, but we know it was in this general area where this lecture was originally given. 

I draw your attention eastward to what would have been mostly open space during the Norse development. There are three areas of interest: the Long Stone, Hoggen Green, and the area between the Green and the town.

The Long Stone or Langstein, a man-made standing stone or monolith, was 12 to 14 feet high and stood until removed in the early 18th century. Its site is now commemorated with a much smaller sculpture. While this site is now several hundred metres from the quay, it would have been a fixed navigation aide for sailors in Dublin Bay in the ninth and tenth centuries, and likely marked the edge of navigable passage in the tidal Liffey. 

There is not necessarily a religious dimension to this practical guide; however, the amount of effort to erect such a monolith indicates an interest in broadcasting power. It may also have had other functions, such as a marker of the space between the town and the bay.

More likely to be a symbol of specifically Norse power, however, is the burial mound or mounds that occupied what was once called Hoggen Green. It is now called College Green thanks to its next door neighbour of Trinity. There was a convent in the area founded 1146 called St. Mary de Hogges, and sometimes historians presume that the green was named after the convent. However, the Hoggen Green was named for its original function as a visible burial ground, ‘Hoggen’ coming from Old Norse haugr (nominative + definite article hauginn, ‘the mound’). Dramatic interment of the dead is a universal human phenomenon, from ancient monuments like Newgrange and the Pyramids of Giza to modern mausolea like that of Elvis in Graceland. 

In addition to statements about the afterlife, prominent tombs announce prestige in the effort expended to create them, as well as indicate a claim on the land by virtue of kinship - real or fictitious - with the deceased. The mound at the Hogges, possibly the hauginn, which made it all the way to the late 17th century before being demolished, is shown on the map in orange. Consider that this would have been highly visible to incoming sailors, particularly as they navigated utilising the Langstein, and think as to how the Norse manipulation of the landscape signalled their conquest and occupation. Then imagine that there may have been a whole field of these impressive mounds on display! 

Unfortunately with its demolishment, the Hogges and anything else in the area are unavailable for archaeological investigation. In fact, it is possible that the fill from the mound was utilised in the elevation of nearby Nassau Street which occurred soon afterwards! 

Oseberg ship (Wikimedia Commons)

It is possible that the Hogges was the site of a ship burial similar to that of the Oseberg or Gokstad sites in Norway, where a wealthy individual or family was interred on a ship laden with goods for the afterlife, and a mound raised around the remains. The treatment of human remains are a good indicator of religious practice in medieval northern Europe. Inhumations or burials without grave goods, especially in churchyards buried with their heads to the west and feet to the east, are generally Christian. Meanwhile the presence of grave goods, and cremation, are signs of a non-Christian burial; but this is how the people who buried the body chose to depose their dead, not necessarily what the living person believed.

A site of definite heathen interest lies between Hoggen Green and the Norse town: this space between where people lived in the west, and died in the east. This area was known as the Thingmotte in later medieval Dublin, the first half of which comes from the Norse term for a proto-parliament ‘thing’. This survives in other countries of Norse settlement in name, such as Iceland’s Þingvellir, Norway’s Gulatinget, Tingwall in the Orkneys, and Tynwald Hill in the Isle of Man. These are the areas that were specially used for administration and legal cases. 

In the absence of a state or overarching structure such as the Roman Church, self-imposed law assumed a religious component. Criminals did not just harm their victims and victims’ families, but society as a whole, and made restitution by returning to the ‘old’ and ‘proper’ ways of existence. Therefore the thing was held sacred throughout the Norse world as a site where gods and ancestors could receive proper deference by the establishment and resumption of an orderly society. The power of the thing continued after Christianisation but in a secular fashion, and even today several Nordic countries and territories use thing-related words for their parliamentary bodies. 

For centuries, confusion over the -motte ending which looks like ‘-mount’ led historians and amateurs alike to assume that the Hogges mound was the Thingmotte. But in a 2005 article Seán Duffy deftly identified that the Thingmotte was a distinct region ‘just outside the city’s eastern gate, straddling [modern] Dame Street, and lying to the west of Hoggen Green’ (358). Duffy explains that -motte is actually from the archaic English word moot, related to our modern English word ‘meeting’. The Thingmotte was still in use as a site of judicial administration by the time Henry II visited Dublin, which he used for his own law court in the winter of 1171-2. Its position just outside the town, but not within it, and linking the town to its burial ground, indicates the power and prestige of the Thing in Norse Dublin.

Another site of specific importance for heathenism in Dublin is a site mentioned in literary sources but whose location is not well-defined. This is Caill Tomair or the Wood of Thor, which I’ve reconstructed into Old Norse as *Þorsviðr. 

This grove appears several times in the Cogadh Gáedhel re Gallaib, which is a Munster text written in the first quarter of the twelfth century that purports to give the history of the Norse in Ireland culminating in the celebrated Battle of Clontarf. Brian Boru is the star of this text as it was composed for his great-grandson, Muirchertach Ua Briain; the overarching theme of the Cogadh is the prestige that Brian, and therefore his descendants, deserve for his subjugation of Norse and Gael alike. As a result, whether the historical Brian actually did so or not, the author of the text depicts him destroying sacred sites and royal symbols of his rivals all over Ireland. Therefore, when Brian’s forces capture Dublin in 1000, they make firewood out of Caill Tomair as part of the city’s subjugation. 

This was apparently such a massive undertaking that fourteen years later, when an attendant describes the Battle of Clontarf to the elderly Brian, he compares the noise and confusion to the sound and sight of chopping down Caill Tomair and setting it ablaze. Because of this, and the fact that presumably fourteen years wasn’t enough time for the grove to recover, it is unlikely that Caill Tomair was the same wood northeast of Dublin that trapped many of the Norse fleeing from Clontarf in the rising tide. In his 2014 book on Brian and the battle, Duffy suggests that Caill Tomair was near Dublin although well outside of the town, and may have been in the area of modern Phoenix Park (214-5). 

Click here for Part II: Objects

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Works Cited & Select Further Reading

Abrams, Lesley. 'The Conversion of the Scandinavians of Dublin.' In Anglo-Norman Studies, vol. 20, 1998, pp. 1-29.

Brady, Joseph, and Anngret Simms, eds. Dublin Through the Ages (c. 900--1900). Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2001.

Bradley, J., A. J. Fletcher, and A. Simms, eds., Dublin in the Medieval World. Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2009.

Clarke, Howard B., and Ruth Johnson, eds. The Vikings in Ireland and Beyond. Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2015.

Downham, Clare. ‘Religious and Cultural Boundaries between Vikings and Irish: The Evidence of Conversion.’ In Ní Ghrádaigh, Jenifer, and Emmett O’Byrne, eds., The March in the Islands of the Medieval West, Brill, 2012.

Duffy, Seán, Brian Boru and the Battle of Clontarf. Dublin, Gill & Macmillan, 2014.

Duffy, Seán, 'A reconsideration of the site of Dublin's Thing-mót.' Condit, Tom, and Christiaan Corlett, eds., Above and Beyond: Essays in Memory of Leo Swan, Wordwell, 2005, pp. 351-60.

Holm, Poul. ‘The naval power of Norse Dublin.’ In Purcell, Emer, et alia, eds., Clerics, Vikings, and High-Kings. Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2015, pp. 67-78.

Price, Neil. The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia. Uppsala, Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University, 2002.  

Todd, James Henthorn, ed. and trans. Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh: The War of the Gaedhil with the Gaill, or, The Invasions of Ireland by the Danes and Other Norsemen. Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, London, 1867.

Valante, Mary. The Vikings in Ireland: settlement, trade and urbanization. Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2008. 

An introduction to Irish for curious Americans

The Irish language is full of cultural capital for us Yanks: a bit mysterious, seemingly incomprehensible, and very kitsch - what could more authentic, right? If you’ve been in Ireland for even an airport stopover you can’t help but see Irish versions of every sign, sometimes fairly close to what you’d expect - músaem for museum, for instance - and sometimes entirely foreign - an lár for the city center. And how on earth do you get Baile Átha Cliath for Dublin? Whether you’re interested in learning enough Irish to read literature in the original, or just want to know a bit more about this highly-regarded but infrequently spoken language, I’ve got a basic introduction for you.

Let’s start with what Irish is, and isn’t.

Irish is not related to English. Growing up next to the adopted isle of the Anglo-Saxons, and coming under various forms of English rule, the Irish language has many loanwords and some phrases translated word-for-word from English. However, Irish and English are from separate language families and follow extremely different grammar rules and sentence constructions. If you come to Irish thinking that it’s as foreign as Italian or Polish, you’ll be pleased to find some similarities to English, especially if you’re familiar with Hiberno-English. But if you assume that Irish is just a dialect or version of English, you’ll be overwhelmed immediately. 

Irish is not synonymous with Gaelic. Many Americans use ‘Gaelic’ when talking about the language, but Irish people prefer to call it Irish. ‘Gaelic’ is a language family that includes Scottish Gaelic and Manx. (Scots is another language from Scotland but it is closely related to English and not Gaelic.) You could say Irish Gaelic, but that’s unusual. Scottish Gaelic, Manx, and Irish are all descended from the same language, and fluent speakers can understand each other with a bit of work, but for the beginner they are different languages. It’s easy to tell them apart when you’re reading: Irish accents all slant upwards, while Scottish accents all slant downwards, and Manx doesn’t use accents: Irish tír, Scottish tìr, and Manx çheer are the same word.

Irish is its own language with its own literature and history. While all Irish speakers today also know English (with a handful of remarkable exceptions), there are books, graphic novels, films, television shows, and music albums originally composed in Irish. They may be translated for English readers, but they lose things. There are jokes, innuendo, slang, and turns of phrase that only exist in Irish and cannot be conveyed in any other language. Furthermore, there are hundreds of thousands of lines of prose and poetry written in medieval Irish. Irish was the primary, even sole language for millions of people over many centuries in Ireland. It is not a backwards, fabricated, or deficient language. 

Irish is complicated, but consistent. It’s easy to joke about how difficult it is to pronounce Irish, or how some words look like a random pile of letters to an English reader. But you learned how to say hors d’oeuvres and got used to it without claiming that French is insane, and Irish is the same! Irish also has a quality called ‘initial mutation’ that changes the first letter(s) of words due to the word in front of it or what part of speech it is. This leads to words like ‘hÉireann’, ‘gcónaí’, ‘dtréo’, and ‘mhatháir’ which complicate an already foreign orthography (way of writing). It can be mind-boggling, but everything has a purpose. Think of how contradictory English is in its spelling and orthography - ‘though, thou, thought, through, trough’? Irish doesn’t do anything like this, I promise!

Irish is an indigenous language. Ireland is a peculiar place that has Eurocentric/majority-white privilege, but is also recovering from an experience of language loss and trauma shared with other indigenous populations. Virtually all Irish would agree that native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, Austro-Indonesians, and other post-colonial peoples have the right to preserve their heritage and use their language, in particular as a balm against colonialism. But many Irish consider their language to be a lost cause, and fall back on their frustration with it in school as the reason why they don’t care for it. It’s hard to show people that they’re making excuses rather than acknowledging their own language was taken from them on purpose. Most countries in Europe have a native language (or several!) that they use in addition to English or another international language, and there’s no reason Ireland can’t resume its use of Irish.

Irish is alive. The history of Irish over the last few centuries has included direct and indirect attacks on it, nearly always due to a preference for using English. Right up to today, many people in Ireland think that using it is an exercise in romanticism or antiquarianism. As a consequence Irish often gets labeled as ‘dead’, ‘dying’, ‘revived’, ‘old’, ‘ancient’, ‘quaint’, or ‘unusual’; even by people not trying to belittle it. Nothing can undo Elizabethan legal statutes, An Gorta Mór (‘The Great Hunger’ or the famine of 1847), or the haphazard application of Irish language requirements in the Republic’s early years; so endless debates about what could have been are pointless. What we can do right now is learn it and use it as often as possible, in and outside of Ireland.

Some other things to know: 

There are areas in Ireland where Irish is used as the first language; these are called Gaeltachtaí or Gaeltachts and with a few exceptions are found in the west. Not everyone there is a Gaeilgeoir or Irish-speaker but many are, and if you want you can carry out your entire day in Irish. These places attract curious tourists and fill with school students in the summer for immersive courses. Tourism thus is an important part of their industry but consequently their relationship with the rest of Ireland can be complicated. 

The Irish language has three preserved dialect-groups, and a fourth one which is generated. The preserved dialects are Munster, Connacht, and Ulster, and with some exceptions they are spoken in that region of the country (south-west, mid-west, and north-west respectively). They have their own words and phrases but are mutually intelligible, such as a strong Yorkshire accent versus a strong Texas accent in English. 

The fourth ‘dialect’ is Lárchanúint or Central Dialect which was generated in an attempt to unify and standardise Irish, and it’s what most speakers who don’t live in a Gaeltacht use. Lárchanúint has advantages and disadvantages: it’s popular and it’s not location-specific, but its artificiality lacks the organic creativity of the regional dialects. Sometimes Lárchanúint speakers look down on the preserved dialects, which is itself a form of linguistic privileging. Personally, I think anything that is being used in Irish is helpful, but I also try to use Munster Irish when I can, as my mother’s grandfather was a Gaeilgeoir from West Cork. 

Irish can be written using a Latin alphabet (what you are currently reading). It also has its own alphabet, called seanchló, which is based on a Latin alphabet but has noticeable differences. The ‘g’ looks like an ’s’, the ’s’ looks like an ‘r’, and ‘r’ looks like an ’n’. ‘D’ can look like ‘o’, and sometimes a dot over a letter replaces the letter ‘h’ following it (ċat instead of chat). Many signs in Ireland use Latin alphabets for English and seanchló for Irish, and old printed documents in Irish often use seanchló exclusively. 

The relationship between land names in Irish and in English is complicated. In many cases, a bizarre sounding place-name in English turns out to be the rendering of a fairly prosaic Irish description of the area: Clonskea for Cluain Sceach, Meadow of the Whithorns. Sometimes the English place-name is a direct translation of the Irish: Greystones for Na Clocha Liatha. And sometimes the name is entirely different in English and in Irish, which often indicates a troubled history for the area. Dublin is referred to as Baile Átha Cliath in Irish (often abbreviated to BÁC) as that was the name of the Irish-speaking settlement just north of the Norse town that eventually became the capital. It’s a long story.

What does Irish sound like, anyway? You may have noticed that I haven’t tried to approximate the pronunciation of any words I’ve given so far. That’s because there are sounds in Irish that aren’t in English, so I’d have to use an international phonetic alphabet to get it right. To my ears, Irish sounds a little like French, but with a lot of guttural (back-of-the-throat) and “sh” sounds. The inflection, or pattern of speech, of Irish has strongly influenced Hiberno-English, so if you’ve heard Irish people speaking English you’ve heard Irish inflection. Native Irish speakers also tend to speak fast and blend words together, so don’t be discouraged if you can’t match written to spoken Irish right away. Baile Átha Cliath, for instance, as written ought to sound like ‘BAHW-luh Aw-huh CLEE-ah’. But it is pronounced ‘BAHL-uh CLEE-ah’ and sometimes Irish speakers shorten it even further to something like ‘Blocklee’.

Hopefully this was a straightforward introduction to the Irish language for Americans who may not have encountered it before. Irish language instruction is available on Duolingo, on free and paid online courses, and in textbooks that come with audio recordings as well. I hope you get a chance to see it used, hear it spoken, read it, and maybe even try speaking or writing it yourself.

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This blog post was originally written for an Irish-language film night I hosted over the summer. It has been revised with considerable assistance from Gréagóir Ó Dáire. GRMA!