Postgraduate research students

This project is an interdisciplinary and multilingual investigation of evolving early medieval identities around the Scandinavian-controlled Irish Sea from the late eighth century to the mid twelfth century. This was a pivotal era of dynamic identity renegotiation which led to the production of several cultural identities in the Insular Viking Zone. This process of identity production is expressed in both material culture and textual sources that span multiple languages, regions and genres. This research proposes to analyse both texts and archaeological sources from these communities as case studies to examine the Scandinavian-Insular hybridisation and identity formation process.

The pricipal research questions for this project is:

How were the new identities that emerged around the Viking-Age Irish Sea, generated, negotiated, maintained and remembered?

• What new words and terms expressive of identity emerge in insular texts during this period, and how do older terms change their semantics?

• How are identities manifested in material culture and how do these relate to textual expressions?

• How do these cultures, both the native Insular ones and incoming Scandinavian, memorialise this period in later literary works, i.e. sagas? How does this period affect later identities?

• What new approaches to the Viking diaspora and the communities they encountered can be developed and applied when examining both archaeological and textual evidence?

This research analyses key contemporary sources, both textual and material, that exhibit expressions of the negotiation of new identities, including Scandinavian-Insular hybridities. This involves close analysis of primary sources in Early Gaelic, Middle Welsh, Old English and Old Norse as well as bringing together the material and textual sources as a cohesive corpus of evidence. Previous study on this topic, though extremely valuable, has been primarily conducted within the boundaries of discrete disciplines, languages, source materials, or geographical locations. This research builds on the findings of previous scholars and bridge the gaps between these studies.

• Professor Thomas Clancy
• Dr Stephen Harrison

Celtic and Gaelic Level 1 Celtic Civilisation 1A

Celtic and Gaelic Level 1 Celtic Civilisation 1B