Like Jon Snow, I know nothing
In which a conversation with a proper historian leaves me feeling (temporarily) disheartened
I wasn’t going to write a blog this week, partly because it’s been an exhausting week (both work-wise and politically), but mostly because, since last week’s blog, I’ve become quite disheartened about my whole topic, and about “doing” history generally.
But as the whole reason I’m writing this blog is to chart my journey towards (I hope) becoming a historian of early medieval Scotland, it seems only right to write about the downs as well as the ups.
A recap of my MA topic: Sueno’s Stone and Dubh of Alba
(If you’ve been reading my other posts, you can probably skip this bit…)
So to recap, last week I wrote about how some of the early king-lists say that three 10th-century kings of Alba died in Forres in Moray, while other early sources say that two of them were actually killed in or near Dunnottar in Aberdeenshire.
I’m looking at those king-lists because, for my MA, I want to try to contextualise Sueno’s Stone in Forres within the historical events of the time in which it was created.
That’s quite difficult because Sueno’s Stone can’t be reliably dated. The best guess comes from art historians, who put it between 850 and 950 AD, based on the style of the carvings. So my plan was to home in on this period and see if I can piece anything together that might shed any more light on this extraordinary monument.
At the same time, I was aware that historians have already tried this to little avail. After nearly 300 years of speculation, there’s still no consensus on what the stone is doing in Forres, or what its graphic battle scenes are meant to represent.
So rather than add more speculation to the mix, I thought I could approach it another way: by taking an existing theory and putting it to the test. If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know I picked Professor Archie Duncan’s 1984 theory that the stone commemorates the death of Dubh, king of Alba.
A brief précis: Several early sources say that Dubh was murdered in Forres in 966 or 967, and his body hidden under the bridge of Kinloss, whereupon the sun didn’t shine until the body was found, and it was taken away to Iona to be buried. Duncan proposed that an arch-shaped object on Sueno’s Stone represents the bridge, and that one of the decapitated bodies underneath it represents Dubh.
Why I’m not convinced about a Forres death for Dubh
(If you’ve read my other posts you could probably skip this bit too…)
From the start, I’ve found the story about Dubh’s death quite suspect. The first red flag was the mention of Kinloss, which I didn’t think existed as a ‘place’ until the 12th century, when David I founded the abbey there in 1150.
The second was the mention of a bridge, because there’s seemingly no watercourse at Kinloss that would warrant a bridge – especially in an age when bridges were few and far between. And there’s no archaeological evidence of human settlement at Kinloss in the 10th century, so what would a bridge be doing there?
My suspicions were further aroused while reading Alex Woolf’s excellent From Pictland to Alba 789-1070, in which he remarks on page 125:
In the reign of David (1124-1153) the places of the kings’ deaths were added to the king-list…
Woolf doesn’t explain where or how he got this information. But it seemed to support my suspicion that the story of Dubh being killed in Forres and his body being hidden under the bridge of Kinloss belonged more to the 12th century than the 10th.
Then I remembered that some of the king-lists say that two earlier kings of Alba – Dubh’s father Malcolm I and grandfather Donald II – also died in Forres. Perhaps my hunch was wrong, then, and that Forres was a royal centre in the 10th century after all.
That’s what inspired my last post, in which I looked at what the early sources actually say about those kings’ deaths, and tried to assess how reliable that evidence might be.
So why am I disheartened?
And this, reader, is how I came to be disheartened.
In assessing the reliability of these sources, I cited opinions from three leading historians of the period: Archie Duncan, Alex Woolf and Neil McGuigan.
In particular, I wondered why Woolf and McGuigan were prepared to believe the king-lists when they say Dubh died in Forres, but not when they say Donald and Malcolm died there.
Neil McGuigan very kindly got back to me on Twitter, with some really useful guidance about using these manuscript sources:
In other words, 12th-century scribes added material to the original king-lists (which were likely just a list of kings and their reign-lengths) that reflected the politics of their own time.
Specifically, a time in which two Moravian (i.e. from Moray) aristocrats had challenged David I for the kingship, leading to the battle of Stracathro in 1130, in which one pretender was killed and the other later rounded up and imprisoned.
So the scribes of these manuscripts had an interest in discrediting Moravians, and did so by moving the location of Donald’s and Malcolm’s deaths from Dunnottar to Forres, and framing this as ‘evidence’ of a natural Moravian tendency towards rebelliousness and treachery.
Three reasons to be less than cheerful
This is good info, and I’m very grateful to Dr McGuigan for engaging with me. So why did I find it disheartening? Well, for quite a few reasons, including:
1. The primary sources are evaporating in front of my eyes
It brings home just how little reliable historical evidence there is for 10th century Moray. Even these earliest sources reflect the politics and preoccupations of their own time, rather than preserving an authentic record of what happened two centuries earlier. On one level I knew this, but it’s still disheartening to realise it’s almost impossible to “see” further back than the 12th century in the documentary sources.
2. The secondary sources are hard to get hold of
Two of the secondary sources Neil McGuigan recommended are virtually inaccessible to people outside academia. I began my MA research more than a year before the course actually starts, so I don’t have access to a university library. That means I’ve had to rely on material that’s publicly available.
I’m in the fortunate position of being quite financially comfortable, so I’ve been able to buy a lot of books – some new, most second-hand. But most academic books and papers are eye-wateringly expensive. Dauvit Broun’s The Irish Identity of the Kingdom of Scots costs £60. Benjamin T. Hudson’s article on the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba is £25 (even though I already subscribe to Edinburgh University Press’s journals).
Yes, I could probably spare £85 to buy them. But it’s not just these two – to do proper historical research you have to consult hundreds of books and papers. I’ve had to be quite picky about what I buy, and so far, these two hadn’t made the cut.
(Friends in academia have also shown me where to get contraband PDFs of books and articles, but those sources don’t have everything I’m looking for.)
While that’s only a short-term problem for me, as I’ll soon be a registered student with library access, it does show how prohibitive serious historical research is for people outside academia. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to do an MA rather than just research the period as a hobby – without access to the latest research and critical thinking, you can easily leap to totally wrong conclusions.
3. I basically know nothing
Lastly, it’s made me realise how much I have to learn. With last week’s post, I really thought I was getting somewhere. I was quite pleased with myself for digging into the sources and attempting to evaluate them.
Now I realise that to understand the 10th century I can’t just look at the 10th century. I also have to understand the 12th century, because that’s when most of the ‘early’ sources date from. And I have to understand the 9th century, because it laid the foundations for the 10th century. And so on.
And I can’t just look at Moray, or Alba, or Scotland. I have to look at least at the whole of Britain and Ireland, and ideally further afield, to put what’s happening in Moray into its European context. That feels daunting, like I’ve struggled to the top of a hill only to find a huge mountain range ahead.
It’s not that I don’t like hard work – I love hard work. It’s just difficult to know what to read and how to plan it. I’ve realised I don’t even know how to take proper notes.
New light on the bridge at Kinloss
But on we go. And Neil McGuigan has also inspired me to re-open my casebook on the bridge of Kinloss (which is starting to feel like the stuff of an academic paper in itself).
When I asked him why he trusts the king-lists on the place of Dubh’s death but not Malcolm’s or Donald’s, he specifically cited the bridge as being the kind of ‘random detail’ that makes the story more plausible:
In his own PhD thesis from 2015, he refers to Professor David Dumville’s characterisation of this type of source analysis as ‘textual archaeology’, explaining:
The idea is an obvious and unproblematic one: that early evidence and incidental detail are more reliable sources of information about the past than late or rationalized narrative.
So the fact that there’s mention of a bridge, which has no apparent political subtext either for the 10th century or the 12th, makes it more likely that Dubh died in the manner and the place that the king-lists say he did.
And I may even be wrong to think that bridges were rare (or non-existent) in 10th century Moray. In our last Twitter exchange, McGuigan said:
Back on the hunt for the bridge of Kinloss
This idea of ‘textual archaeology’ really appeals to me, and the fact that a bridge might actually have existed at Kinloss in 966 AD is very intriguing.
I’m still pretty sure it’s not the arched object depicted on Sueno’s Stone, but I’m definitely going to do some more digging to see if I can find any more references to it.
(Which means I’m now no longer disheartened, and am off to burrow in 12th-century land grants… of which more next week, maybe.)
Thanks for sharing the Downs. It’s a great reminder that the best Ups rarely come free.
Do you know about the bridge at Clonmacnoise (built AD 804)? A potential comparison: http://www.ce.memphis.edu/1101/interesting_stuff/irish_bridge_1.html