A key argument of this book is that it is impossible to separate the growth of any insular origin narrative from that of the larger corpus of historical writing which contained them. Chapter One presents the evidence for the textual connections between these works, while the chapters to follow analyse the implications of these connections. This chapter outlines the sources and later reuses of each major work under consideration. Specialists on individual texts and manuscripts will already be aware of many of these connections, yet broader scholarship on the early medieval period still treats so-called ‘Irish’, ‘Welsh’, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Scottish’ literary and historical traditions as disparate. This chapter thus provides the ‘hard evidence’ for the extent to which the corpus of texts containing origin narratives influenced one another during the early medieval period. Early medieval authors were interested not solely in writing the story of their own people, but rather, in collecting the histories of the peoples of Britain and Ireland together. Chapter One overturns the common perception that the authors of these texts were working in proto-national isolation, instead revealing the textual connections that shaped the intellectual landscape of the early medieval insular region.

When writing their own histories and those of their neighbours, early medieval insular peoples sought to provide answers to some obvious questions. Who were their ancestors? Where did they come from? And why did they leave their homelands? Over the course of the early medieval period, a discourse of origin narratives developed within the insular region. By the time of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, an expansive origin legend had become attached to each of the four peoples who inhabited Britain and Ireland. This book explores the development of these stories in the early medieval period from (roughly) the departure of the Romans to the arrival of the Normans before turning to an examination of how they were treated by early modern chroniclers writing histories with a more nationalist bent. In the early medieval period, the corpus of insular origin legends evolved together to flesh out the history of the region. Individual origin narratives were in constant development, written and rewritten to respond to other works. Together, these legends were constructed not to form four distinct ‘national’ histories but rather to fill in the blanks of prehistory for the region as a whole.