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  • Manx Kingship in its Irish Sea Setting, 1187– 1229: King Rögnvaldr and the Crovan Dynasty
  • Alex Woolf
R. Andrew McDonald , Manx Kingship in its Irish Sea Setting, 1187– 1229: King Rögnvaldr and the Crovan Dynasty. Four Courts Press: Dublin, 2007. 254 pp. €55 hardback. ISBN 978-1-84682-047-2

The last few years have seen an explosion of scholarly interest in, and publication on, the Irish Sea World in the central middle ages. The godfather of this trend is undoubtedly Seán Duffy of Trinity College Dublin who opened up the field in a number of important articles in the early 1990s,1 but in the new century we have suddenly been exposed to a series of monographs and essay collections which puts publication in some adjacent areas, including perhaps mainstream Scottish history, to shame. Benjamin Hudson has produced both a monograph, Viking Pirates and Christian Princes: Dynasty, Religion and Empire in the North Atlantic (Oxford, 2005), and a collection of his own essays, Irish Sea Studies, 900–1200 (Dublin, 2006); Clare Downham has published the book based upon her doctoral thesis, Viking Kings of Britain and Ireland: the Dynasty of Ívarr to A.D. 1014 (Edinburgh, 2007); and Duffy has returned to the fray with an edited conference proceedings, The World of the Galloglass: Kings, warlords and warriors in Ireland and Scotland, 1200–1600 (Dublin, 2007), which contains a number of papers dealing with the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the Irish Sea World. Finally we have the book under review here written by an Assistant Professor at Brock University (not far from Niagara Falls) in Canada.

The narrative that has emerged from this new sub-discipline is of a dynasty (or dynasties if we follow Hudson 2005) of Scandinavian origin which between the mid-ninth and the mid-tenth centuries nearly realised its ambitions to become politically dominant in both Britain and Ireland but which, from about the 950s, became increasingly integrated into regional politics, developing complex relations, political, economic and personal, around the shores of the Irish Sea and north into the west of what is now Scotland. The degree to which the different parts of their disparate territories were integrated into a political whole; the degree to which the dynasty, together with its core following, retained their Scandinavian character and language or became increasingly Gaelicised; and the degree to which they retained their independence from regional hegemonies is still very much open to debate but that debate is now very well informed. [End Page 113]

McDonald's volume is very much a new departure within the field, and one which builds upon what has gone before, for he attempts for the first time to write a book-length biography of one of the kings of this dynasty: Rögnvaldr son of Guðrøðr, who reigned from 1187 to 1229. Few would have thought such a biography possible. Only six of Rögnvald's acta survive and the narrative account of his reign in the only native chronicle from his kingdom, The Chronicle of the Kings of Man and the Isles, focuses most of the three-and-a-half folios it devotes to his reign on the final five years. This said, we know far more about Rögnvaldr than about most of his predecessors. Fortunately for us, but undoubtedly unfortunately for the king himself, Rögnvaldr was the first king of the Isles to come to the throne after the English conquest of Ireland. The strategic position of the Isle of Man, lying between England and Ireland, led to far greater interest in the kingdom of the Isles by the English crown than had been apparent at any earlier period. This in turn has led to the greater generation of documents preserved in English and Anglo-Irish archives.

McDonald's approach is thematic and the bulk of the volume comprises five chapters, each dealing with a different aspect of Rögnvald's reign: Manannán's kingdom: the Manx sea kings and their world; Rögnvaldr, Óláfr and the Manx war: family succession and kin-strife in Man and the Isles; the greatest warrior: foreign relations to c.1200...

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