Rekdal, Jan Erik & Charles Doherty (ed.): Kings and warriors in early North-West Europe.

M. Egeler

doi:10.1515/zcph-2017-0020

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Rekdal, Jan Erik & Charles Doherty (ed.): Kings and warriors in early North-West Europe.

M. Egeler
M. Egeler

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From the journal Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie Volume 64 Issue 1

ii“zcp64_2017-10-04” — 2017/10/4 — 15:31 — page 500 — #506iiiiii500BesprechungenRekdal, Jan Erik, & CharlesDoherty(ed.):Kings and warriors in earlyNorth-West Europe. Dublin / Portland: Four Courts Press, 2016. 480 pp.,ISBN 978-1-84682-501-9. € 50.This substantial volume, fittingly edited in a Norwegian-Irish collaboration, as-sembles eight equally substantial contributions that examine the relationshipbetween the king and the warrior in a North-West European comparative per-spective, i.e. equally covering Old Norse, Welsh, Irish, and Anglo-Saxon mate-rial. It presents the results of a project on ‘The representation of the warriorin relation to the king in the European Middle Ages (600–1200)’ that had beenfunded by the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters. The first contri-bution, by Marged Haycock, addresses ‘Living with war: poets and the Welshexperiencec.600–1300’. Here, Haycock presents an in-depth engagement withthe treatment of war in the corpus of Welsh poetry, of which she estimatesthat 85% are dedicated to this topic. She focuses on how warfare is communic-ated and mediated in poetry: the life of the king and his war-band, for whomwarfare is a way of life, the how and why, physical suffering (especially inits only very selective presence in the poetry, which contrasts with its sober-ingly blunt treatment in the law books), atrocities, issues of control and dis-cipline, peace-making, and finally a broader ‘culture of war’ that permeatesalso spheres of activity not as such connected to warfare. This is followed bya chapter by Charles Doherty on ‘Warrior and king in early Ireland’, whichtakes a very different approach to the topic, applying a perspective inspiredby the work of Georges Dumézil’s comparative Indo-European studies. How-ever, Doherty does not apply the Dumézilian paradigm of the ‘three functions’,which has long been shown to be a more than questionable construct,¹ butmerely uses Dumézil’s work in a heuristic fashion as a mine of comparativematerial that can provide inspiration for interpreting the North-West Europeandata: a measured approach which can only be applauded. Doherty thus touchesupon a wide range of material, covering the semi-mythical history of ancientRome, the Celts of antiquity as described by Greek and Roman ethnography,continental Celtic gold coins, Irish medieval iconography (both illuminationand sculpture), place-names, and medieval Irish and Welsh literature. In thecourse of this highly learned tour de force, Doherty suggests that some of themotifs depicted on Iron Age Celtic gold coins can, through the literatures ofIreland and Wales, be explained as symbols of kingship and the warrior thatindicate a degree of continuity between the worlds of medieval Ireland andthe Celts of antiquity. An new analysis of the figure of a warrior with an erectpenis in the Book of Kells leads Doherty to view this warrior as caught in a deer1Cf. the fundamental critique by Bernfried Schlerath: “Georges Dumézil und dieRekonstruktion der indogermanischen Kultur,” in:Kratylos40 (1995), pp. 1–48; 41(1996), pp. 1–67.DOI 10.1515/zcph-2017-0020

Published Online: 2018-1-25

Published in Print: 2017-10-26

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