Merlin, Myrddin Wyllt, & the ‘Men of the North’

Tim Clarkson, Scotland's Merlin: A Medieval Legend and Its Dark Age Origins, John Donald, 2016. Amazon US $22 PB, $8 Kindle. Tim Clarkson's new book, Scotland's Merlin, was a lovely break from my usual plague reading. Merlin is one of the few Arthurian characters who can stand alone from the Arthurian corpus as the Welsh figure...

The Makers of Scotland

Tim Clarkson, The Makers of Scotland: Picts, Romans, Gaels and Vikings. Edinburgh: John Donald, 2012. 224 pg. In his third book, Tim Clarkson takes on the first thousand years of recorded Scottish history. It's a huge task, but Tim was more than up to the challenge. I really enjoyed it. I tend to focus so...

Berht of Dunbar?

I was reading Tim Clarkson's The Picts: A History (2008) last week and I came across the following: The sources credit him [Cinead mac Alpin] with six campaigns in Northumbria, during which he seized the coastal fortress of Dunbar and burned the monastery of Old Melrose on the River Tweed. Dunbar was an important stronghold...

Northern British Bibliography

This is a bibliography for Strathclyde,  Gododdin (Lothian),  Isle of Man, and Cumbria -- 'the Men of the North', Gwyr y Gogledd. Alcock, Leslie(1979) ' The north Britons, the Picts and the Scots', p. 134-42; In: The End of Roman Britain: Papers Arising from a Conference, Durham 1978 Edited by P.J. Casey. BAR British Series...

LKM: Gododdin

This month's lost kingdom is Gododdin in southern Scotland (early medieval northern Northumbria). This post just gets longer and longer and still seems incomplete, so hopefully it will do to give you a flavor of this lost kingdom. Gododdin is the one British kingdom that appears to have been conquered and annexed into Bernicia/Northumbria under...