Early​ modernists have long bragged, to the annoyance of medievalists, that their period invented such concepts as ‘the individual’ and ‘scientific rationality’. More recently, medievalists have laid claim to evils such as racism and xenophobia, less to vindicate their period than to place themselves where the academic action is. Entering the vigorous debate over the origins of nationalism, Lindy Brady maintains that it was not in fact a medieval construct. As she argues in The Origin Legends of Early Medieval Britain and Ireland, when medieval historians traced the genesis of the islands’ four peoples, they rarely claimed ethnic superiority for their own nation. Early modern authors, however, did so with zeal.

Like all historians, medieval writers had biases, but they privileged the social markers of class, religion and language over ‘nation’ or gens. Brady asserts that of the four peoples in question – the Britons (Welsh), Irish, Anglo-Saxons and Picts (proto-Scots) – it’s significant that each group’s origin myth was first recorded by a writer of a different nationality. Through a careful study of manuscript transmission, she shows that the legends did not develop independently but in dialogue, as later writers read and elaborated on older versions. These recorded legends have nothing to do with actual history (‘needless to say’), so she excludes potential sources of corroborating evidence such as archaeology. Fair enough, for a literary study, but the reader cannot help but wonder what oral traditions lay behind the texts and whether they preserved a trace of historical memory. For example, Bede tells us that the elusive Picts sailed to Ireland and Britain from ‘Scythia’, an ill-defined region on the Eurasian steppe. That seems unlikely, but then where did they come from? If the Picts were not a cohesive ethnic group but a heterogeneous coalition of Iron Age tribes, as some scholars now think, what gave rise to the Scythian story? Given the absence of Pictish texts, we may never know.

In addition to Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Brady’s sources include two other Latin texts and two in Middle Irish. Gildas, a sixth-century Briton, wrote On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain less as a historian than as a prophet, presenting the Britons’ defeat at the hands of Anglo-Saxon invaders as divine punishment for their sins, like Israel’s lost battles in the Old Testament. A ninth-century Latin text called The History of the Britons, sometimes ascribed to ‘Nennius’, introduces the Saxon brothers Hengist and Horsa. Supposedly exiles from Germany, they were hired by the British king Vortigern as mercenaries to fight his Irish and Pictish enemies, only to overthrow Vortigern himself. Hengist (‘stallion’) and Horsa (‘horse’) are probably mythic figures, but they feature prominently in the histories. Hengist appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Beowulf, the Icelandic Prose Edda and Geoffrey of Monmouth, who as usual invents a lively tale about him. While there is no reason these brothers could not have existed, it’s probably not a coincidence that ancient Germanic peoples worshipped a pair of divine twins in the form of horses. This myth has survived in some unlikely places. John Aubrey ascribed the Uffington White Horse to the brothers, though more recent archaeologists have dated it even earlier, to the Bronze Age. In Lower Saxony, the horse-head gables featured on many farmhouses were still referred to as ‘Hengst und Hors’ as late as 1875.

The History of the Britons was translated into Irish Gaelic as the Lebor Bretnach. A later Irish work, the Lebor Gabála Érenn, combines this translation with a variety of biblical, classical, late antique and earlier Irish sources that no longer survive on their own. Although many ancestral founders are named in the texts, settlement of the islands is seen as proceeding by fits and starts. A ship may dock and its crew increase and multiply, only to be wiped out by battle or plague. A new landing party then has to start from scratch. One clear sign of the legends’ literary origin is the number of ancestors who are said to have come from Egypt (via the biblical book of Exodus), Troy (via the Aeneid) or Rome (via Brutus, a descendant of Aeneas). It is hardly possible to unravel this tangled web, let alone find consistency among the tales, but one thing is clear: all the insular peoples knew their ancestors were refugees. The origin myths of indigenous peoples, such as those of North America or Australia, are strikingly different. They involve creator gods and goddesses, a dependence on nature, and animals as teachers and guardian spirits, suggesting a rootedness in the landscape. The insular legends, on the other hand, require migration and more or less violent struggle.

Three themes occur again and again: exile, kin-slaying and a choice between incest or intermarriage with the locals. Early medieval historians had no access to the myth of Oedipus, yet that archetype hangs over their tales. Kin-slaying, a crime whose punishment was often exile, could explain why the founding figures arrived in a new land. The most famous fratricides of antiquity, Cain and Romulus, both went on to found cities and dynasties. Although regarded with abhorrence, kin-slaying was not uncommon in dynastic struggles. Legends sometimes mitigated the notoriety of the crime by declaring it accidental. In Beowulf, Prince Haethcyn unintentionally slays his brother, Herebeald, in a hunting accident, leaving their father doubly burdened by grief and an inability to avenge his eldest son’s death. In despair, King Hrethel abandons life’s joys and chooses ‘God’s light’, i.e. he either dies of grief or enters a monastery. In the Historia Brittonum Arthur slays his own son, there called Amr, without recognising him. Amr is buried in a miraculous tomb whose measurements are never the same twice, a marvel later transferred to Merlin. Partholón is said, in the Lebor Gabála Érenn, to have settled Ireland with a thousand men and women after slaying his own parents and fleeing his homeland. The population thrived until retribution for Partholón’s crime came in the form of a plague that wiped out the population in a single week.

Surprisingly, incest seems less problematic than intermarriage as a means of populating new lands. One explanation lies in the Hebrew Bible, which is full of examples – from the vexed question of where Cain got his wife to the stories of Abraham’s marriage to his half-sister, Sarah, and Lot’s incest with his daughters. The incest is excused by the daughters’ belief that their father was the only male to survive the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah. Their sons go on to found the nations of Moab and Ammon, placing those peoples under a lasting cloud of infamy. Even so, biblical writers expressed a strong preference for endogamy, explicitly prohibiting intermarriage with the Canaanite tribes. Ethnic mingling, they feared, would lead to cultic mingling and so to apostasy. Some patriarchs did take foreign wives – Joseph and Asenath, Moses and Zipporah – but they were the exceptions. The author of Ruth boldly violated Deuteronomic law by depicting Boaz and his Moabite wife as the great-grandparents of King David.

Although the incest taboo is not strongly rooted in the Bible, medieval canon law enforced it by greatly broadening the prohibited degrees of marriage. This left the Torah as a thorny problem for exegetes. St Augustine explained that even if ‘men took their sisters as wives’ out of necessity in a sparsely populated world, this once respectable custom became reprehensible as populations grew. But on desolate islands awaiting settlement, the prospect of incest re-emerged. Father-daughter incest figures in both the Anglo-Saxon and Irish origin narratives. Gerald of Wales condemns the Welsh for frequent marriages to kin, which they defended as a necessity to preserve their noble blood. Marriage to outsiders, such as Vortigern’s union with the daughter of Hengist, could be tricky because they gave foreigners (or indeed, the native peoples) the upper hand in political negotiations. Quasi-incestuous marriages between the scions of Europe’s kings remained troublesome as long as monarchs held power, leading to hereditary mental illness, haemophilia and other genetic ills.

In her final chapter, Brady turns to early modern historians, who were driven more by nationalism and a desire to prove the honour of their respective nations (not just their antiquity). Anti-Celtic racism rears its head in many of the chronicles. Raphael Holinshed, one of Shakespeare’s principal sources, is not alone in denouncing the Scots as ‘an unprofitable, brutish, & untameable nation’, which ‘neither the sugred courtesie, nor sharpe swords of the Romans could mollifie’. John of Fordun makes a distinction between lowland Scots (‘of domestic and civilised habits, trusty, patient and urbane’), and the highlanders and islanders, who remain ‘savage and untamed’, hostile to the English and to others of their own nation. But early modern writers also wanted to establish a more critical historiography, less reliant on fabulous tales such as that of the giants who once inhabited Britain. Geoffrey Keating, writing in Irish to defend his nation’s history in 1634, took older ‘foreign’ historians to task for failing to use reliable sources. On the one hand, the Romans and Saxons had destroyed many historical records; on the other, writers who were ‘blindly ignorant in the language of the country’ couldn’t read the records that survived. Hence, among their many errors, medieval historians had asserted that Ireland owed tribute to King Arthur. But this could not have been the case because ‘King Gillamar’, who allegedly paid it, had never been king of Ireland. Similarly, William Camden debunks numerous fictional ancestors, including ‘Scota the Aegyptian Pharaoes daughter’ and a slew of ‘counterfet Demi-gods and Worthies’ – retroactive inventions based on the names of peoples or places.

The origin legend was a widespread medieval genre used to account not only for peoples and nations, but also for the rise of cities, dynasties, monasteries and even landscape features. To know who we are, we need to know who we have been, and to that end either myth or history will suffice. The British descendants of ‘Brutus’ were hardly more fanciful than the Lusignans, a French crusading dynasty that traced its origins to the fairy Mélusine, half woman, half serpent. But if, as Brady argues, ‘unease about the historicity of origin legends marked the beginning of their end,’ it was a very slow demise. Myth-laden as they were, the medieval legends were in one sense more modern than those of the 16th and 17th centuries because they still conceived of insular history as an interdependent whole. More critical, yet also more nationalistic, early modern writers introduced a competitive streak that made the defence of one’s own national history dependent on the discrediting of others, splintering the four polities just as English colonialism was striving to unite them under a single crown.