Friday...

A cold, cloudy day with a touch of light snow - not a day to tempt me into the garden at all! I've done no writing so far this week, but reading and thinking, yes, and this is a good day for more of same.

Sixth century Ireland seems in many ways to be as obscure a time and place as sixth century Wales, despite a much greater quantity of written sources. The sources, however, are none of them - or almost none of them - contemporary, and the writers and their later copyists had all of them their own agenda, not to mention the thick forest of oral tradition and legend which has grown up around the few solid facts we have. In the end the storyteller - and I am a storyteller, not a historian - can only pick and choose the fragments which make sense at the moment, and do her best to tell a coherent and interesting tale, noting any exceptions in the afterword...

Today's picture: the crest of the Hill of Tara, with a few anonymous figures seen from a great distance - a suitable visual analogy for the problem at hand.



Back to work...

-GRG