ABSTRACT
Students of history approaching the subject of early medieval Ireland for the first time usually come to grief in the quagmire of names that faces them almost from the start. The seemingly endless genealogies and tribal histories, stretching in date from the sixth century down to the sixteenth, may be a boon to the historian, but they are the bane of every student’s life. Added to this intimidating onomastic barrier are the no less daunting Irish annals containing an equally bewildering litany of names and dates, those ‘Chiefs and clans in all directions, with their far and near connections’ that some balladeer poked fun at. Challenged to make sense of this delirium of information, students often feel much as they would if asked to piece together the course of twentieth-century Irish history using only the evidence of the telephone directory and the death-columns of the national and provincial newspapers.
