The question most commonly posed about early medieval ‘national’ origin legends seems to be ‘How far do they reflect a historical reality?’, with the result that origin myths that lack even the semblance of historical plausibility — such as the myth of Brutus, the founder of Britain — receive little attention. Origin myths have too often been treated as a resource to be mined for nuggets of historical information, without any consideration for the context of their composition and formation, and then cast aside once their supposed historical usefulness has been exhausted. Lindy Brady’s book takes a completely different approach, arguing that origin legends deserve attention in their own right as a genre, regardless of the question of whether they correspond to some sort of historical truth (which, in the vast majority of cases, they do not). However, Brady shows that the consideration of origin legends such as the Historia Brittonum of Nennius as literature need not mean that their historical significance is simply set aside. For origin legends are historically significant, but not because we should expect them to be simplistically ‘verified’ by archaeology or by genetics. They are not veiled or garbled histories. They are, rather, historically significant because their composition and development was itself a process of identity-formation for early medieval peoples. The questions we should be asking about origin legends are not about their historical accuracy, but about why the people who devised them felt they needed them and what this tells us about identity and about history. Once we are able to move into this hermeneutical space, origin legends become a great deal more interesting.

Central to Brady’s book is the argument that the legendary narratives of Gildas, Bede, Nennius and the Lebor Bretnach and Lebor Gabála Érenn are more interconnected than has previously been supposed. It is, therefore, possible to speak of insular origin legends spanning the entire geography of Britain and Ireland — and, indeed, it is necessary to do so, since the use of contemporary ‘national’ or ethno-cultural designations is inevitably limiting. Not only are the origin legends interconnected, however, but they also take their inspiration from the same body of biblical, classical and late antique literature which was available to learned authors of the early middle ages. The central part of the book is, therefore, structured thematically, considering in turn common themes of exile, kin-slaying, intermarriage and incest. These recurring themes provided the narrative motors for stories of identity formation, in which it was necessary to explain how a new people is formed — how Trojans, for example, turn into Britons. Moral and sacred transgressions like fratricide and incest, as well as acts of exclusion and experiences of alienation like exile and the formation of composite identities through intermarriage allow one people to become another — and it is because these devices have narrative power, rather than because they reflect some cultural reality, that they came to be used again and again.

In the last part of the book, Brady argues that from the late middle ages onwards, chroniclers and other authors drawing on early medieval material (as well as literary products of the ‘twelfth-century Renaissance’) deployed legendary narratives in the service of an increasingly divisive proto-nationalism. This stands in contrast to the interchangeability and fluidity of narratives in the early medieval period itself, when national and regional identities were subtle, complex and alien to later preoccupations.

As well as a major contribution to the literature on early medieval origin legends, Lindy Brady’s book is an important contribution to the debate about the emergence of proto-nationalisms in the late medieval and early modern periods. It is to be hoped that the book will stimulate more work on the detailed manuscript and textual traditions of the key texts for insular origin legends — an area of research that, as Brady acknowledges, remains a weakness of the field. However, Brady manages to push past such issues to present a compelling case for the study of origin legends as a key resource for understanding early medieval identities in all their richness, complexity and otherness, set against the Romantic nineteenth-century notions of nationality that still so often dominated popular discussion of insular identities. The origin legends of early medieval Britain and Ireland will be a standard work in an increasingly exciting field of study, where origin myths are studied for their own sake rather than simply mined for illusory ‘facts’.