WWW Sciencemag Org News 2018 01 Vikings Were Enemy No 1 Iris PDF

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A new study suggests the Battle of Clontarf (depicted here in an 1826 painting) was fought primarily between the Hugh Frazer/Wikimedia Commons
Irish and Vikings, rather than between rival Irish factions.
The Vikings were enemy No. 1 for Irish hero Brian Boru, social
network study says
Home By Michael PriceNews
Jan. 25, 2018 , 8:00 AM Journals Topics Careers Authors
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Every Irish schoolchild knows the story of the great Christian hero-king Brian Boru, who united his countrymen against
the heathen Viking horde. Yet many modern scholars view his final battle—Clontarf in 1014—as mostly a civil war Advertisers
between
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playingRobotics
only a small role. Now, a mathematical analysisForumof the war’s primary
account suggests the traditional story may be closer to the truth: Although Ireland was indeed riven by a jumble of 
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alliances, the authors say the conflict was primarily the Irish versus Vikings.
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The research sheds light on the complicated cultural and political legacy of the Vikings in Ireland, says Søren Michael
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Sindbæk, a Viking archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark who wasn’t involved in theGraduate Programs
study. “The Vikings do not
act as a monolithic group,” he says. “They enter into existing Irish power struggles which they catalyzeFeatures
in new ways.”
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The primary account of the war between ancient Irish and Vikings, appropriately titled the Cogadh 
Gaedhel re Gallaibh,
or The War of the Irish with the Foreigners, lists the travels, meetings, and battles of Irish kings and Viking warlords for
nearly half a century. But the sprawling epic, collated from three different sources, is problematic. Historians aren’t
sure exactly when it was written, its timeline makes no sense, and it’s a brilliant piece of propaganda that demonizes
the Vikings. “It basically says Brian was a good guy and the Vikings were bad guys,” says the study’s lead author,
Ralph Kenna, an Irish theoretical physicist and mathematician at Coventry University in the United Kingdom.
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Some historians have argued that the tale was a way of strengthening the O’Brien dynasty’s claim on the throne, and
that the real war was waged between clans in the province of Munster, led by Boru, and clans in the province of
Home Leinster, supported
News by the Vikings. But Journals
there’s precious little archaeological
Topics evidence to support either side.
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So Kenna turned Science Advances
to social network analysis—the Special
kind Facebook uses to Issues
figure out who yourFind Jobs are—to analyze the
friends
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Photo Galleriesrelationships ScienceShots
between characters in theScience
Cogadh. Sindbæk says that
Immunology although
Custom this method is
Publishing usedResources
Career increasingly in
anthropology, applying it to characters in ancient texts is quite ingenious. Kenna and colleagues mapped out everyAdvertisers
interaction among the 315 characters mentioned in the Cogadh, and coded their more than 1100 interactions as either
friendly or hostile.
Data Stories Contest They
From the then tallied the Science
Magazine hostile Signaling
interactions into a single scorecard: If the nastiness was Irish-on-Irish,
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the score went up. If it was Irish-on-Viking, the score went down. The final score was negative. That means it’s quite
likely that the war really was a struggle Medicine
primarily against the Vikings, Kenna’s team reports
Kenna admits the interpretation isn’t perfect, as it depends on the accuracy of the relationships described in the 
Cogadh. But even though the text is biased in its character descriptions, he doesn’t think itsAdvertising Features
authors would have
altered the actual alliances and conflicts. “There’s an art to propaganda,” Kenna says. “You About
can’t falsify
Careerstoo much or 
else people won’t accept it.”
Sindbæk agrees, adding that this kind of complex mathematical analysis might cut through the text’s overt spin to get
at something real. “It enables us to unveil a different layer of the text, even one which might not have been …
consciously constructed by the author.”
Posted in: Archaeology, Europe

doi:10.1126/science.aat1122
Michael Price
Michael Price is a former scientific employment and training writer at Science Careers.
 Email Michael  Twitter
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