Talk:Dyfnwal I of Strathclyde
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[edit] Name change
If the only reference to him names him as 'Doneualdus', where does Dyfnwal come from? And is that more commonly used than either Domnall or Donald? Michael Sanders 00:30, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
- Depends what you mean by commonly. Calling "Welsh" people by "Scottish" names could be seen as rather misleading not to say proprietorial. For that reason modern writing prefers Welsh names, written in modern speak-and-spell Welsh, for Welsh people. Kings of Strathclyde were Welsh. There was a fashion for referring to Strathclyde rulers by Gaelic names, but it turns out that it was only a fad. There are likely to be some books out there which incorporate this. A few very bad books are likely to assume Strathclyde people are "Scottish" and call them Donald as a matter of reflex. Their authors (Mike Ashley for example) have usually perpetrated far worse errors.
- In the past the name has been "Dunmail" and "Dovenald" and who-knows-what else. 'Doneualdus' itself is a Latin representation of a British name now usually written as Dyfnwal from which the Gaelic name Domnall and its English representation Donald are derived and no more relevant than Latin misspellings of any other name (well, almost any). Strathclyde kings are sufficient obscure that it's not very easy to say exactly how they've been written. Dickinson's Scotland from the earliest times to 1603 (1963; 378 pages of text) doesn't include any but "Owen the Bald" apparently; Robertson's Scotland under her early kings (1860s; about 400 pages) has "Artga[l]" and Owen (but the index is poor, there could be more). Joseph Ritson's annals have a few Dyfnwals. He gives the name as "Daniel", but that only really tells us about the 1820s. Pryde's Handbook of British Chronology doesn't include the Strathclyde Welsh.
- As an aside, the numbers here aren't regnal numbers, merely a disambiguation. Dyfnwal II of Strathclyde would usually be "Dyfnwal" rather than "Dyfnwal II". Angus McLellan (Talk) 01:29, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
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- A cut and paste error lost part of the answer. Anyway, to recapitulate (I'm not typing it out again), Dyfnwal is fairly common. It's in things as varied as the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica and the 2000 History Today Who's Who of British History. Angus McLellan (Talk) 01:33, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
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- All my fault here Sanders. I did all (or all but one or two) Strathclyde/Alt Clut monarchs at the same time and just decided (after Smyth and others) for convenience (didn't want to worry too much about the names 'til later) to use Old Welsh forms for the Alt Clut kings, Gaelic forms for the Strathclyde kings ... and that was because all the names of Strathclyde monarchs are potentially Gaelic, whereas, not all are potentially Welsh. I figured it was better to have a coherent system. But using Gaelic forms for the kings who don't have diagnostically Gaelic names is no longer done. In English writings today, there are no dominant forms ... Dyfnwal prolly edges it over an older Welsh form, then prolly Domnall/Donald. Douenaldus is both Domnall and Dyfnwal - the decision which form to pick is the historian's.
- As a side note, in the days since Smyth the old idea that Strathclyde was taken over by Gaels any times before the 1060s has kinda disappeared. Note though that this is based almost entirely on negative evidence ... debunking all the old Fordunian evidence for Scottish takeover; positive evidence has not been advanced, and there's just an assumption (probably correct) that it doesn't need to be. I'll just say that this posed problems for me in my own research, cause you've only got 5 decades to explain all the Gaelic placenames in the valley and the existence of guys like Gillemachoi of Kinclaid (Head of the Clyde, at modern Glasgow Green) if you assume David and his successors didn't over preside over the spread of Gaelic. It's a tough one to get conclusive about. Deacon of Pndapetzim (Talk) 01:51, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
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