Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that an iconography redolent at Irish royal sites represents a material manifestation of early Irish kingship ideology. Through examining the monuments perpetuating that ideology, it examines how authority was constituted and power exercised at royal sites between c.400-800AD.

Paper long abstract:

In early medieval Ireland kingship was vested in places. Power was exercised through the manipulation of ceremonial landscapes which were redolent with antiquity. Despite the many complexities of the Irish hierarchy of kingship, scrutiny of royal sites (Tara, Cashel, and Clogher) reveals a labyrinth of interconnected monumentalities; sets of common cultural, architectural, iconographic and spatial motifs prevailed upon repeatedly to construct kingship. This 'iconography' represents a tradition: a monumentality of ideologies of kingship with roots which, though persisting into the medieval period, lay ultimately in prehistoric practices. Motifs like internally ditched enclosures, mounds, figures-of-8 and a northeast/southwest axis can be found at expressed at 'royal sites' during the Bronze Age and Iron Age. With the arrival of Christianity the ideology and iconography appropriate to the begetting of sacred space and the imagining of royal sites was appropriated, re-interpreted and re-imagined by the early ecclesiastical elite. This paper analyses how the symbolic system and imagining of place contained within that iconography of kingship changed during the period 400-800AD. It explores how power was constructed and exercised, and how authority was constituted, imagined and challenged in early medieval Ireland. In so doing, it argues that this iconography and tradition of monumentality was central to discourses of power, place and ideology, and concerned, ultimately, with re-defining the materiality of people and place. By tracing the changing contexts through which these motifs are found expressed, it will be suggested that one can observe an evolving ideology of kingship and a political context which necessitated such developments.