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Ancestry of the kings of Britain

Ancestry of the kings of Britain (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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Inaccurate Original Research, misnamed, and a WP:COATRACK for an editor who has now created three different pages (the other two already up for AfD or merger) in an effort to find a way to force this bogus genealogical ephemera into Misplaced Pages somewhere, anywhere. Agricolae (talk) 20:37, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Note: This debate has been included in the list of History-related deletion discussions. Agricolae (talk) 20:39, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Note: This debate has been included in the list of England-related deletion discussions. Agricolae (talk) 20:39, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

• Keep I am just being creative. No OR or COATRACK here. What information is bogus? Let's change it if there is any. The topic is super-notable and an interesting aside to List of legendary kings of Britain and Ancestry of the kings of Wessex. It could be a group header page for various similar ones such as the Ancestry of the kings of Saxony and Ancestry of the kings of Mercia. The other pages being deleted are the manuscript sources that needed a link in order to make this one.Paul Bedson ❉talk❉ 20:44, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

You shouldn't create pages for the sole purpose of being sources for other pages. Likewise, the fact that you are super-interested in something is insufficient to demonstrate that the material is super-notable. And no, we don't want the other pages you have named, which are equally inappropriate. Quit trying to turn Misplaced Pages into a repository for sketchy genealogy. Agricolae (talk) 21:42, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

• What is sketchy about it? I've added some illustration that I hope will clarify. Paul Bedson ❉talk❉ 21:52, 19 November 2012 (UTC)
• Delete. Not independently notable. Paul, I think it would be best if you waited to let these discussions come to consensus before creating further articles, in case the consensus is that this material is not notable. I suggest the closer closes this in conjunction with Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Genealogia Lindisfarorum and possibly also the merge at Talk:Anglian collection, if enough people have commented there, since they are all related discussions. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:57, 19 November 2012 (UTC)
• Comment A quick Google search brings up two good book references and a Google scholar. If you search for genealogy instead of ancestry there are lots more hits, but this fits with the Wessex precedent and is probably the terminology used by a lot of folk in cafés all around Britain. I'll give room for further discussion on articles in this direction until this is resolved as you suggest. Paul Bedson ❉talk❉ 23:48, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Just because there have been detailed studies on, specifically, the Wessex pedigree, does not establish a precedent for creating whatever article one wants for the ancestry of other kingdoms that have not been studied to nearly the same level of detail. For that matter, maybe the Wessex article doesn't belong either - WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS is not a valid argument. None of this justifies the COATRACKing being done to make a third Misplaced Pages home (it is all already on the Wessex page along with the scholarly refutation of it, and some of it is also on the Anglo-Saxon genealogies page) for the ancestry of Woden or Icel or Ealdfreath, which will never be more than a string of made-up names without the slightest context because they are entirely unknown to history, with some legendary heroes thrown in that already have their own pages and aren't really ancestors of their supposed descendants. It is effectively an extended exercise in POV forking, trying to throw around the raw list of names so as to be uncluttered by the scholarly analysis that shows it all to be nonsense. Agricolae (talk) 00:15, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

• Delete. Out of the four references for the introduction, full page references are only given for one, and the John Glover book is not a reliable source. No sources are given for the list itself, and it appears to be original research. The wikilinks suggest the list is somewhat random. Offa points to the 8th century king, and is followed by Angeltheow which redirects to kings of the Angles, and then Eomer which points to a diambig page. One of the external links is a commercial genealogy site. As Agricolae has argued, a list of legendary names without context does not provide the basis for a notable and sourced article. Dudley Miles (talk) 00:30, 20 November 2012 (UTC)
• Comment This isn't original research. I can't make up original king lists. Everything should be referenced fine now I've added an improved Cambridge University source for the concept. Thanks for noticing that. Paul Bedson ❉talk❉ 01:01, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Decorating an introductory sentence with a non-reliable medieval pedigree compilation that has nothing to do with the genealogy presented on the rest of the page does nothing to improve the situation, even were it cited properly (specific information comes from specific pages, not an entire book or all of a book after a given page). These aren't original kings lists, but original pedigrees (it would be useful if you understood what the material was before you created a page trying to describe it), large parts of which have indeed been made up (albeit not by you) and we do no service in propagating such bogus genealogy long rejected by the scholarly community. Agricolae (talk) 02:36, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

• Delete - you need to show notability of the comparision of the various manuscript versions - has anyone written a number of scholarly articles that compare and contrast the various legendary genealogies? And do so in this exact manner? I'm pretty sure that the 1885 source isn't useful as a indicator of notability ... and I've seen the Stenton piece (have it somewhere, in fact) and it's not set up like this article either... If you don't have scholarly articles which compare the various genealogies, you ARE engaging in OR to compare them in this manner. Ealdgyth - Talk 01:50, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Only for that part of these genealogies that the various kingdoms have in common, the scholarly analysis of which is already discussed in detail (maybe too much detail) in an existing article. Please note, however, that the part in purple is not a comparison between two pedigrees - it is just two distinct adjacent pedigrees that have nothing in common except that that they converge on Woden and the editor wants them to appear somewhere on Misplaced Pages. When someone doesn't know the nature of the sources they are looking at (above, a genealogy and a kings list are entirely different things) and creates whole sections of pages based on a misreading of those sources (as when trying to attribute the lineage from Anglian collection mss V instead to Genealogia Lindisfarorum, based on a severe misreading of Stenton), and makes bullocks of the SYNTH they don't even realize they are doing (this page discussed here), there is a legitimate question of WP:CIR. Agricolae (talk) 02:36, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

I'll freely admit I've not paid that much attention to the early medieval manuscripts that describe the legendary ancestors of the various kings - it's a bit outside my field. On the other hand, this is extreme genealogical trivia - it's better covered somewhere other than Misplaced Pages, quite honestly. This is seriously the most extreme trivia of trivia as far as historians are concerned. No one would seriously argue any more that these ancestor lists or king lists are anything but stuff some scribe made up to fill in gaps of knowledge. Thus, they really don't need coverage in a serious encyclopedia, and certainly not as total reproductions of the lists! Ealdgyth - Talk 02:44, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Further, I've gone back to Barbara Yorke's Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England where she discusses the ancestry of the Mercian kings. She says "No Mercian origin legend survives comparable to those from Kent or Wessex, though the Mercian kings apparantly claimed descent from legendary kings of Contintenal Angeln." D.P. Kirby in Earliest English Kings says "Early eighth-century dynastic and genealogical tradition remembered Oisc, reputed son of Hengest and father of Ochta, as the first of the Oiscingas kings to rule in Kent, Wuffa as the first of the Wuffingas kings to rule in East Anglia, and Iel as the first of the Icelingas who, according to the early eighth-century Life of Guthlac, came to dominate Mercia, but details for the period before c.550-75 (and sometimes much later) are too uncertain for these men to be placed in very precise genealogical or historical contexts." Seems clear to me that the historians who study the period don't place much credence in these legendary lists, so neither should we. Remember, we follow the secondary sources here - and if the historians who specialize in the area don't discuss the subject in this manner, then we shouldn't either. Ealdgyth - Talk 20:41, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

• Delete for lack of notability, agreeing that Paul needs to hold back on article creation while these discussions are ongoing. I'm sure that are clearly notable articles that he could write. Dougweller (talk) 12:20, 20 November 2012 (UTC)
• Delete -- It all feels like WP:OR to me, perhaps based on a self-published book. Peterkingiron (talk) 13:31, 20 November 2012 (UTC)
• Comment I am suprised everyone deleting on notability has judged this less noticable than the Ancestry of the kings of Wessex. Britain is far more notable than Wessex. That will now need taking to deletion discussion based on your judgement of this article, which is one of the most notable in the field of Geneaology. I'll suggest a merge into this one to help clarify and save it from deletion too. Still have the Ancestry of the Vikings, Ancestry of the kings of Europe and the Ancestry of the kings of Outremer to create, so hopefully all this info will fit in somewhere. As for OR, that's when you chop chunks out of king lists and make up your own, as Agricolae has done on the List of monarchs of Mercia page. He is just trying to hide something as part of a cover up of this information and I suspect as part of a personal witch hunt to protect his hacked apart lists and the legends and myths of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Paul Bedson ❉talk❉ 16:06, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

What I chopped from List of monarchs of Mercia was not from a king's list - please recognize the distinction between a king's list and a pedigree. A kings list explicitly is listing people who ruled a kingdom (usually with the number of years that they ruled) and often has been compiled to serve as a chronological framework around which the history of a kingdom can be viewed, while a pedigree is a list of the ancestors of a given individual, irrespective of whether they ruled or not, and usually was constructed to demonstrate political or cultural affiliations (ancient or current to the time of construction). What I removed were names from a pedigree that made no claims to the individuals in question being kings of anywhere - it just claims that each is father of one and son of another person in the descent. It is OR to decide they must have been kings of Mercia (at a time before Mercia even existed) without reliable secondary sources, not to remove this unfounded conclusion. Further, it is OR to use a primary record, be it a pedigree or a kings list, and draw any conclusions from it. And again, I would point out that one should not create pages simply in the hopes of finding someplace to force information that has been deemed inappropriate - that is the COATRACKing that has brought us here twice already, nor should one propose that material be merged into a page that has been deemed unuseful, for the sole purpose of rescuing it. The decision on this page has no relation to the worthiness of any other page - remember WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS. It is only a judgement on the value of this page. If you feel that the Wessex page should be deleted, go ahead and nominate it. Let me point three things, however. First, that every word of it and every chart in it derives directly from an explicit statement in an extensive published study of the topic in reliable secondary literature, 2) it was originally created as the result of an earlier AfD that explicitly called for such a page to be made, and 3) notability is not determined by logic - it is determined by the coverage given material in the secondary record. By virtue of having given rise to the crown of England, the kingdom of Wessex has received more attention from those evaluating the medieval genealogies. Further, the study of the Wessex pedigree has included much of the material you keep trying to force onto other pages, e.g. the mythical ancestry of Woden. Agricolae (talk) 17:06, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

• Comment The kings listed are called Legendary kings on the List of legendary kings of Britain page. What do you say to renaming that page?

A critical difference is that, even though there is no historical basis for it, Geoffrey (or some other source) explicitly called those people kings, while the names you tried to add are never called (even wrongly) kings of Mercia - they are simply listed as ancestors in a pedigree. Agricolae (talk) 18:26, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

A cover up??? A witch hunt??? Some grand conspiracy to protect Geoffrey of Monmouth???? Now we're moving into fringe topic territory ... Again - notability (which is what determines whether we have pages on subjects) is determined by coverage in reliable secondary sources. A manuscript is the PRIMARY source here - you need scholarly commentary on the subject in secondary sources (see WP:SECONDARY) to show that this article should be kept. Bringing up things like cover ups and witch hunts rather than showing secondary source coverage is not helping to show this article's notability. Ealdgyth - Talk 17:16, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Sure, good advice, just give me 5 minutes to fend off the Spanish inquisition. Paul Bedson ❉talk❉ 18:07, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

I don't know what Paul meant by "fend off", but see Talk:Ancestry of the kings of Wessex#Proposal of merger into Ancestry of the kings of Britain. Dougweller (talk) 18:31, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

• Merge to Anglian collection -- This is horrid WP:ESSAY. It should certainly be kept separate from the Wessex article. The title is inaccurate since these were not kings of Britain but of Anglian kingdoms. Legendary genealogies are a potentially encyclopaedic subject. Just what these genalogies mean is no doubt the subject of scholarly debate, which could be reflected in an article, but I doubt that many scholars are interested in something quite so obscure. We have a Mercia article that is currently propeosed for merger there. I think this one might be a useful addition. Peterkingiron (talk) 19:19, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

I don't know that the Anglian collection is an appropriate target, as it deals specifically with one document (that exists in four copies) and not the topic in general - there is a page, Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies that deals with the more general topic that the page in question talks about (but is not named for), but it is already more scholarly than the material in the page under discussion here, and would only be damaged by a merge. Likewise, the use of 'British' in the page name, as you well know, represents the opponents of the Anglo-Saxons (in the 8th century sense of the words) and so I don't think the namespace should point there (namespace and content are two separate issues here because the name of the current page is misleading, using the modern meaning of Britain but talking about a period for which Britain has a distinct meaning to historians that is not at all what the page is about). There used to be a page on the Ancestry of Queen Elizabeth II - don't remember the exact name of it - maybe the redirect (but not the content) from this namespace should go there if it still exists. Agricolae (talk) 20:15, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your reconsideration Peter. I won't let you down. Working on the article right now and will be extensively after the Wessex merge proposal with Britannica external link to overwhelm questions about place on Misplaced Pages. Also made a critical point producing Creoda as Cretta being the first generally regarded historically-"real" British king by modern source David Hughes to express the need for original sourcing and to correct other confused lists. Paul Bedson ❉talk❉ 19:30, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Err... you linked David Hughes to a disambiguation page - none of which are historians... who are you referring to? Ealdgyth - Talk 19:46, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

For the convenience of time, read the book. I'll make a page on him later, when I've improved this one. Have a nice Churchill quote to reassure you. Paul Bedson ❉talk❉ 20:18, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

He is referring to the author of some self-published fringe books in which he traces European dynasties to King David and Noah and, believe it or not, to an ancient King of America. He has actually stated publicly that he is absolutely opposed to scholarly evaluation of genealogies because it deprives people of good stories about their ancestors (by revealing them not to be their ancestors). In attempting to 'save' both versions of alternative accounts of the same relationship, he has turned people into their own great-grandfather, and he never met a connection to antiquity he didn't like, as long as it let him extend the pedigree. He is another ancestor-collector and his work is the antithesis of a reliable source. Agricolae (talk) 20:15, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Thank you Agricolae, since I couldn't make heads or tails of Paul's response at all. I was kinda curious as I'd not heard of a medievalist named David Hughes. I'm still not sure what a Churchill quote (and which Churchill - and which quote?) has to do with anything but... Ealdgyth - Talk 20:21, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

He is referring to the Churchill quote that has been twice put on the page (and twice taken off - it is probably back on again in the time it takes me to respond here). It doesn't really have anything to do with anything, but if a page quote's Churchill, it must be about something notable, right? Agricolae (talk) 20:58, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

• Delete: WP:OR and WP:ESSAY. Also meets none of the notability guidelines. Non-notable original essay. Agree that Paul needs to receive a stern warning about creating articles on clearly non-notable topics such as this. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 20:03, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

• • Comment Agricolae has started some sort of edit-war to remove valuable information, such as the name of the first real British King, Cretta and his migration to Mercia. This is nothing but book burning. This page could be a quality featured article. Please replace the original text of the article as it stands tonight, which should read:

The Ancestry of the kings of Britain has long attracted historians' interest because the monarchs of Britain trace their lineage from them. It has a close connection with ancestry in the United States of America with the present royalty having long distant relatives who settled in New England.

Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote a legendary chronology of the kings and legendary kings of Britain in the Historia Regum Britanniae c. 1136 CE. The ancestry has also been studied through "genealogies"; lists of names in various manuscripts. Ancestries include the Ancestry of the kings of Wessex and the Ancestry of the kings of Mercia. Scholarly analysis suggests the early part of some versions are largely an invention of the 8th and 9th centuries. They provides lines of names stretching from Godulf Geoting, presumably ruler of a Kingdom before Woden to Eanfrith, Aldfrið or Pybba and onwards. They have variations in a number of Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies.

Manuscripts include references to names from the Kingdom of Lindsey, a settlement in the northeast of Britain that rose to prominence in the early years of settlement by the Angles. Little is known of the Kingdom and the people are not recorded participating in the wars of the seventh and eighth centuries. The first king generally regarded by history to have been real is Cretta, who led a migration into Mercia and became Creoda.

The ancestry dates back to times when, as Winston Churchill said, "all the Britons dye their bodies with woad, which produces a blue colour, and this gives them a more terrifying appearance in battle".

References

1. Peter (of Ickham) (1885). The Genealogy of the Kings of Britain: From Brutus to the Death of Alfred, Tr. from a Norman-French Ms. in the Library If Trinity College, Cambridge. Priv. Print. Retrieved 20 November 2012.
2. Ancestry Inc (2000-11 - 2000-12). Ancestry magazine. Ancestry Inc. pp. 18–. ISSN 1075475X Parameter error in {{issn}}: Invalid ISSN.. Retrieved 20 November 2012. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
3. Geoffrey (of Monmouth, Bishop of St. Asaph); Michael D. Reeve; Neil Wright (2007). The History of the Kings of Britain: An Edition and Translation of De Gestis Britonum (Historia Regum Britanniae). Boydell & Brewer. pp. 68–. ISBN 978-1-84383-206-5. Retrieved 20 November 2012.
4. ^ Stenton, F. M. (Frank Merry), "Lindsey and its Kings", Essays presented to Reginald Lane Poole, 1927, pp. 136-150, reprinted in Preparatory to Anglo-Saxon England: Being the Collected Papers of Frank Merry Stenton : Edited by Doris Mary Stenton, Oxford, 1970, pp. 127-137
5. Zaluckyj, Sarah & Feryok, Marge. Mercia: The Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Central England (2001) ISBN 1-873827-62-8
6. Robert Dennis Fulk; Robert E. Bjork; John D. Niles (5 April 2008). Klaeber's Beowulf: And the Fighting at Finnsburg. University of Toronto Press. pp. 292–. ISBN 978-0-8020-9567-1. Retrieved 18 November 2012.
7. David Hughes (1 January 2007). The British Chronicles, VOLUME 1 ONLY. Heritage Books. pp. 246–. ISBN 978-0-7884-4490-6. Retrieved 20 November 2012.
8. Winston Churchill; Sir Winston S Churchill, K.G.; Christopher Lee (1 May 2011). A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: A One-Volume Abridgement. Skyhorse Publishing. ISBN 978-1-61608-240-6. Retrieved 20 November 2012.

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