Download or read book Saxons Vikings and Celts written by Bryan Sykes and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2006 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study based on a decade-long DNA survey traces the genetic makeup of British Islanders and their descendants, ranging from prehistoric times to the genetic heritage of Americans of British descent.
Download or read book Saxons Vikings and Celts written by Bryan Sykes and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2007-11-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the best-selling author of The Seven Daughters of Eve, a perfect book for anyone interested in the genetic history of Britain, Ireland, and America. One of the world's leading geneticists, Bryan Sykes has helped thousands find their ancestry in the British Isles. Saxons, Vikings, and Celts, which resulted from a systematic ten-year DNA survey of more than 10,000 volunteers, traces the true genetic makeup of the British Isles and its descendants, taking readers from the Pontnewydd cave in North Wales to the resting place of the Red Lady of Paviland and the tomb of King Arthur. This illuminating guide provides a much-needed introduction to the genetic history of the people of the British Isles and their descendants throughout the world.
Download or read book Saxons Vikings and Celts The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland written by Bryan Sykes and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2007-12-17 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the best-selling author of The Seven Daughters of Eve, a perfect book for anyone interested in the genetic history of Britain, Ireland, and America. One of the world's leading geneticists, Bryan Sykes has helped thousands find their ancestry in the British Isles. Saxons, Vikings, and Celts, which resulted from a systematic ten-year DNA survey of more than 10,000 volunteers, traces the true genetic makeup of the British Isles and its descendants, taking readers from the Pontnewydd cave in North Wales to the resting place of the Red Lady of Paviland and the tomb of King Arthur. This illuminating guide provides a much-needed introduction to the genetic history of the people of the British Isles and their descendants throughout the world.
Download or read book Celt and Saxon written by Peter Berresford Ellis and published by Trans-Atlantic Publications. This book was released on 1993 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Blood of the Isles written by Bryan Sykes and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-02-28 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bryan Sykes, the world's first genetic archaeologist, takes us on a journey around the family tree of Britain and Ireland, to reveal how our tribal history still colours the country today. In 54BC Julius Caesar launched the first Roman invasion of Britain. His was the first detailed account of the Celtic tribes that inhabited the Isles. But where had they come from and how long had they been there? When the Romans eventually left five hundred years later, they were succeeded by invasions of Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans. Did these successive invasions obliterate the genetic legacy of the Celts, or have very little effect? After two decades tracing the genetic origins of peoples from all over the world, Bryan Sykes has now turned the spotlight on his own back yard. In a major research programme, the first of its kind, he set out to test the DNA of over 10,000 volunteers from across Britain and Ireland with the specific aim of answering this very question: what is our modern genetic make-up and what does it tell us of our tribal past? Are the modern people of the Isles a delicious genetic cocktail? Or did the invaders keep mostly to themselves forming separate genetic layers within the Isles? As his findings came in, Bryan Sykes discovered that the genetic evidence revealed often very different stories to the conventional accounts coming from history and archaeology. Blood of the Isles reveals the nature of our genetic make-up as never before and what this says about our attitudes to ourselves, each other, and to our past. It is a gripping story that will fascinate and surprise with its conclusions.
Download or read book Seven Daughters of Eve written by Bryan Sykes and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2002-05-17 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This national bestseller, now in paperback, reveals how all humans are descended from seven prehistoric women--the Seven Daughters of Eve.
Download or read book Brian Boru and the Battle of Clontarf written by Sean Duffy and published by Gill & Macmillan Ltd. This book was released on 2013-10-11 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brian Boru is the most famous Irish person before the modern era, whose death at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014 is one of the few events in the whole of Ireland's medieval history to retain a place in the popular imagination. Once, we were told that Brian, the great Christian king, gave his life in a battle on Good Friday against pagan Viking enemies whose defeat banished them from Ireland forever. More recent interpretations of the Battle of Clontarf have played down the role of the Vikings and portrayed it as merely the final act in a rebellion against Brian, the king of Munster, by his enemies in Leinster and Dublin. This book proposes a far-reaching reassessment of Brian Boru and Clontarf. By examining Brian's family history and tracing his career from its earliest days, it uncovers the origins of Brian's greatness and explains precisely how he changed Irish political life forever. Brian Boru and the Battle of Clontarf offers a new interpretation of the role of the Vikings in Irish affairs and explains how Brian emerged from obscurity to attain the high-kingship of Ireland because of his exploitation of the Viking presence. And it concludes that Clontarf was deemed a triumph, despite Brian's death, because of what he averted – a major new Viking offensive in Ireland – on that fateful day.
Download or read book Saxons Vikings and Celts written by Bryan Sykes and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue written by John McWhorter and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-10-27 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A survey of the quirks and quandaries of the English language, focusing on our strange and wonderful grammar Why do we say “I am reading a catalog” instead of “I read a catalog”? Why do we say “do” at all? Is the way we speak a reflection of our cultural values? Delving into these provocative topics and more, Our Magnificent Bastard Language distills hundreds of years of fascinating lore into one lively history. Covering such turning points as the little-known Celtic and Welsh influences on English, the impact of the Viking raids and the Norman Conquest, and the Germanic invasions that started it all during the fifth century ad, John McWhorter narrates this colorful evolution with vigor. Drawing on revolutionary genetic and linguistic research as well as a cache of remarkable trivia about the origins of English words and syntax patterns, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue ultimately demonstrates the arbitrary, maddening nature of English— and its ironic simplicity due to its role as a streamlined lingua franca during the early formation of Britain. This is the book that language aficionados worldwide have been waiting for (and no, it’s not a sin to end a sentence with a preposition).
Download or read book The Last of the Celts written by Marcus Tanner and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of Ireland's Holy Wars journeys through the Celtic world to discover the Celtic past and what remains of the authentic culture today, discovering that Celtic revival is largely misplaced and that the threats to the world's Celtic communities and culture are relentless.
Download or read book Gods Heroes Kings written by Christopher R. Fee and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-03-18 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The islands of Britain have been a crossroads of gods, heroes, and kings-those of flesh as well as those of myth-for thousands of years. Successive waves of invasion brought distinctive legends, rites, and beliefs. The ancient Celts displaced earlier indigenous peoples, only to find themselves displaced in turn by the Romans, who then abandoned the islands to Germanic tribes, a people themselves nearly overcome in time by an influx of Scandinavians. With each wave of invaders came a battle for the mythic mind of the Isles as the newcomer's belief system met with the existing systems of gods, legends, and myths. In Gods, Heroes, and Kings, medievalist Christopher Fee and veteran myth scholar David Leeming unearth the layers of the British Isles' unique folkloric tradition to discover how this body of seemingly disparate tales developed. The authors find a virtual battlefield of myths in which pagan and Judeo-Christian beliefs fought for dominance, and classical, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Celtic narrative threads became tangled together. The resulting body of legends became a strange but coherent hybrid, so that by the time Chaucer wrote "The Wife of Bath's Tale" in the fourteenth century, a Christian theme of redemption fought for prominence with a tripartite Celtic goddess and the Arthurian legends of Sir Gawain-itself a hybrid mythology. Without a guide, the corpus of British mythology can seem impenetrable. Taking advantage of the latest research, Fee and Leeming employ a unique comparative approach to map the origins and development of one of the richest folkloric traditions. Copiously illustrated with excerpts in translation from the original sources,Gods, Heroes, and Kings provides a fascinating and accessible new perspective on the history of British mythology.
Download or read book The Lordship of the Isles written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Lordship of the Isles, twelve specialists offer new insights on the rise and fall of the MacDonalds of Islay and the greatest Gaelic lordship of later medieval Scotland. Portrayed most often as either the independently-minded last great patrons of Scottish Gaelic culture or as dangerous rivals to the Stewart kings for mastery of Scotland, this collection navigates through such opposed perspectives to re-examine the politics, culture, society and connections of Highland and Hebridean Scotland from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. It delivers a compelling account of a land and people caught literally and figuratively between two worlds, those of the Atlantic and mainland Scotland, and of Gaelic and Anglophone culture. Contributors are David Caldwell, Sonja Cameron, Alastair Campbell, Alison Cathcart, Colin Martin, Tom McNeill, Lachlan Nicholson, Richard Oram, Michael Penman, Alasdair Ross, Geoffrey Stell and Sarah Thomas.
Download or read book Ancient Celts written by Tim Newark and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Sea Kingdoms written by Alistair Moffat and published by Birlinn. This book was released on 2011-08-12 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The most powerful representation yet of the race which has repeatedly changed history as we know it' - The Scotsman Alistair Moffat's journey, from the Scottish islands and Scotland, to the English coast, Wales, Cornwall and Ireland, ignores national boundaries to reveal the rich fabric of culture and history of Celtic Britain which still survives today. This is a vividly told, dramatic and enlightening account of the oral history, legends and battles of a people whose past stretches back many hundred of years. The Sea Kingdoms is a story of great tragedies, ancient myths and spectacular beauty.
Download or read book The Makers of Scotland written by Tim Clarkson and published by Birlinn. This book was released on 2012-09-28 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the first millennium AD the most northerly part of Britain evolved into the country known today as Scotland. The transition was a long process of social and political change driven by the ambitions of powerful warlords. At first these men were tribal chiefs, Roman generals or rulers of small kingdoms. Later, after the Romans departed, the initiative was seized by dynamic warrior-kings who campaigned far beyond their own borders. Armies of Picts, Scots, Vikings, Britons and Anglo-Saxons fought each other for supremacy. From Lothian to Orkney, from Fife to the Isle of Skye, fierce battles were won and lost. By AD 1000 the political situation had changed for ever. Led by a dynasty of Gaelic-speaking kings the Picts and Scots began to forge a single, unified nation which transcended past enmities. In this book the remarkable story of how ancient North Britain became the medieval kingdom of Scotland is told.
Download or read book Celts written by and published by Time Life Education. This book was released on 1994 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes how bodies found preserved in peat bogs have provided scientists with information about the Celtic civilization, and looks at Celtic artifacts and antiquities
Download or read book A History of Ancient Britain written by Neil Oliver and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 2011-09-15 with total page 527 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who were the first Britons, and what sort of world did they occupy? In A History of Ancient Britain, much-loved historian Neil Oliver turns a spotlight on the very beginnings of the story of Britain; on the first people to occupy these islands and their battle for survival. There has been human habitation in Britain, regularly interrupted by Ice Ages, for the best part of a million years. The last retreat of the glaciers 12,000 years ago brought a new and warmer age and with it, one of the greatest tsunamis recorded on Earth which struck the north-east of Britain, devastating the population and flooding the low-lying plains of what is now the North Sea. The resulting island became, in time, home to a diverse range of cultures and peoples who have left behind them some of the most extraordinary and enigmatic monuments in the world. Through what is revealed by the artefacts of the past, Neil Oliver weaves the epic story - half a million years of human history up to the departure of the Roman Empire in the Fifth Century AD. It was a period which accounts for more than ninety-nine per cent of humankind's presence on these islands. It is the real story of Britain and of her people.
