ANST - pirates, sea raiding, women warriors ...

j'lynn yeates jyeates at realtime.net
Sat Jun 19 09:30:09 PDT 1999


.. minimal cattle and still no yard-apes.

On 19 Jun 99, at 2:08, Dezidoo at aol.com wrote:

> The Irish are a scurvy lot o' raiders, but not as bad as those damned
> women pirates.

"pirate" is such a general term

many of the races that settled ireland were sea peoples (hard to get there 
otherwise) with a very long and deep tradition of sea raiding ... a trait that 
the "irish" (a mix of many different ethnic peoples ..) kept up on a localized 
level well into historic times.  

in the early years of our civilization, just about anyone with a deep-sea 
capable ship and a sea-based lifestyle had to resort to what we call pirating 
to survive as a commercial entity ... trade a little here, take a little there, 
resupply as necessary along the shore as you travel.

after all "pirating" is a simply later term that equates to "raid via boat" 
(better than walking and you can carry off a great deal more stuff more 
successfully with less loss .... much more efficient.

couple that with fact that up through the milesian invasion (last great ethnic 
incursion of the early period), there was nothing preventing women from being 
warriors ... and and if you read the tales you find women warriors ranked 
amongst the most revered warriors.  though it faded over time, in the early 
period there are mentions of a professional female warrior elite.  

for example, the surviving literature tells of the great female warrior & 
champion Scathach-Buanand who had a military training academy somewhere in the 
Hebrides that was renown amongst the aristocracy of the islands and into 
europe.  

from some recent reading on ethnicity in the islands (interesting stuff) from 
her recorded clann affiliations and their history, it's quite probable that she 
was likely desceded from one of these earlier sea-peoples (as were a great many 
in ireland ... the gloss's and tale fragments that give bit's of data on the 
various early clans are fascenating stuff).  

if you want to get technical, the great queen Maeve (see: the Tain) could be 
considerd a "pirate", though on land, for her "raid" against the Ulad..  though 
like so much in those misted times, as a whole it may just be a literary 
creation but surely built on some pieces of reality. 

additional reference request ...

anyone know any good read's on cultural / ethnicity studies in this area 
(british isles)??? ... looking for something that better ties the geographic 
distrubutions and movements of populations over time.  dovetails nicely with 
some research i did a long time back on burial architecture as a marker of ths 
movement of new peoples. (shows earlier stable and widespread people giving way 
to a sucessive waves of aggressive sea-peoples in ireland and britain ...) 

'wolf
  

... truth is the sword of us all (lords of the new church)
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