Myth as a Historical Resource : The Case of Orgain Denna Ríg (The Destruction of Dinn Ríg)

Abstract

This article examines how mythology and fictional narratives in medieval Irish literature were used to communicate important societal ideas and to encode political messages. It is a commonplace that stories about the past were re-used, re-cycled and re-interpreted in order to justify the present. These sources were utilized by the ruling classes in medieval Ireland to help explain the status quo on the one hand and to justify emerging change on the other. As the preference of the medieval Irish was ‘to take their history in the form of fiction’, many stories like Orgain Denna Ríg (The Destruction of Dinn Ríg) are extant from this period, stories which provide us with an important perspective on the growth and articulation of a significant facet of medieval Irish historiography.