News Archive
Lecture - The Battles of Clontarf and Peipus compared: making national history in Ireland and Russia
Dr Andrey Mashinyan, Director of the Irish Cultural Institute, State University of St Petersburg, Russia, will deliver a lecture at 5.00pm in the Seminar Room 1, Silverdale (located above the College Rd car park), School of History, on Tuesday, 28 October next
The Battle of Clontarf and the Battle of Lake Peipus (Battle on the Ice): parallels in Irish and Russian national history and mythology
The lecture will explore modern interpretations of two epochal conflicts, the Battle of Clontarf (1014) and the Battle of Lake Peipus (1242), in shaping nineteenth- and twentieth-century views of the Irish and Russian past. It will examine the portrayal of two leaders, king Brian Boru and prince Alexander Nevsky, in forming a heroic myth of national importance in Ireland and Russia. This myth of the heroic national past played an important role at critical moments in Irish and Russian history (the Celtic Revival and War of Independence in Ireland, Imperial policy in the late nineteenth century, and the First and Second World Wars, in Russia). The talk will also consider representations of these events from the 1960s to the present in popular culture.