Names of the British Isles
The toponym "British Isles" refers to a European archipelago comprising Great Britain, Ireland and the smaller, adjacent islands. The word "British" has also become an adjective and demonym referring to the United Kingdom and more historically associated with the British Empire. For this reason, the name British Isles is avoided by some, as such usage could be interpreted to imply continued territorial claims or political overlordship of the Republic of Ireland by the United Kingdom.
Alternative names that have sometimes been coined for the British Isles include "Britain and Ireland", the "Atlantic Archipelago", the "Anglo-Celtic Isles", the "British-Irish Isles", and the Islands of the North Atlantic. In documents drawn up jointly between the British and Irish governments, the archipelago is referred to simply as "these islands".
To some, the reasons to use an alternate name is partly semantic, while, to others, it is a value-laden political one. The Channel Islands are normally included in the British Isles by tradition, though they are physically a separate archipelago from the rest of the isles. United Kingdom law uses the term British Islands to refer to the UK, Channel Islands, and Isle of Man as a single collective entity.
An early variant of the term British Isles dates back to Ancient Greek times, when they were known as the Pretanic or Britannic Islands. It was translated as the British Isles into English in the late 16th or early 17th centuries by English and Welsh writers. Whilst early works were straightforward translations of Classical geographies into English, later writings have been described as propaganda and politicised.
The term became controversial after the breakup of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1922. The names of the archipelago's two sovereign states were themselves the subject of a long dispute between the Irish and British governments.
History
Classical Antiquity
The earliest known names for the islands come from Greco-Roman writings. Sources included the Massaliote Periplus and the travel writings of the Greek, Pytheas, from around 320 BC. Although the earliest texts have been lost, excerpts were quoted or paraphrased by later authors. The main islands were called "Ierne", equal to the term Ériu for Ireland, and "Albion" for present-day Great Britain. The island group had long been known collectively as the Pretanic or Britanic isles.There is considerable confusion about early use of these terms and the extent to which similar terms were used as self-description by the inhabitants. Cognates of these terms are still in use.
According to T. F. O'Rahilly in 1946 "Early Greek geographers style Britain and Ireland 'the Pretanic islands', i.e. the islands of the Pritani or Priteni" and that "From this one may reasonably infer that the Priteni were the ruling population of Britain and Ireland at the time when these islands first became known to the Greeks". O'Rahilly identified the Preteni with the and the, whom he stated were the earliest of the "four groups of Celtic invaders of Ireland" and "after whom these islands were known to the Greeks as 'the Pretanic Islands'". Today O'Rahilly's historical views on the Preteni and the ethnic makeup of early Ireland are no longer accepted by academic archeologists and historians.
According to A. L. F. Rivet and Colin Smith in 1979 "the earliest instance of the name which is textually known to us" is in The Histories of Polybius, who referred to them. According to Rivet and Smith, this name encompassed "Britain with Ireland". Polybius wrote:
According to Christopher Snyder in 2003, the collective name "Brittanic Isles" was "a geographic rather than a cultural or political designation" including Ireland. According to Snyder, "Preteni", a word related to the and to the, was used by southern Britons to refer to the people north of the Antonine Wall, also known as the Picts. According to Snyder, "Preteni" was a probably from a Celtic term meaning "people of the forms", whereas the Latin name was probably derived from the Celtic practice of tattooing or painting the body before battle. According to Kenneth H. Jackson, the Pictish language was a Celtic language related to modern Welsh and to ancient Gaulish with influences from earlier non-Indo-European languages.
The fourth chapter of the first book of the of Diodorus Siculus describes Julius Caesar as having "advanced the Roman Empire as far as the British Isles" and in the 38th chapter of the third book Diodorus remarks that the region "about the British Isles" and other distant lands of the oecumene "have by no means come to be included in the common knowledge of men". According to Philip Freeman in 2001, "it seems reasonable, especially at this early point in classical knowledge of the Irish, for Diodorus or his sources to think of all inhabitants of the Brettanic Isles as Brettanoi".
According to Barry Cunliffe in 2002, "The earliest reasonably comprehensive description of the British Isles to survive from the classical authors is the account given by the Greek writer Diodorus Siculus in the first century B.C. Diodorus uses the word, which is probably the earliest Greek form of the name". Cunliffe argued that "the original inhabitants would probably have called themselves Pretani or Preteni", citing Jackson's argument that the form Pretani was used in the south of Britain and the form Preteni was used in the north. This form then remained in use in the Roman period to describe the Picts beyond the Antonine Wall. In Ireland, where Qu took the place of P, the form Quriteni was used. Cunliffe argued that "Since it is highly probable that Diodorus was basing his description on a text of Pytheas's, it would most likely have been Pytheas who first transliterated the local word for the islands into the Greek. Pytheas may have taken his name for the inhabitants from the name Pretani when he made landfall on the peninsula of Belerion, though in Cunliffe's view, because it is unusual for a self-description to describe appearance, this name may have been used by Armoricans, from whom Pytheas would have learnt what the inhabitants of Albion were called. According to Snyder, the derives from "a Gallo-Brittonic word which may have been introduced to Britain during the P-Celtic linguistic innovations of the sixth century BC".
According to Cunliffe, Diodorus Siculus used the spelling, while Strabo used both and . Cunliffe argues the B spelling appears only in the first book of Strabo's Geography, so the P spelling reflects Strabo's original spelling and the changes to Book I are the result of a scribal error. According to Stefan Radt's 2006 commentary to his critical edition however, although the medieval manuscripts of Strabo's Geography vary in the spelling, the older epitome, which is often the only witness to preserve the correct reading, consistently uses the B spelling. According to Radt, "Where it is missing, one may confidently adopt the B found in secondary manuscripts, assuming it was also present in the Strabo text underlying the epitome".
In classical texts, the word Britain replaced the word Albion. An inhabitant was therefore called a "Briton", with the adjective becoming "British".
The Pseudo-Aristotelian text On the Universe mentions the British Isles, identifying the two largest islands, Albion and Ireland, and stating that they are "called British" when describing the ocean beyond the Mediterranean Basin:
Apuleius's Latin adaptation of the Aristotelian De Mundo calls the British Isles "the two Britains", naming Albion and Ireland :According to Philip Freeman in 2001, "The Latin version is a close translation of the Greek and adds no new information".
Strabo, in his Geographica, refers to the British Isles as "the Britains", citing Pytheas for his information on Britain, Ireland, and Thule. According to D. Graham J. Shipley, "Strabo probably consulted Pytheas' work only indirectly through other authors". Strabo was disapproving of Pytheas, whose work was used by Strabo's predecessor Eratosthenes. Strabo wrote:Around AD 70, Pliny the Elder, in Book 4 of his Naturalis Historia, describes the islands he considers to be "Britanniae" as including Great Britain, Ireland, Orkney, smaller islands such as the Hebrides, the Isle of Man, Anglesey, possibly one of the Frisian Islands, and islands which have been identified as Ushant and Sian. He refers to Great Britain as the island called "Britannia", noting that its former name was "Albion". The list also includes the island of Thule, most often identified as Iceland—although some express the view that it may have been the Faroe Islands—the coast of Norway or Denmark, or possibly Shetland. After describing the Rhine delta, Pliny begins his chapter on the British Isles, which he calls "the Britains" :File:Rhine rivermouth - Rheinmündung.jpg|thumb|Great Britain opposite the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta, photographed from across the North Sea by the astronaut Alexander Gerst.
According to Thomas O'Loughlin in 2018, the British Isles was "a concept already present in the minds of those living in continental Europe since at least the 2nd–cent. CE".
In his, Dionysius Periegetes mentions the British Isles and describes their position opposite the Rhine delta, specifying that there are two islands and calling them the "Bretanides".
In Priscian's Latin adaptation of Dionysius's Greek, the British Isles are mentioned as "the twin ".
In his Ars tactica, Arrian referred to "people living in the islands called "Britannic" which belong to the Great Exterior sea" as being the only people in the world still to use war chariots.
In his Almagest '', Claudius Ptolemy referred to the larger island as Great Britain and to Ireland as Little Britain. According to Philip Freeman in 2001, Ptolemy "is the only ancient writer to use the name "Little Britain" for Ireland, though in doing so he is well within the tradition of earlier authors who pair a smaller Ireland with a larger Britain as the two Brettanic Isles". In the second book of Ptolemy's Geography, the second and third chapters are respectively titled in and. File:Map_after_Ptolemy's_Geographia_.jpeg|thumb|The westernmost portion of Ptolemy's "first European map" from a Greek manuscript edition of Geography, dated, once owned by Charles Burney and now in the British Library, depicting Ireland. The island is labelled in.
In the fifth chapter of the seventh book of Geography, Ptolemy describes the British Isles as being at the northern limits of the oecumene: "in the north, the oecumene is limited by the continuation of the ocean which surrounds the British Isles and the northernmost parts of Europe". In the same chapter, he enumerates in order of size the ten largest islands or peninsulas known to him, listing both Great Britain and Ireland:
In the third chapter of the eighth book of Geography, Ptolemy summarizes the content of his maps, stating that "The first map of Europe includes the British Isles and the surrounding islands".
Ptolemy wrote around AD 150, although he used the now-lost work of Marinus of Tyre from about fifty years earlier. Ptolemy included Thule in the chapter on Albion; the coordinates he gives correlate with the location of Shetland, though the location given for Thule by Pytheas may have been further north, in Iceland or Norway. Geography generally reflects the situation c. 100 AD.
Following the conquest of AD 43 the Roman province of Britannia was established, and Roman Britain expanded to cover much of the island of Great Britain. An invasion of Ireland was considered but never undertaken, and Ireland remained outside the Roman Empire. The Romans failed to consolidate their hold on the Scottish Highlands; the northern extent of the area under their control stabilised at Hadrian's Wall across the north of England by about AD 210. Inhabitants of the province continued to refer to themselves as "Brittannus" or "Britto", and gave their patria as "Britannia" or as their tribe. The vernacular term "Priteni" came to be used for the barbarians north of the Antonine Wall, with the Romans using the tribal name "Caledonii" more generally for these peoples who they called Picts.
The post-conquest Romans used Britannia or Britannia Magna for Britain, and Hibernia or Britannia Parva for Ireland. The post-Roman era saw Brythonic kingdoms established in all areas of Great Britain except the Scottish Highlands, but coming under increasing attacks from Picts, Scotti and Anglo-Saxons. At this time Ireland was dominated by the Gaels or Scotti, who subsequently gave their names to Ireland and Scotland.
In the grammatical treatise he dedicated to the emperor Marcus Aurelius,, Aelius Herodianus notes the differences in spelling of the name of the British Isles, citing Ptolemy as one of the authorities who spelt the name with a pi : " islands in the Ocean; and some like this with pi,, such as Ptolemy". Herodianus repeated this information in : " islands in the ocean. They are called with pi,, such as by Ptolemy".
The chronicle attributed to Pope Hippolytus of Rome mentions the British Isles as part of the lands allotted to Japheth in the table of nations:
File:BNE_Codex_Matrinensis_Graecus_4701_,_f._55r.png|thumb|Folio 55 recto of the Biblioteca Nacional de España's Greek manuscript 4701, probably copied in the second half of the 10th century and including the phrase.
In the manuscript tradition of the Sibylline Oracles, two lines from the fifth book may refer to the British Isles:
In the editio princeps of this part of the Sibylline Oracles, published by Sixt Birck in 1545, the or is printed as in the manuscripts. In the Latin translation by Sebastian Castellio published alongside Birck's Greek text in 1555, these lines are translated as:
Castellio translated Βρύτεσσι as. The chronicler John Stow in 1580 cited the spelling of Βρύτεσσι in the Sibylline Oracles as evidence that the British Isles had been named after Brutus of Troy. William Camden quoted these Greek and Latin texts in his Britannia, published in Latin in 1586 and in English in 1610, following Castelio's translation identifying Βρύτεσσι with the Britains or Britons:
In Aloisius Rzach's 1891 critical edition, the manuscript reading of Βρύτεσσι is retained. Rzach suggested that Procopius of Caesarea referred to these lines when mentioning in his that the Sibylline Oracles "foretells the misfortunes of the Britons". Milton Terry's 1899 English translation followed Rzach's edition, translating Βρύτεσσι as "the Britons":
Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, however, suggested that the manuscript reading Βρύτεσσι should be emended to Βρύγεσσι,, in reference to the ancient Bryges. 1902 critical edition accepted Wilamowitz's emendation, printing Βρύγεσσι. John J. Collins's English text of the Sibylline Oracles in James H. Charlesworth's 1983 edition of translated Old Testament pseudepigrapha follows the manuscript tradition, translating Βρύτεσσι as "the Britains":
Ken Jones, preferring Wilamowitz's emendation, wrote in 2011: "This is not, so far as I can see, a usual translation, nor is this even a Greek word. The Brygi or Briges, on the other hand, are a known people."
The mentioned the British Isles as the Insulae Britannicae or Insulae Britanicae. The text refers to the archipelago together with Gallia Comata: "Gallia Comata, together with the Brittanic islands, is bounded on the east by the Rhine, …". According to the editor Paul Schnabel in 1935, the manuscript traditions spelt the name variously as: brittannicis, britannicis, or britanicis.
John Chrysostom's Biblical commentary on the Book of Isaiah, mentions the British Isles in a comment on Isaiah 2:4:
In the manuscript copy of the classical Armenian adaptation published in 1880 by the Mekhitarists of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, the British Isles are, which in the Latin translation of 1887 is Britannicae insulae.
In his, Prosper of Aquitaine mentioned the British Isles to which Pope Celestine I sent Palladius as "the Britains" including both Great Britain and Ireland –'' the "Roman island" and the "barbarian island". Prosper praised Celestine as thereby having dealt with Pelagianism in Great Britain and having established Christianity in Ireland:
The of Stephen of Byzantium mentions the British Isles and lists the Britons as their inhabitants' ethnonym. He comments on the name's variable spelling, noting that Dionysius Periegetes spelt the name with a single tau and that Ptolemy and Marcian of Heraclea had spelt it with a pi:The Chronographia of John Malalas mentions the British Isles as part of the lands allotted to Japheth in the table of nations.The anonymous Outline of Geography in Summary wrongly attributed to Agathemerus until the mid-19th century mentions "the two Britains", identifies both Ireland and Great Britain, and describes each:The of Jacob of Edessa twice mentions the British Isles, and in both cases identifies Ireland and Great Britain by name: