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Nennius, or Nemnivus, is either of two shadowy personages traditionally associated with the history of Wales
Wales

native_name = Cymru|conventional_long_name = Wales|common_name = Wales|image_flag = Flag of Wales 2.svg|national_motto = ...
. The better known of the two is Nennius, the student of Elvodugus. Elvodugus is commonly identified with the bishop Elfoddw of Gwynedd
Elfodd

Elfodd , also known as Elfoddw was a Welsh bishop who induced the Welsh church to adopt the Roman method of determining the date of Easter....
, who convinced the rest of the Welsh portion of Celtic Christianity
Celtic Christianity

Celtic Christianity, or Insular Christianity broadly refers to the Early Middle Ages Christian practice that developed in Britain and Ireland before and during the post-Roman period, when Germanic invasions sharply reduced contact between the broadly Celts populations of Britons and Irish with Christians on the Continent until their s...
 to celebrate Easter
Easter

Easter is the most important religious feast in the Christianity liturgical year.Christians believe that Jesus was Resurrection of Jesus from the dead three days after his Crucifixion of Jesus, and celebrate this resurrection on Easter Day or Easter Sunday , two days after Good Friday....
 on the same date as the other Catholic
Catholic

Catholic is an adjective derived from the Greek language adjective , meaning "whole" or "complete". In the context of Christianity ecclesiology, it has a rich history and several usages....
s in Britain
Great Britain

Great Britain is an island lying to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the List of islands by area, and the largest in Europe. With a population of 58.9 million people it is List of islands by population....
 in 768, and is later stated by the Annales Cambriae
Annales Cambriae

Annales Cambriae, or The Annals of Wales, is the name given to a complex of Cambro-Latin chronicles deriving ultimately from a text compiled from diverse sources at St David's in Dyfed, Wales, not later than the 10th century....
 to have died in 809.






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Nennius, or Nemnivus, is either of two shadowy personages traditionally associated with the history of Wales
Wales

native_name = Cymru|conventional_long_name = Wales|common_name = Wales|image_flag = Flag of Wales 2.svg|national_motto = ...
. The better known of the two is Nennius, the student of Elvodugus. Elvodugus is commonly identified with the bishop Elfoddw of Gwynedd
Elfodd

Elfodd , also known as Elfoddw was a Welsh bishop who induced the Welsh church to adopt the Roman method of determining the date of Easter....
, who convinced the rest of the Welsh portion of Celtic Christianity
Celtic Christianity

Celtic Christianity, or Insular Christianity broadly refers to the Early Middle Ages Christian practice that developed in Britain and Ireland before and during the post-Roman period, when Germanic invasions sharply reduced contact between the broadly Celts populations of Britons and Irish with Christians on the Continent until their s...
 to celebrate Easter
Easter

Easter is the most important religious feast in the Christianity liturgical year.Christians believe that Jesus was Resurrection of Jesus from the dead three days after his Crucifixion of Jesus, and celebrate this resurrection on Easter Day or Easter Sunday , two days after Good Friday....
 on the same date as the other Catholic
Catholic

Catholic is an adjective derived from the Greek language adjective , meaning "whole" or "complete". In the context of Christianity ecclesiology, it has a rich history and several usages....
s in Britain
Great Britain

Great Britain is an island lying to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the List of islands by area, and the largest in Europe. With a population of 58.9 million people it is List of islands by population....
 in 768, and is later stated by the Annales Cambriae
Annales Cambriae

Annales Cambriae, or The Annals of Wales, is the name given to a complex of Cambro-Latin chronicles deriving ultimately from a text compiled from diverse sources at St David's in Dyfed, Wales, not later than the 10th century....
 to have died in 809. This Nennius is traditionally stated as having lived in the early 9th century, and is identified in one group of manuscript
Manuscript

A manuscript is any document that is written by hand, as opposed to being printed or reproduced in some other way. The term may also be used for information that is hand-recorded in other ways than writing, for example inscriptions that are chiselled upon a hard material or scratched as with a knife point in plaster or with a stylus on a wa...
s of the Historia Brittonum as the author of that work. The careful scholarship of professor David N. Dumville on this text has instead shown that the manuscripts that make this claim come from an exemplar dating to the later eleventh century, far later than the exemplars of other versions of this manuscript — as well as over two hundred years after this Nennius is supposed to have lived. However, a number of historians still refer to the author of either the original text of the Historia Brittonum, or this specific recension, as Nennius, or pseudo-Nennius.

The other Nemnivus, or Nennius, is mentioned in a Welsh
Welsh language

Welsh ]], is a member of the Brythonic branch of Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, in England by some along the Welsh Marches and in the Welsh settlement in Argentina in the Chubut Valley in Argentina Patagonia....
 manuscript of the 9th century. In response to the snide accusation of a Saxon
Anglo-Saxons

Anglo-Saxons is the term usually used to describe the invading tribes in the south and east of Great Britain starting from the early 5th century AD, and their creation of the English nation, lasting until the Norman conquest of England of 1066....
 scholar that the Britons had no alphabet
Alphabet

An alphabet is a standardized set of letter basic written symbols each of which roughly represents a phoneme, a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past....
 of their own, this Nemnivus is said to have invented an alphabet on the fly in order to refute this insult. The alphabet Nemnivus is said to have invented is preserved in this manuscript, and according to Nora Chadwick
Nora Kershaw Chadwick

Nora Kershaw Chadwick , Order of the British Empire, was a noted medievalist....
 it is derived from the Old English futhark
Anglo-Saxon Futhorc

Futhorc, a runic alphabet used by the Anglo-Saxons, was descended from the Elder Futhark of 24 runes and contained between 26 and 33 characters....
. "Indeed the names given to some of his letters seem to show evidence of an actual knowledge of their Saxon names", Chadwick concludes.

Some conclude that these two figures are the same individual. Others argue that drawing such a conclusion is not warranted, since Nennius, the student of Elvodugus, is arguably fictional, and since the histories of both Wales and Britain over the period in question are quite incomplete.

External links

at the Avalon Project
Avalon Project

The Avalon Project is the name of Yale Law School's digital library of Documents relating to Law, History and Diplomacy.The project contains online electronic copies of documents dating back over the past two thousand years and so it possible to study the original text of not only very famous documents such as Magna Carta, The English Bill...
. commentary from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature
The Cambridge History of English and American Literature

The Cambridge History of English and American Literature. Originally published in 1907-1921, the 18 volumes include 303 chapters and more than 11,000 pages, edited and written by a worldwide panel of 171 leading scholars and thinkers of the early twentieth century....
, Volume 1, 1907–21. : The de mirabilibus britanniae section of the Historia Brittonum, with details