Duncan "the Gracious" Mormaer, Lord of Mormaer - Is this the brother/father/fantasy connection of Crinan?

On Mormaer, the title "Lord of Mormaer" must be a remnant of someone's misunderstanding.

See http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/392470/mormaer

"mormaer, also spelled Mormaor, (from Gaelic mor, “great”; maer, or maor, “steward,” or “bailiff”), ruler of any of seven provinces into which Celtic Scotland (i.e., the part of the country north of the Forth and the Clyde) was divided. This Celtic title was rendered jarl by the Norsemen and after the 12th century, under Anglo-Norman influence, “earl.” The seven mormaerships, or original “earldoms,” of Scotland were Angus, Atholl with Gowrie, Caithness with Sutherland, Fife, Mar with Buchan, Moray with Ross, and Strath Earn with Menteith."

Thanks, Justin - that's helpful confirmation

My suspicion was that the "lord of Mormaer" title came out of someone's misunderstanding (or my own :-) of what it meant to have Crinan described as: Crinan, aka "THE Thane".

I've also seen the 'Lord of Mormaer' descriptor on one of the other popular genealogy sites (ancestry or such) - so I imagine it was imported from there to here as is.
So, I'm hoping, if there is a reason for it - someone who sees this discussion could enlighten us

Otherwise, I agree with you, Justin, and will feel justified in removing it.

As I'm no big expert in this area, I concur with your reasoning that the "Lord of Mormaer" isn't correct, and can be removed.

Lasse - while you're here, what are your thoughts on this about the profile? I'm stuck :-)

As far as I can see, we have to figure out two things first:
1) What is the Burke's Peerage source for a Duncan as a brother of Crinan? Does anyone have access to these & corroborating sources?
2) Is the fact that this Duncan has 'the Gracious' appended to his name, the result of mismerges - or do we have sources to corroborate the fact that Crinan's son took on the description of his brother? (Always presuming he had a brother, and this is him :-))

Still no answer to this. In the absence of corroborating sources, I think it may be safe to remove 'The Gracious' from this profile's names as most likely resulting from a mis-merge with Duncan I somewhere in the past. Pam Wilson (on hiatus), will you take a look and see what you think.

Again, Sharon Doubell, I absolutely defer to you and Justin (and would also like for one of you to take our curatorship of these ancient Scots).

One of the things I was cleaning up a few weeks ago, which got me into all of these profiles, which were an absolutely mess of knotted relationships as well as bad naming, included dealing with a lot of misuses and misunderstandings about terms like Mormaer (which is a title, equivalent to "earl", not a location), as Justin Durand pointed out.

Yes, - and don't lets get into the question of the relationship between the mormaers, thanes and the 'ri' petty kings. Then in come jarls to compete with the thanes... No wonder Shakespeare felt he needed to make the point at the end of Macbeth that a standardization was overdue!

I seem to recall trying to trace how Crinan comes to be named in places as also 'Grimus' and 'The Thane' - and trying to track etymology ito suggestions that Grimus or Crinan might actually be words that meant Mormaer or Thane, and one of them might not actually be a name, but a title description - whence, possibly the tendency to confuse mormaer with a given name.

However, I gave up pursuing this when Pictish and Gaelic and Old English mixed with Norse just got too dense to work through :-).

Sharon,

I found this site that uses "the Gracious" in their family history: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mysouthernfamily/...

Bless you for all of the work you are doing to find the link.

Susie

Thanks for the compliment, susan. appreciation is always so welcome and so inspiring :-)

Yes, 'the Gracious' on that site is applying to the Duncan that Macbeth killed, so it tallies with what we've done here.

He is messed upagain

Which one, Bill?

Okay, I see - Duncan of Atholl, Mormaer of Atholl
And he's acquired mothers & grandmothers we didn't know about. Going to have to contact all the managers to find sources. Maybe they're correct?

I will check the book of Irwin tonight also