Calendars of Identity: Annalistic Writing in the Carolingian Kingdoms

The tradition of one of the most influential texts from the Carolingian period - the Frankish Royal Annals – could be divided into a short and a long history. The long history of the annals involves the narrative’s eventual achievement of establishing Carolingian rule over the Franks and the Frankish supremacy over half of Europe. This long history – the establishment of the text as the grand narrative of the Carolingian rise to power – has had the result that even modern historical research involves analyzing and evaluating the Annals and the historical processes that accompanied their production on the basis of their outcome: the success of the narrative as the common history of the Franks and their Carolingian rulers.

This, however, fails to address how, in their short history, the Annals first become accepted as the valid perspective of the historical events. Similarly modern research, by focusing on the success of the Frankish Royal Annals, has tended to consider a number of other historiographical narratives from the Carolingian period preliminary to or derivative from the story of the Frankish Royal Annals. This is particularly true of the „minor annals“ of the Carolingian period that have been used as a quarry from which to supplement information in the Frankish Royal Annals; thus these texts were regarded as part of single unified Frankish history and identity. However, taken seriously as independent attempts to write Carolingian history, the varying annalistic texts reveal the development of alternative and even competing conceptions of history and identity in the Frankish kingdoms. On the basis of this notion of annalistic writings as competing conceptions of Carolingian history this paper aims to deconstruct the single identity of the Carolingian annals, the starting point for analyzing them as alternative conceptions of identity in the Frankish kingdoms.