Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Esla (Anglo-Saxon king)

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was Merge - target for merge to be discussed on article talkpage. Certainly consensus to merge - the question is where. Can those in the know determine a suitable location (even if it's a brand-new article) during Talk on the article talkpage (non-admin closure) (talk→ BWilkins ←track) 19:48, 18 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Esla (Anglo-Saxon king)

Non-notable. Individual is just a name in an old pedigree, between two other people who are nothing but names in the pedigree. There is no evidence that the person existed, let alone being an Anglo-Saxon king, and the scholarly consensus is that the whole pedigree was concocted. Agricolae (talk) 03:05, 12 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of History-related deletion discussions. —Agricolae (talk) 03:05, 12 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Keep - may not be a historical figure but is definitely notable. At least one Book and many websites mention it. It may require a clean-up though. Panyd^{The muffin is not subtle} 04:00, 12 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- It may require deletion for being unverifiable from reliable sources. Yes, Google Books gives results. But actually reading them reveals a different story. (Counting Google hits is not research, remember.) And that story is in line with what Agricolae wrote, above.
  For example: The annotation in footnote 4 on page 229 of Asser's Life of King Alfred (ISBN 9780140444094) states that Asser "omits Esla between Elesa and Gewis" and continues with the observation that "it is interesting to find that the same names do not occur in other versions of the West Saxon royal genealogy preserved outside of the context of the Chronicle".
  For another example: The commentary on page 88 to William of Malmesbury's "Gesta regum Anglorum" (ISBN 9780198206828) also notes that Asser omits "qui fuit Esla" and differs from ASC (and John of Worcester).
  Now one could argue that we could put this information into this article. But we'd have to have several pretty much the same articles, under several different names, were we to do that, because there are at least six other names (Wig, Freauuine, Freodegar, Frithuwulf, Cutha, and the sequence from Heremod to Streph) where all of these genealogies differ. And, to quote the annotation to Life of King Arthur again, "this genealogy is to be understood largely as a product of royal ideology: it traces Alfred's ancestry through the heroes of the West Saxon past to the pagan god Woden and beyond, and is given Christian respectability by the claim of ultimate descent from Adam himself". Similarly, the The Blackwell encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England in its entry for "genealogies, royal" on page 200 says "any attempt to use them [the genealogies] for 'historical' purposes must be undertaken with extreme caution".
  In other words: The only source that we have for this person is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and a couple of other genealogies, and their reliability as sources on genealogical matters, beyond a certain point, is not accepted by historians. Who are we as encyclopaedists to judge differently?
  Now we could have articles on Life of King Alfred, Gesta regum Anglorum, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, noting that they are considered unreliable in certain matters and where they differ from one another, or indeed an article on Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies in general. It's not as if we a short of sources (starting with Kenneth Sisam (1953). "Anglo-Saxon Royal Genealogies". Proceedings of the British Academy. 29: 287–348.) on that subject, and it is clearly a subject good enough for the Blackwell encyclopaedia … Uncle G (talk) 06:18, 12 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Likewise, with the cited book (Reno) there are problems. First, all entries deal with Elesa, not Elsa. These, supposedly, are distinct individuals. Elsa is only named as father of Elesa, which doesn't count since notability is not inherited. It also should not pass without comment that the author's hypothesis is . . . , well . . . , "unique" would be a polite word. He is taking several people with distinct names and distinct pedigrees from distinct legends of distinct cultures and deciding they are all identical. This is WP:FRINGE, not WP:RS. Many web sites do name him, all repeating the same pedigree. They know him simply as father of Elesa and son of Gewis. However, it has been generally accepted among the scholarly community that this pedigree is a construct. Based on Sisam's reconstruction, the name Elsa arose in that pedigree through first a forgery (or scribal error) that transferred the name Aloc from the Bernicia royal pedigree to that of Wessex. Perhaps at the same time, the name changed from Aloc to Elesa consistent with the regional linguistic differences between Bernicia and Wessex. Finally, it was duplicated, giving Elsa and Elesa to establish an alliterative rhyming scheme to the descent. It is all fiction. No Elsa ever existed, and the best scholarship on the subject unambiguously rejects him. Even if he did exist, he is just a name in a pedigree, which does not provide notability. Agricolae (talk) 06:38, 12 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Merge this guy and all the other apocryphal kings into a List of kings in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or something similar. Reyk _YO! 07:41, 12 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Merge all the articles into one. This is a an odd situation because the sources that cite them are highly notable but also highly unreliable, so we don't know whether any of these individuals actually exist. Given the unreliability of these sources, it seems doubtful that any of these individual articles could grow beyond stubs (but I'm open to being proven wrong about this). However, there appears to be a lot that could be said about the kings of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in general (what it says about them, what historians make of it, and indeed all the reservations discussed above), so an article that puts all of these kings in context seems the best home for this information. Chris Neville-Smith (talk) 10:05, 12 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Merge and redirect per Reyk. I agree with Reyk that this shouldn't be a redlink, because an unfamiliar name in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is the kind of thing someone would look up in an encyclopaedia; and I also agree with him that there isn't enough material there to make a separate article.—S Marshall ^Talk/_Cont 23:02, 12 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Merge, with redirect, to Cerdic of Wessex. Both Esla & Elesa are individuals who appear only once in the historical record & practically nothing more than their names are known. (There's more than a slight chance, in fact, that they are variants of the same name.) Their chief interest is that they are Cerdic's ancestors -- so his article should be their ultimate home. (On the other hand, there's enough discussion in the secondary literature about Gewis, his relationship to the Gewissae, & the politics of genealogy, to justify a separate article.) -- llywrch (talk) 19:58, 13 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Merge somewhere. This and similar articles are dealing with names of legendary ancestors of historic kings. This article amkes a point about the similarlity of the Bernician and Wessex legendary genealogies. That would suggest that we need oen article dealing with that subject, possibly Legendary Saxon royal ancestors, to which all articles on individual ancestors (other than obvious heathen gods, such as Woden) should be redirected. I have no dount that there is substantial acadmic literature providing a commentarty on the genealogies, but we do not need artifcles on every induvidual in them. Peterkingiron (talk) 22:30, 15 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.