Sybil BEARSSON Queen of Scotland [6441] ¹⁵²¹

   FamilySearch ID: L8MB-CYC.

  General Notes:

The mother of Malcolm III is known only from a single near-contemporary source, a Scottish kings list that states simply that Malcolm's mother was named Suthen, a Gaelic name. It provides no additional information about her.

The Chronicle of John of Fordun, written in the late 1300s and hence almost 350 years after the fact, refers to Duncan's wife as the kinswoman of Siward of Northumbria.

Siward was an Anglo-Dane, born in Scandinavia and married to an Anglo-Saxon wife, and EXTREMELY unlikely to have had a close kinswoman with a Gaelic name.

These two sources are hence in conflict, and it is unlikely that John of Fordun, who was writing centuries later and incorporating some material of a non-historical nature, was accurate in the face of the conflicting information given by the kings list.

In relatively recent times, genealogists have combined these two conflicting pieces of information to make Suthen the name of Siward's kinswoman, while others have chosen to interpret the generic 'kinswoman' of the original source as the much more specific and unsupported 'first cousin' or even 'daughter' (which is chronologically impossible). Likewise, at some point another name came to be assigned to Suthen: Sybil or Sybilla, which has no basis in the historical record.

There is no source that attests to Suthen being the mother of the other children of Duncan.

  Death Notes:

Edinburgh Castle

Sybil married King Duncan I of Scotland [6440] [MRIN: 5385], son of Crínán OF DUNKELD Mormaer of Atholl [6447] and Bethóc INGEN MAÍL COLUIM MEIC CINÁEDA [6448], in 1030 in , , , Scotland.¹⁵²³ (King Duncan I of Scotland [6440] was born on 15 August 1001 in Atholl, Perthshire, Scotland,¹⁵²¹ died on 14 August 1040 in Aberlour, , Moray, Scotland ¹⁵²¹ and was buried on 15 August 1040 in Isle of Iona, Scotland ¹⁵²¹.)