A History of the Vikings
Chapter 9
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IRELAND
IT was in Ireland's 'Golden Age' that the vikings fell upon Erin. Not only in wealth, but in learning and in intellectual vigour, was the country rich, and as steadily as Christianity with its softening of old barbarisms had won its way into the hearts of the people, firing them with its doctrines of concord and charity, so there had arisen a sense of Irish solidarity, and a respect for law and the security that law can give, that, though it may have had but little flavour of real nationalism, had nevertheless raised the Irish state to a high position in the van of the civilized countries of north-western Europe.
The island was a heptarchy. Connaught, Munster, and Leinster (though not with exactly the present boundaries of these provinces), were three of the kingdoms, the fourth was Meath (the northern part of modern Leinster), and the other three were in Ulster, namely Ailech in the west, Ulaidh in the east, with Oriel (Airgialla) between them. But this heptarchy was not a chaos of seven quarrelsome and suspicious states, though, in truth, there were still wars enough in Ireland; for the control of the whole country belonged to but two kings, those of Tara (Meath) and Cashel (Munster), the other sub-kings existing for the most part upon the favour of these two great chieftains. There was, therefore, a primary division of Ireland, not into seven kingdoms, but into two confederacies of kingdoms, that of the South, looking to the Cashel king as its overlord, and that of the North, which was ruled from Tara. Nor was this all, for the Tara king was more than the head of the northern states, being nothing less than the titular 'King of Ireland', high-king of the commonwealth of both the northern and southern confederacies. No doubt his authority depended rather upon common consent than the sanction of his might, for he possessed no constitutional powers in the kingdoms that were not his own; but for all that he was acknowledged as first in rank in the country, being, potentially at any rate, the chosen head of a united people.
Yet Ireland, for all these advantages of learning, law, and a
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high-king, did not present an unbroken front to the invaders from overseas. There was still a jealousy between North and South, and much fighting, viking raids of rapine, between the chiefs of the several states. Plainly enough, in this time of prosperity and comparative quiet, the Irishman's worst foe was his own neighbour, and at the end of the eighth century and at the beginning of the ninth the attacks of the Northmen in their first isolated and little raids were much less to be feared than the sudden and ferocious battles of the rival clans. Had the viking invasion burst upon the country as one huge and shattering blow, then possibly might Ireland have faced the evil single-hearted and resolute; but the piecemeal raiding of the Northmen discovered the weakness of the land, allowing them to trade upon local jealousies, to take advantage of the personal quarrels of the kings, and so to succeed in winning for themselves settlements in Erin before the Irishmen learnt that the Foreigners had veritably come to conquer and to govern.
The first recorded attack took place in the year 795 when the Northmen, sailing south from Skye, plundered and burnt the church on Lambey, an island off the Leinster coast just north of Dublin. And the opening phase, a period of thirty or forty years, of the long struggle between the Gaedhil (1) and the Gaill, (2) of which this raid is the prelude, was for Ireland the same series of intermittent alarms and maraudings as that whereby the Danes were plaguing the kingdoms of England and the great empire of Louis the Pious. It seems that they were Dubhgaill (black strangers), Danes, (3) who made this the first-mentioned attack upon Ireland, but in these early years it was really the Norwegians who most of all ravaged Erin.
Of course, in the beginning neither the audacity of their forays nor the behaviour of the vikings themselves distinguished the Norwegian pirates in Ireland from the Danish buccaneers on the Continent. Hurrying west-over-sea to their summer robberies from the little independent kingdoms that at this time made up their country, these Norsemen were soon attacking Ireland from all sides, sailing up the Shannon in the west, raiding Cork in the south, pillaging the rich monasteries of Ulster in the north, pene-
1. Gaedheal, Irishman.
2. Gall, foreigner (originally, a Gaul, and by application, a viking).
3. Irish chroniclers, who use a variety of names for the vikings, often distinguish between dubh (black) and finn (white) foreigners, and this is usually assumed to be a distinction between dark Danes and fair Norwegians. But it is really a distinction of only dubious ethnological value, and though it has been utilized here, according to the custom of Irish historians, I do this not without serious misgivings.
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trating inland into Roscommon in Connaught, and daring even to plunder into the heart of Leinster. But the character of the raiding changed quickly and it must have been about 830 that the hitherto sporadic plundering was first followed by the settlement of some of the vikings in the land, while not many years later, about 834, an event occurred that at once gave the Norse invasion of Erin a different aspect from that of the contemporary viking invasion of England and Francia. This event that led to the opening of a period of serious colonization, not, as yet, attempted by Danes anywhere but in Frisia, was the arrival in Ireland of a chieftain, Turgeis (or Thorgest, as the Norse would have called him), a Norwegian royalty, (1) who sailed to North Ireland with a great 'royal' fleet and made himself king over the Norwegian settlers in Ulster.
Now it so happened that the coming of Turgeis fell at a time when Feidlimid, the priest-king of Munster, was throwing all Ireland into a turmoil by his monstrous plundering of the monasteries, a long series of outrages that were inspired by his attempt to secure for himself absolute spiritual authority over Ireland and the high-kingship itself. His calamitous behaviour, in every respect as terrifying and as cruel as that of the heathen Norsemen, together with all the conspiracies and jealousies that his quest for power occasioned, left Ireland an easy prey to a determined and able general, and such a man, beyond all doubt, was Turgeis. The capture of Armagh, for it was the chief town of the north and the ecclesiastical centre of Ireland, made this remarkable man, soon after his arrival, one of the powers of the land, and when he drove out the abbot and himself assumed the abbacy, thereby controlling the rich revenues of the monastery, he had achieved a power and dominion such as few vikings of these early years could hope to win. He was not, however, content with a supremacy in Ulster, and spying into the chaos that Feidlimid had made of central Ireland he soon saw opportunity of extending his power. With a fleet that he had sent up the Shannon to Loch Ree he terrorized Connaught in the west and Meath in the east; he sacked the great monasteries of Clonmac-
1. The identification of Turgeis with Thorgils, a son of Harald Fairhair, is chronologically impossible, although the story of Thorgils as preserved in Norse tradition (Heimskringla, H. hárfagri, XXXV) corresponds fairly closely with the Irish account of Turgeis. That this prince was a member of the Yngling family of Vestfold (p. 106 ) is probable enough. I retain the Irish form of the name here as Thorgils, not Thorgest, may conceivably have been the Norse equivalent.
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nois (1) and Clonfert, and all Ireland learnt to dread his name. He did not, of course, conquer the Ui Neill or Fiedlimid's Munster, but he certainly succeeded in establishing the Gaill as a political power in Erin and in threatening the safety of the whole fabric of Irish society. Yet, like many another viking chieftain in the hour of his success, he did not know when to stay his hand and remain content with the dominions already under his sway; for his relentless and savage campaign against organized Christianity, which culminated in a final outrage when Aud, his wife, gave her heathen audience at the high altar of Clonmacnois, made the prospect of his overlordship so intolerable that at last the faithful men of Meath rose in their dismay and their king, Mael Seachlinn, by trickery rather than fighting, captured him and drowned him in Loch Owel. This was in the year A.D. 845.
Thereafter the Irish were encouraged to defend their country with increasing boldness, but the fall of this great viking did not, nevertheless, free the lands he had won from the Norse yoke that now lay heavy upon them. The fame of Turgeis's conquests had already fired his countrymen, and before his death fleets of adventurers, 'great sea-cast floods foreigners', were assailing the coasts of Ireland. It was this period of the late '30s and early '40s that witnessed the first establishment of the vikings in the harbour-strongholds of the east and south that became their permanent bases and were later developed into the towns of Dublin, Anagassan (on the coast of Louth), Waterford, Wexford, and Limerick. From these new strongholds, soon to become much more dangerous than the now feeble settlements of the north, the vikings cruelly devastated the country and the death of Turgeis was followed by a decade of hard fighting between the Gaill and the Irish. No strong chieftain took the place of the fallen viking lord, so that many and brilliant were the victories won by the native levies, and this in spite of the continual advent of fresh companies of vikings from Norway. But these successes of the Irish in the end brought further troubles upon the country, for the rumour of disasters to the Norwegians reached the ears of their enemies the Danes, and about the year 849 a fleet, 140 ships strong, of the Dubhgaill (black foreigners, Danes) invaded
1. Dr. A. Mahr very reasonably connects a fine ninth-century sword discovered in 1928 in Ballinderry Bog, Co. Westmeath, with Turgeis's raid upon Clonmacnois (Mannus, Ergänzungsband VI (1928), p. 240). This remarkable weapon is of Frankish, not Scandinavian, manufacture and bears the name of a Teutonic smith Hiltipreht; it was no doubt obtained by the vikings, always greedy for Frankish arms, either by trade or robbery on the Continent.
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Ireland, careless of possible Irish resistance, but determined to crush the power of the Finngaill (white foreigners, Norwegians) and to take the land for themselves. Long and bitter was the fighting between these Danes and the Norsemen. In 851 the Norwegians of Dublin were almost annihilated and their women and treasures seized by the Dubhgaill; in 852 there was a great battle of three days' duration on Carlingford Loch in which the Danes were finally victorious; but in 853 the Norwegians regained the upper hand.
This came about through the arrival of another great Norwegian viking, much experienced in raids upon the west, who, like Turgeis, understood something of the art of command and government. He was Olaf, commonly called Olaf the White, (1) and was a prince of the royal house of Vestfold, being descended from Halfdan Hvitbein (p. 106 ). With a great fleet he came, and such was his strength that the Danes and Norsemen alike submitted to him, and even some of the Irish were forced to pay him tribute. But most of the Danes, having no stomach for such complete Norse ascendency, went off to plunder Britain, while a few took service with the Irish kings, and this left the Dublin colony that was now ruled by Olaf as the undisputed centre of viking power in Ireland.
The Norse king left Ireland soon after his initial conquests, but upon his return in 856 he was joined in Dublin by two viking princes, one a Dane, Ivar the Boneless, who was a son of Ragnar Lodbrok, (2) and the other his (Olaf's) brother Audgisl, and these three chieftains having come to terms, they soon set about the plundering of the middle territory
1. The identity of the Olaf of the Irish chronicles with Olaf the White of Norse tradition is generally accepted, though not by any means certain. It depends on the explicit statement of Landnámabók that Olaf the White 'took Dublin in Ireland and Dublinshire and was made king over it'; but there are serious objections to the identification. See A. O. Anderson , Scottish Annals from English Chronicles, I, p. 308, n. (1) and D. W. H. Marshall, Sudreys in Early Viking Times, Glasgow, 1929, p. 21.
2. See A. Mawer, Saga-Book of Viking Club, VI, pt. (1) (1909), p. 80 ff. Like Olaf, Ivar left Dublin soon after his arrival, going off to take part in the Danish invasion of England where it is alleged that he murdered St. Edmund. But immediately after this he joined Olaf in an invasion of Scotland. It is a curious thing that neither he nor Olaf seem at first to have regarded the Irish port as anything better than a base for further conquests, Olaf in Scotland and Ivar in England. It is because of Ivar's kinship with Halfdan of York that there arose the later quarrel between the reigning houses of Dublin and York, Halfdan thinking himself justified in interfering in the Dublin succession after Ivar's death, and the descendants of Ivar subsequently fighting to possess themselves of York in addition to Dublin.
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