A History of the Vikings
Chapter 9
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of Ireland, even ransacking the pre-historic tumuli and the souterrains (stone-lined underground passages) in their frenzied search for treasure. But it so happened that a great Irishman, Aed Finnlaith, was now high-king, and he so resolutely opposed the Norse raids, so fearlessly and so successfully carried the war back to the very gates of the Norse strongholds, that the prudent Olaf and his fellow-adventurers deemed it best to remain content with the safeguarding of their own small colony rather than to risk defeat and expulsion by Aed. They made no attempt, therefore, to co-operate with the other Norse settlements in attacks upon the Irish, always supposing that the jealous and independent colonies could cooperate effectively, and instead made a peace with Aed, Olaf himself wedding the high-king's daughter, a plain proof of the secure establishment of Dublin as a Norse realm. From this time onwards (it was in the late '60s) Olaf's principal viking expeditions were directed overseas against Strathclyde Wales and Pictland, though his Dublin colonists still went plundering in Leinster and Munster when the Irish were busy with their own quarrels, and he himself on one occasion (868) went north to burn Armagh. In the meantime Ivar the Boneless had sailed for England to help in the conquest of the Danelaw by his brothers Halfdan and Ubbe.
Though Olaf did not achieve any notable territorial aggrandizement in Ireland of his Dublin kingdom, he added materially to its importance by securing a wholesome regard for his personal authority in Man, in the Hebrides, and on the mainland of Scotland. One of the three women he had taken in marriage (1) was Aud the Deepminded, a daughter of Ketil Flatneb, already a famous viking of the Sudreys (Hebrides), and another was daughter of Kenneth MacAlpin, the great king who had brought about in 844 the union of the Scottish and Pictish monarchies in Alban. Such alliances must undoubtedly have given him a real, or fancied, right to intervene in the politics of Scotland and the Isles, and though he can hardly have won any recognized overlordship, except perhaps over Man, he extended, nevertheless, most successfully the sphere of Dublin influence, making of his Irish kingdom the acknowledged headquarters of viking activity not only in Erin, but in all the western waters.
But in 871, at the height of his power, Olaf left Ireland for ever, sailing off to fight in his own country where he fell in battle.2
1. Always supposing that Olaf of Dublin was really Olaf the White.
2. On the other hand, Landnámabók says explicitly that Olaf was slain in Ireland and Scottish tradition affirms that he was killed while fighting Constantine in Scotland; for a summary of G. Storm's arguments concerning Olaf's identity with the Thore Haklang who fell at Hafrsfjord, see L. J. Vogt, Dublin som norsk By, Oslo (1896), p. 60 ff. Cf. also Sir H. Howorth, Saga-Book of Viking Society, IX, pt. (1) (1920), p. 172. The evidence of the Three Fragments, s.a. 8 71) seems to be conclusive in the matter of the country of Olaf's death, but the battle therein mentioned cannot have been Hafrsfjord (new dating c. 900); it is possible that Olaf made a bid for the Vestfold throne when Halfdan the Black died leaving only young Harald Fairhair to succeed him.
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He left Ivar the Boneless, who had been away fighting in England, as king of the Norse colonies in Ireland 'and Britain', and two years later, at Ivar's death, Olaf's son Eystein became king in his stead. Early in his reign there was an attack by the Danes on Dublin, a small party of the Northumbrian vikings under Halfdan (p. 231 ), and perhaps Ubbe, his brother, attempting to take Eystein's kingdom from him by guile, this because it had been under the rule of their brother Ivar and they could therefore pretend some claim to add this splendid colony to their rich English possessions. It was the beginning of a long and curious struggle between Dublin and York that was partly based on the natural rivalries of Danes and Norwegians and partly a result of the circumstance that the later rulers at Dublin were of the same family as the Danish kings of York; in a word, the struggle was not so much a declared war between the two viking states as a series of attempts to unite by force these two states into a single family heritage.
On this first occasion Aed Finnlaith intervened on behalf of the now peaceful Norwegians, so that Halfdan and his contingent took fright and sailed off northwards up the Irish coast where the great Northumbrian chief was killed1 in a battle with the Norsemen on Strangford Loch. The Danes of his army fled to Scotland, and thence to Wales and Devonshire, and for the time being the Norwegians in Ireland had nothing more to fear from their fellow-vikings.
But at this period, about 877, their power was already on the wane. No longer came great fleets from Norway to reinforce the colonies, for now the Vestfold royal line was aiming at the mastery of all the country and the full strength of the great viking provinces of Vestland was needed at home in order to resist their would-be lords. The Irish settlements, therefore, grew weaker in numbers, and less and less a menace to the native kings and their peoples. It even came to pass that Dublin, the main-
1. The King Halfdan who died in East Anglia (Saxon Chronicle, s.a. 911) was another chief of the same name.
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spring of Norse power in Ireland, fell, after the short reigns of the sons of Audgisl and Ivar, under the control of Cearbhall of Ossory, who had been an ally of Ivar. Although Cearbhall's granddaughter married a son of Olaf of Dublin, and his daughter married the viking Eyvind Eastman, and though he himself was later counted as the head of the family tree of several distinguished Icelandic families, this Irish control of Dublin must have been a sorry business for whatever remained of the old viking pride, and it is natural enough that about this time the settlement should have been further depleted by the wholesale migration of many of the Norse colonists across the Irish Sea to Cumberland and Northumberland. Small wonder that when Cearbhall, king of Leinster, attacked Dublin in 902, he captured the place without difficulty, made a terrible slaughter of the inhabitants, and forced the beaten remnant of the defending army to seek refuge across the sea, some going off to plunder Chester and others sailing for the Loire.
Although, during these forty years after the death of Halfdan, the viking hold upon Ireland had been steadily weakening, yet most of their harbour-strongholds on the coast must still have remained as centres of a semi-Norse population. Even as early as the middle of the ninth century there existed the Gaill-Gaedhil, or foreign Irish, and though at first these were merely Irishmen who had thrown in their lot with the pirates, it is likely enough that from these recreants had sprung a race of mixed parentage, half Irish and half Norse, in the settlement areas. But the Gaill-Gaedhil, low-born adventurers whose swords were for hire, (1) were not the only result of intercourse between Norse and Irish. On the contrary, there are many records of the free and peaceable mingling of the two peoples, the intermarriage of the high-born Norse and the Irish nobility, and also of temporary alliances between them for battle and adventure, the Norse sometimes entering with zest into the wars of the rival Irish kings, while these kings, upon occasion, were not above taking a part in the viking expeditions in search of
1. They seem to have been ready to fight for the best paying master; thus a party of them under a viking leader, Ketil Find, were defeated by the Dublin Norse under Olaf in 857. Another group of such semiNorse folk dwelt in western Scotland (Kintyre, upper Argyll, Galloway-the name is derived from Gall-Gael--and the Hebrides); these were of mixed Scottish-Scandinavian blood and in Norse source the inhabitants of Galloway are referred to as vikingar-skotar. For the Gaill-Gaedhil, see D. W. H. Marshall, Sudreys in Early Viking Times, Glasgow, 1929, p. 9.
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plunder. There remained, therefore, on the Irish coasts a not inconsiderable legacy from the viking conquests of Turgeis and Olaf, even if viking rule had to some extent collapsed, and it needed only the advent of fresh armies of Norsemen to re-establish the colonies where the Norse tongue and Norse manners were still cherished by the enfeebled descendants of the early raiders.
Not that, even in this dark period, the fighting force of the Gaill in Ireland was reduced to complete inactivity. In 879 and 880 they were certainly marauding outside their territory, and in 881 they took part in an attack by Flann Sinna, the high-king, upon Armagh. In 893 (this was after the death of Cearbhall) there was civil war in Dublin among the foreigners, and in 895 Sigtryg, son of Ivar, and now king of Dublin, led the Gaill north to plunder Armagh, the same Sigtryg who in 892 had taken an army across the sea to invade the Scots. Again, in 904, the Dublin vikings under Ivar, who was a grandson of Ivar the Boneless, invaded Alban.
It was not until 914, however, that the new period of viking activity in Ireland begins, this being a time when both Francia and England were virtually closed against viking enterprise, the one because of the concession of Normandy to Rollo, and the other because of the prestige and power of Edward the Elder. The first notice of the new peril threatening Ireland was the arrival of a viking fleet at Waterford, and this was quickly followed by a second fleet under Ragnvald, grandson of Ivar the Boneless, though the leader himself, who had previously been fighting in Scotland and Man, was soon off again to try his fortune as king of York. In 916 came Sigtryg Gale, another grandson of Ivar, who, after making a fortified camp at Cenn Fuait close to Waterford, set out to recapture Dublin, sailing into the Liffey mouth with an immense fleet manned by crews made up of both Danes and Norwegians. (1)
But the Irish had not allowed the sudden challenge of this new viking invasion to shock them from the offering of a brave and well-supported resistance. Their gallant, though luckless,
1. It is unlikely that these early tenth-century invasions were either purely Norse or purely Danish enterprises. The Irish annals certainly suggest that the armies included vikings of both nationalities, and this, indeed, is to be expected if we imagine the attacks on Ireland to be adventures of Danish malcontents from Normandy and Danish and Norwegian emigrants from England and Scotland. Limerick is supposed to have been captured in 920 by Danes, but there were probably Norsemen too in the invading force. Cf. A. Walsh, Scandinavian Relations with Ireland, Dublin, 1922, p. 24.
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high-king, Niall Glundubh, for he it was who inspired and led the attacks upon the Norsemen, had at once set aside the wars and quarrellings of domestic politics in order to protect Erin from the Gaill. In 917 he fought them, unsuccessfully, at Clonmel, and afterwards, undismayed, he marched off, this time in alliance with the king of Leinster, to attack the foreigners in Waterford. He encamped in a fortified position over against the enemy, and so remained for three weeks, but finally the vikings managed to attack the Leinster men separately and to defeat them, thus forcing Niall to retire without giving battle and leaving the enemy in assured possession of the stronghold at Waterford. In 918, Niall, still resolute in the defence of Ireland, determined upon attacking Sigtryg Gale in Dublin. It was by this time clear to all the Irish that this new establishment of a great host of the Gaill in the old viking capital must mean the beginning of another long struggle with the foreigners, for the position of this important harbour made its occupants a perpetual menace to the safety of Leinster, Meath, and Ulster. Niall, therefore, was able to collect a formidable hosting, a great company of the Irish sub-kings and their followings, and in 919 at the head of this force he gave battle to Sigtryg near Islandbridge on the north bank of the Liffey. But brave fighter though he was, Niall was not destined to be the saviour of Erin. Victory went to the Gaill; Niall fell, and with him there died twelve of the Irish kings. It was a decisive battle, leaving the foreigners in undisputed possession of Dublin and with Ireland, now that the chief parade of her strength was overthrown, at their mercy. Yet, upon consideration of the uncertain and feeble resistance that opposed elsewhere the great tenth-century invasions of the vikings, it seems no small honour in the annals of Erin that these Norwegians and Danes should win their footing in the land only at the price of a hard-fought battle against a hosting of the chieftains of the land with the high-king at their head.
The Gaill were not slow to take advantage of the victory, and by 920 they had already begun to ravage the north, pillaging Kells and many of the monasteries of Meath and Ulster, and even occupying Armagh. In the same year Limerick was captured by 'an immensely great fleet, more wonderful than all the other fleets' that was manned chiefly by Danes and commanded by Thorir Helgason who fortified the place and held it as a settlement entirely independent of, even hostile to, the colony at Dublin. In 921 Sigtryg Gale,
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