Chapter 9

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king of Dublin, left Ireland to succeed Ragnvald as king of York, and his Irish throne was filled by a relative, Godfred, who is said to have been another grandson of Ivar; the new king also assumed command of the Waterford vikings, putting his son Olaf as king there, and shortly afterwards was busy with the further devastation of Ulster. But brave Niall's son, Muichertach, king of Ailech, defeated the vikings near Armagh in this year, and it seemed plain that the Norsemen could make no permanent settlement in the north of Ireland, though with their fleets on the rivers and lochs of Ulster they remained for a while a most serious menace to the whole province.
       Yet viking affairs were not prospering everywhere. Ragnvald, king of York, had submitted to Edward the Elder in 920, and Sigtryg Gale, when he succeeded him in Northumbria, could not do other than continue as vassal of the English king, this meaning that the intended Irish-Northumbrian kingdom, now almost entirely in the hands of the Danish family sprung from Ivar the Boneless, never rose to the importance that must have been intended when Ragnvald usurped the throne of York. And the annexation of the Kingdom of York in 926 by the English, introducing a period of almost complete subjugation of the vikings in Northumbria, robbed the rulers in Dublin of all effective power in England, and this despite the rebellion of 937 that culminated in the shattering defeat at Brunanburh, and the short and unhappy spell of Northumbrian independence from 939 to 944. The Dublin kings, therefore, Godfred himself, Olaf Godfredsson from Waterford (who fought at Brunanburh), and that great adventurer Olaf Sigtrygsson Cuaran, spent much of their strength in vain endeavours to regain the viking supremacy in northern England, and it may have been for this reason, if it was not because of a wholesome fear of the Irish, that they made no attempt at a serious conquest of large territories in Ireland. Indeed, the Gaill had begun thus early in the tenth century to accommodate themselves to the changing and confused conditions of Irish affairs, the adoption of Christianity by so many of the Norsemen and the growth of a busy trade between defenders and invaders resulting in many intermarriages and alliances so that the viking colonies began to acquire the status of recognized sub-kingdoms, quarrelsome and dangerous may be, of the body politic of Ireland.
       Nevertheless occasional spells of surface calm in reality did little towards lessening the deep-seated distrust with which the Irish regarded the foreigners, and the annals tell that in the years following Niall's death there was still fighting enough between




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Irishman and Gall. His son, Muirchertach, was the worst foe of the Dublin colony when the vikings ventured abroad to plunder, and in 926 this king defeated them at Carlingford. In 927 he gained another victory over them at Anagassan, but the chief adventures of his struggle with the Gaill took place in 939 when he made a successful expedition against the Norsemen of the Hebrides, and yet was himself captured and held to ransom by the Dublin vikings. However, Muirchertach had established an ascendency over the Gaill that was not lightly to be overthrown, and on the occasion of that famous hosting of 941, the great march of his 'Leather Cloaks' around all Ireland when he, as high-king designate, demanded hostages from every kingdom, he encamped near Dublin, and in the course of this royal and amazing progress took a hostage from the Gaill themselves.
       Muirchertach of the Leather Cloaks died in 943 and still the struggle continued, sometimes the vikings making daring plundering expeditions, sometimes living at peace, while sometimes they in turn were attacked by the Irish armies. In 944 Congalach became high-king and made a successful raid upon Dublin; in 946 the foreigners pillaged Clonmacnois; in 947 Congalach resumed the offensive and won a great victory over the Gaill at Slane in County Meath when he defeated the then king of Dublin, Olaf Cuaran, and exacted a tribute from the Dublin colony. This Olaf was the last of the viking princes in Ireland who sought to win a kingdom in Northumbria, for in his early days he had set himself to gain both the realms that had been ruled by his father, the Sigtryg who had been in turn king of Dublin and king of York. But at the time of his defeat by Congalach he had been expelled from York, where he had for a time set himself up as king, and had been for some years in Ireland; yet after the complete rout of his army at Slane and the downfall of Dublin, he straightway abandoned his Irish realm and returned to York. He succeeded in getting himself made king there for a second time, but once again the English authority was too strong for him and he was compelled to leave Northumbria. In 951 he went back to Ireland and resumed his position as king of Dublin. He gave up all hope of recovering the throne of York, and, content at last with the single Irish realm, he reigned for some thirty years, the most illustrious and perhaps the best-known of the foreign kings of Dublin. But he never succeeded in restoring the colony to the power that it had enjoyed in the days of his father and of Godfred; on more than one occasion the Irish attacked and         




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defeated him, and when, in 980, Mael Seachlinn Mor, the highking, having overthrown Olaf's sons in battle at Tara, forced Dublin to surrender to him, then was the great viking a broken man and he fled from the country, making his way as a Christian pilgrim to Iona where he died.
       Olaf Cuaran had married a daughter of Muirchertach, and it was the son of this marriage, a man of mixed blood with the Irish name of Gluniarainn (Iron Knee), who succeeded to the throne of Dublin, assuredly as the sworn vassal of Mael Seachlinn, for the Irish king not only was half-brother to Gluniarainn by reason of this marriage of Olaf's, but was also his conqueror in the field. Yet although in 983 Mael Seachlinn took the Dublin king and the army of the Gaill to fight side by side with him against the king of Leinster and the viking Ivar who was now king of Waterford, nevertheless the relations between the two half-brothers were not always friendly, and in 989 Mael Seachlinn again laid siege to Dublin, forcing it to surrender after an investment of twenty days' duration, the townsmen giving in because of a want of water; again he demanded a tribute, and, furthermore, a tax of an ounce of gold from every building in the place. Gluniarainn died soon afterwards and it seems that his now weakened realm was seized by Ivar, of the old family of Ivar the Boneless, the powerful king of the now independent and rival colony at Waterford; but in 994 Mael Seachlinn drove him out, taking on this occasion as part of his booty Thor's ring, the holiest treasure of ancient viking heathendom and the focus of pagan rituals of oath and sacrifice, and ' Charles's Sword,' a weapon that was the symbol of Dublin's power and that was believed, no doubt, to have belonged to the great Emperor himself. After the expulsion of Ivar, Sigtryg of the Silken Beard, another son of Olaf Cuaran, became king of Dublin.
       But this was the time when the fortunes of the Dublin colony began to be affected by the rapid march to power and fame of Brian Boru, the noblest and the greatest Irishman of his day and the well-beloved hero of the songs and stories of posterity. Except perhaps for Alfred the Great, no man of all the princes of the western world has been more honoured as the champion of his people against the vikings, and though it may be that his struggle with the Gaill is of less account than his magnificent achievement of the sovereignty of all Erin, yet the fall of the foreign colonies as powers likely to become supreme in Ireland was in no small measure decided by his adventures and strategies, so that the tale of Brian's life is a significant and fateful chapter of the viking history of the country.         




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       He was born in 941 and was the son of Cennetig, king of Dal gCais, a small province occupying the eastern half of the modern county of Clare and in the tenth century a border-state of Munster. Ever since their early days he and his brother Mahoun had watched with indignation the plunderings and ravages of the Danes at Limerick, and for many years they had engaged in a pitiful, though lionhearted, guerilla warfare with these Gaill, hiding their tiny forces in woods and caves, and content merely with embarrassing the progress of the marauding enemy bands. So heavy, nevertheless, were the losses of the brothers that Mahoun made a truce with the Danes; but Brian, bitterly reproaching him for this weakness, continued the miserable struggle, careless of the rapid dwindling of his own small following and fighting on until it is said he had only fifteen men left with him. At this point the assembly of the little kingdom was convoked in order to decide whether the war should be continued, and, though their tribulations had been long-lasting and terrible, the courageous Dalcassians determined upon one final attempt to rid themselves of the foreigners; at the same time they purposed to assert Mahoun's claim to the throne of Cashel, the chief kingdom of Munster, for the death of the Munster king in 963 presented what seemed to be a favourable opportunity of making this bid for greater power. And so, summoning to their aid allies from Connaught and western Munster, Mahoun and Brian seized Cashel and, having established themselves there, prepared for a serious struggle against the Danes.
       Five years later, at Sulcoit near Tipperary, came the inevitable conflict between the two Dalcassian princes and Ivar, the proud and aggressive king of Limerick, and after a battle lasting from sunrise until noon the foreigners were overthrown and driven back in confusion to Limerick. There the Danish fort was sacked by the pursuing Irishmen and the town itself burnt. Ivar fled overseas, and of the great band of prisoners taken by Mahoun and Brian, those who were of military age were put to death and the rest carried off as slaves. Seldom had a victory over the Gaill been more complete, and seldom had its aftermath been so pitiless and so thorough an extermination of the enemy.
       But Munster was not for ever freed of the Danes. The year after the battle, in 969, Ivar returned from his short exile in Britain and once more at the head of a very great fleet. He built himself a new camp at Limerick and also fortified the islands of the Shannon, and then, with his own holding thus secured, he proceeded to make alliances with those Munster chiefs who were




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watching with jealous eyes the new political ascendency of the Dal gCais. Mahoun, however, did not wait for the breaking of the storm that was gathering against him and speedily renounced his pretensions to the overlordship of Munster; yet this submission did not save him from his enemies, and it was with Cashel thus surrounded by foes that in 976 he was mysteriously killed. Brian, heir to the murdered king, immediately and magnificently became the avenger of his brother and the saviour of his people. 'And he was not a stone in the place of an egg; and he was not a wisp in the place of a club; but he was a hero in the place of a hero; and he was valour after valour.' He attacked the islands of the Shannon in 977, killed the terrible Ivar and two of his sons, and took a great booty of gold and silver. In the next year he raided the territory of Donnabhan of the Ui Fidgenti in County Limerick, where another of Ivar's sons had taken refuge, and there he slew both the viking and Donnabhan himself. In the same year he fought Maelmuadh, king of Desmond and overlord of Munster, at Belach Lechta near Ardpatrick, and in that great fight Maelmuadh fell and with him 1,200 of his men, both Irish and Danes. After this Brian took hostages of Munster 'even unto the sea', and so became the undisputed king of Cashel and the mightiest chieftain in Munster.
       His first concern in the period following the battle of Belach Lechta was to obtain the submission of the Leinster kings, for this neighbouring province, itself at the mercy of the Gaill of Waterford and Dublin, was an ever-present source of danger, unless governed by his own strong hand. When, by 984, he had achieved this overlordship he was master of southern Ireland, and henceforth during the long spell of peace that lasted until the very end of the century he devoted himself above all things to the re-organization and administration of his now great realm and eagerly fostered the once-flourishing arts and scholarship that the coming of the foreigners had ruined. But just as a strong man had stood forth as champion and defender of the south, so too a mighty king, Mael Seachlinn Mor, controlled the north, and the history of the last fifteen years of the peace reveals a growing rivalry between these two powerful rulers. But it was not until 999 that there was any threat of open hostilities on a large scale. In that year a Leinster king made an alliance with the Dublin Gaill and revolted from Brian's overlordship. Brian marched to lay siege to Dublin, and on his way intercepted the united forces of the Leinster men and the Gaill in the pass of Glen Mama in the western foot-hills of the Wicklow mountains;