Chapter 9

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Maelmordha swept downhill upon the Irish centre, the first charge of the Leinstermen carrying all before it. Brodir drove Murchad back. But in the meantime the Connaught men advanced against the Dublin vikings and, after much fighting, routed them, while on the other flank Sigurd was being pressed back by the Irish under the impetuous young Tordelbach.
       With the wings already wavering, all hopes of success for the rebels were soon seen to depend upon the centre. But here too the tide of battle was turning against them, for the conquering Leinstermen, flushed with the brilliance of their fine first charge, had pressed recklessly on, and now Mael Seachlinn, issuing from his trenches on their left, caught them exhausted and scattered by their onrush. In a very short while, therefore, they in their turn were being driven back and flung in confusion upon their right wing. And here too the Irish were triumphing, for Murchad had rallied his men and now attacked the vikings so furiously that Brodir fled into a neighbouring wood, leaving his force to be well-nigh cut to pieces.
       It was upon this occasion, with the rebels and vikings in retreat on all sides, that Sigurd showed himself the redoubtable warrior that he was. By his personal example and valour he stayed the rout of his own men; he collected the refugees from the centre around him; he despatched a messenger to the Dublin vikings bidding them come to his aid. And then he began to fight his way forward. Whether by design or whether by accident his advance led him towards the Tomar wood, and breaking right through the Irish line, he found himself among the rearguard and close to the place where the aged high-king of Ireland still knelt in prayer. And the prowling Brodir, who must have joined Sigurd in this rush forward, came upon Brian and his tiny company. He took him for a priest at first, but when it was told him that it was indeed the king, he broke easily through the shield-burg made by the few defending warriors and slew him, crying 'Now let man tell that Brodir felled Brian!'
       But Murchad had heard how Sigurd and his vikings had broken through the Irish ranks, and was now returned with Tordelbach. For a while there was hard fighting, but Sigurd had committed his men to a position whence further advance was but to invite total destruction and orderly retreat an impossibility. The brave prince Murchad fell in this last struggle, but when both Sigurd and Brodir also lost their lives the unequal contest came to an end. A few vikings, Thorstein the Icelander was one of them, were given quarter upon their surrender, but




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the greater part of the beaten force fled desperately towards their ships, and once more the Irish flung themselves in pursuit after the panic-stricken Gaill and the routed Leinstermen. To the Weir of Clontarf was the chase pressed, and there, in this frenzied hunting of the fugitives, the young Tordelbach was drowned, so that upon this luckless day Munster lost not only her king, but his son and his grandson. To the Liffey bridge in the south the chase was also directed, and it is said that only twenty of the Dublin vikings crossed over the river to the safety of their fort. By sunset 7,000 of the rebels, Leinstermen and vikings, lay dead upon the field, and of the victorious Irish 4,000 were fallen. So ended the Battle of Clontarf, Brian's Battle, the overwhelming, though costly, Irish victory that must be ranked as incomparably the most splendid uprising of a wrathful nation to resist the menace of the vikings in all the history of these northern invaders.
       Yet the death of Brian, aged though he was, robbed the Irish of the peace and security that this victory should have won for them. His amazing funeral, the honour paid to him in their grief by the whole people of Ireland, whether of the North or of the South, whether Goidel or Gaill, the tributes to him in both Irish and Norse literature, so testify to the power and authority of this noble prince that it is easy to understand how his slaying and the sudden loss of his guiding hand left the Irish as much broken by this desperate battle as were the defeated and fugitive rebels. Almost at once, upon the breakup of the Irish host immediately after the battle, there was civil war in Munster over the succession to Brian's throne, and soon all Ireland was sinking into the old fretfulness of quarrels and discord, the struggles of small-minded men than the great king who was dead. 'Brian fell, but saved his kingdom', said the Norse poet of him, and this much is true that Clontarf had ended for ever the danger that the Gaill might win Ireland for their own; but, alas, Brian's fall sent Ireland rocking and tottering back to the soul-destroying chaos of a too-loosely knit heptarchy of little states.
       And to the foreigners in Ireland, beyond the smart of the defeat and the shame of Sigurd's downfall, Clontarf meant nothing. There was no expulsion of the Gaill, no restriction even of their civic or personal liberties, and Dublin, the storm-centre of the rebellion, was left to itself after the battle. True that it fell only a year later to Mael Seachlinn, once again highking, when he marched south to prove to the Leinstermen and Dublin vikings by a show of savage force that further rebellion




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on their part was useless. But Dublin survived its capture and the line of foreign kings were not immediately deposed; the colony prospered, there came fresh contingents of Gaill from overseas to swell its population, and here, as at Waterford, Wexford, Limerick, and Cork, the settlers of Norse and Danish blood remained to contribute, as the years passed, by their trade and wealth, by the very stability of the 'towns' that they thus developed, not a little to the well-being of the Irish commonwealth. And so it came about that these towns are discovered, hustling centres of merchant activity, when, just over a hundred and fifty years later, there fell upon Ireland that new disaster, an angrier and sorrier blow than ever the Northmen had struck at Erin, the coming of the English.
       Of the history of the Gaill in this period after Clontarf the barest outline must suffice. Yet it is true that the entries concerning them in the Irish annals are much the same in the century and a half after the battle as in the two centuries that preceded it, the familiar tale of little wars and plunderings, of success and set-back, of conquests and submission. Certainly in the '20s, and close, that is, to the time of Clontarf, the Dublin foreigners did suffer more than one heavy reverse at the hands of the Irish; but by the '30s their prestige and prosperity were restored, the colony flourishing from this period until its army met with a disastrous defeat in 1052 that led to the flight of the king of the Scandinavian line and the transfer of the crown to an Irishman, Diarmait of Leinster, whose royal house long retained the overlordship of Dublin.
       But under King Torquil, who was of the Scandinavian dynasty, the colony regained in the early twelfth century something of its old political ascendency, and in 1140 the Dublin Norse were engaged in a struggle with the Gaill of Waterford wherein the Irish took no part. Nevertheless, in the following year Dublin fell once more into the hands of an Irishman, Conchobar, king of East Munster, and sixteen years later, in 1157, Limerick surrendered to Muirchertach MacLochlainn, king of Ireland, who also attempted, though without success, to conquer Dublin in 1162. Yet Dublin, also, fell in 1164, Diarmait MacMurchad making himself master of the colony. This prince was the king of Leinster, who is notorious as being the first to bring over the English to Ireland, for he was driven overseas in 1166 and sought the help of the Normans in Wales for the recovering of his kingdom; in three years' time he had achieved his end, so that he was able in the following year to turn savagely upon Dublin and Waterford, cruelly putting         




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many of the Gaill to death and filling both towns with the hired soldiery from abroad. Asgall Torquilsson, who had been king of Dublin, tried, in company with the old Orkney pirate, Svein Asleifarson, to retake the town, but he failed, and when Strongbow, earl of Pembroke, came to Ireland in that year, both Dublin and Waterford were a part of the Leinster kingdom he usurped on the death of Diarmait in 1171.
       Thus it happened that it was, in the end, the English who broke the power of the Gaill in Ireland, for by the year 1200 all the five cities (Dublin, Waterford, Limerick, Wexford, and Cork) of the Ostmen (for this, meaning men from the east, was the new name of the Norse population) were in the hands of the newcomers. Some of the unfortunate inhabitants must have sailed off to the Isles where the descendants of the vikings still lived in colonies that knew only the king of Norway as their overlord, but many peace-loving traders remained and these the English expelled from the towns that their fathers had built, herding them into settlements without the walls. Yet the trade they commanded and the important consideration that they were largely non-Celtic in race did give the Ostmen at first some political significance as potentially valuable allies both in commerce and war, so that they received nominally, at any rate, a certain measure of protection from the English crown. For a while, then, though continually robbed and cheated by the unruly invaders, they held their own as independent corporate societies of not unwealthy merchants in full legal possession of the land whereon they lived. But towards the end of the thirteenth century these little communities of Ostmen were dwindling in numbers and the Englishmen began to buy or seize their lands in the Ostmantowns, so it is small wonder that these poor and persecuted children of the vikings should appeal to Haakon Haakonsson, King of Norway, when in 1263 he sailed at the head of his great armada into the western waters of Scotland, begging him to free them from their English oppressors. But, alas, Haakon, the deliverer and the master of the Isles, never came to Ireland, and when he died, when the Isles fell to the king of Scotland, the last faint hopes of the survival of independent Scandinavian societies in Erin were abruptly extinguished. In the fourteenth century the name of an Ostman is hardly to be found in charter or annal, and thus into obscurity pass the last unimportant remnants of the old Norse colonies, hounded from their homes and cheated of their trade by the bullying new foreigners. For, as were their own viking ancestors in the beginning, so too these English were Gaill, Teuton strangers in a Celtic land.