Every
important seaport in Ireland owes its existence to those sturdy Vikings'
sons. In each of these towns they had founded a petty kingdom, which
endured until, and even in some cases after, the conquest of Ireland by
Henry II. and Strongbow. They intermarried in the mean while with the
native Irish. Brian Boru, for instance, was so connected with Danish
royalty, that it is still a question whether he himself had not Danish
blood in his veins. King Sigtryg Silkbeard, who fought against him at
Clontarf, was actually his step-son,--and so too, according to another
Irish chronicler, was King Olaff Kvaran, who even at the time of the
battle of Clontarf was married to Brian Boru's daughter,--a marriage which
(if a fact) was startlingly within the prohibited degrees of
consanguinity. But the ancient Irish were sadly careless on such points;
and as Giraldus Cambrensis says, "followed the example of men of old in
their vices more willingly than in their virtues."
More than forty years had elapsed since that famous battle of Clontarf,
and since Ragnvald, Reginald, or Ranald, son of Sigtryg the Norseman, had
been slain therein by Brian Boru. On that one day, so the Irish sang, the
Northern invaders were exterminated, once and for all, by the Milesian
hero, who had craftily used the strangers to fight his battles, and then,
the moment they became formidable to himself, crushed them, till "from
Howth to Brandon in Kerry there was not a threshing-floor without a Danish
slave threshing thereon, or a quern without a Danish woman grinding
thereat.
Pages:
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122