Irish Nationality

								

in hate, eager for slaughter, bitter in the battle-work. They came,
"great scourers of the seas--a nation desperate in attempting the
conquest of other realms."
The Scandinavian campaigns of the ocean affected Ireland as no
continental wars for the creation or the destruction of the Roman
Empire had done. During two hundred years their national life, their
learning, their civilisation, were threatened by strangers. The social
order they had built up was confronted with two new tests--violence
from without, and an alien population within the island. We may ask
how Irish civilisation met the trial.
The Danes fell on all the shores of England from the Forth to the
Channel, the land of the Picts northward, Iona and the country of the
Scots to the west, and Bretland of the Britons from the Clyde to the
Land's End: in Ireland they sailed up every creek, and shouldering
their boats marched from river to river and lake to lake into every
tribeland, covering the country with their forts, plundering the rich
men's raths of their cups and vessels and ornaments of gold, sacking
the schools and monasteries and churches, and entering every great
king's grave for buried treasure. Their heavy iron swords, their
armour, their discipline of war, gave them an overwhelming advantage
against the Irish with, as they said, bodies and necks and gentle
heads defended only by fine linen. Monks and scholars gathered up
their manuscripts and holy ornaments, and fled away for refuge to
Europe.
These wars brought a very different fate to the English and the Irish.
In England, when the Danes had planted a colony on every inlet of the
sea (c. 800), they took horse and rode conquering over the inland
plains. They slew every English king and wiped out every English royal
house save that of Wessex; and in their place set up their own kings
in Northumbria and East Anglia, and made of all middle England a vast
"Danelaw" a land ruled by Danish law, and by confederations of Danish
towns. At the last Wessex itself was conquered, and a Danish king
ruled over all England (1013). In Ireland, on the other hand, the
invincible power of the tribal system for defence barred the way of
invaders. Every foot of land was defended; every tribe fought for its
own soil. There could be no subjection of the Irish clans except by
their extermination. A Norwegian leader, Thorgils, made one supreme
effort at conquest. He fixed his capital at Armagh and set up at its
shrine the worship of Thor, while his wife gave her oracles from the
high altar of Clonmacnois on the Shannon, in the prophetess's cloak
set with stones to the hem, the necklace of glass beads, the staff,
and the great skin pouch of charms. But in the end Thorgils was taken
by the king of Meath and executed, being cast into Loch Nair. The
Danes, who held long and secure possession of England, great part of
Scotland, and Normandy, were never able to occupy permanently any part
of Ireland more than a day's march from the chief stations of their