Irish Nationality

								

fleets. Through two hundred years of war no Irish royal house was
destroyed, no kingdom was extinguished, and no national supremacy of
the Danes replaced the national supremacy of the Irish.
The long war was one of "confused noise and garments rolled in
blood." Ireland, whether they could conquer it or not, was of vast
importance to the Scandinavians as a land of refuge for their fleets.
Voyagers guided their way by the flights of birds from her shores; the
harbours of "the great island" sheltered them; her fields of corn, her
cattle driven to the shore for the "strand-hewing," provisioned their
crews; her woods gave timber for shipbuilding. Norwegians and Danes
fought furiously for possession of the sea-ports, now against the
Irish, now against each other. No victory or defeat counted beyond the
day among the shifting and multiplying fleets of new marauders that
for ever swarmed round the coasts--emigrants who had flung themselves
on the sea for freedom's sake to save their old laws and liberties,
buccaneers seeking "the spoils of the sea," sea-kings roaming the
ocean or gathering for a raid on Scotland or on France, stray
companies out of work or putting in for a winter's shelter, boats of
whale-fishers and walrus-killers, Danish hosts driven out of England
or of Normandy. As "the sea vomited up floods of foreigners into Erin
so that there was not a point without a fleet," battle swung
backwards and forwards between old settlers and new pirates, between
Norsemen and Danes, between both and the Irish.
But the Scandinavians were not only sea-rovers, they were the greatest
merchants that northern Europe had yet seen. From the time of Charles
the Great to William the Conqueror, the whole commerce of the seas was
in their hands. Eastward they pushed across Russia to the Black Sea,
and carried back the wares of Asia to the Baltic; westward they poured
along the coasts of Gaul by the narrow seas, or sailed the Atlantic
from the Orkneys and Hebrides round the Irish coast to the Bay of
Biscay. The new-made empire of Charles the Great was opening Europe
once more to a settled life and the possibilities of traffic, and the
Danish merchants seized the beginnings of the new trade. Ireland lay
in the very centre of their seaways, with its harbours, its wealth,
and its traditional commerce with France. Merchants made settlements
along the coasts, and planted colonies over the inland country to
supply the trade of the ports. They had come to Ireland for business,
and they wanted peace and not war. They intermarried with the Irish,
fostered their children, brought their goods, welcomed Irish poets
into their forts, listening to Irish stories and taking new models for
their own literature, and in war they joined with their Irish
neighbours. A race of "Gall-Gaels," or "foreign Irish," grew up,
accepted by the Irish as of their community. Between the two peoples