Irish Nationality

								

kings arose among them, good organisers and good fighters, and for a
hundred years one leader followed hard on another. In 916, Niall, king
of Tara, celebrated once more the assembly of Telltown, and led
southern and northern O'Neills to the aid of Munster against the
Gentiles, directing the men of Leinster in the campaign--a gallant
war. Murtagh, king of Ailech or Tirconnell, smote the Danes at
Carlingford and Louth in 926, a year of great danger, and so came
victorious to the assembly at Telltown. Again, in 933, he defeated the
"foreigners" in the north, and they left two hundred and forty heads,
and all their wealth of spoils. In 941 he won his famous name,
"Murtagh of the Leather Cloaks," from the first midwinter campaign
ever known in Ireland, "the hosting of the frost," when he led his
army from Donegal, under shelter of leather cloaks, over lakes and
rivers frozen by the mighty frost, round the entire circuit of
Ireland. Some ten years later, Cellachan, king of Cashel, took up the
fight; with his linen-coated soldiers against the mail-clad
foreigners, he swept the whole of Munster, capturing Limerick, Cork,
Cashel and Waterford, and joining their Danish armies to his own
troops; till he closed his campaign by calling out the Munster fleet
from Kinsale to Galway bay, six or seven score of them, to meet the
Danish ships at Dundalk. The Norsemen used armour, and rough chains of
blue iron to grapple the enemies' ships, but the Irish sailors, with
their "strong enclosures of linen cloth," and tough ropes of hemp to
fling over the enemies' prows, came off victorious. According to the
saga of his triumph, Cellachan called the whole of Ireland to share in
the struggle for Irish freedom, and a fleet from Ailech carried off
plunder and booty from the Hebrides. He was followed by Brian Boru.
"Ill luck was it for the Danes when Brian was born," says the old
saga, "when he inflicted not evil on the foreigners in the day time he
did it in the next night." From beyond the Shannon he led a fierce
guerrilla war. Left with but fifteen followers alive, sleeping on
"hard knotty wet roots," he still refused to yield. "It is not
hereditary to us," he said, "to submit." He became king of Munster in
974, drove out the Danish king from Dublin in 998, and ruled at last
in 1000 as Ardri of Ireland, an old man of sixty or seventy years. In
1005 he called out all the fleets of the Norsemen of Dublin,
Waterford, Wexford, and of the men of Munster, and of almost all of
the men of Erin, such of them as were fit to go to sea, and they
levied tribute from Saxons and Britons as far as the Clyde and Argyle.
A greater struggle still lay before the Irish. Powerful kings of
Denmark, in the glory of success, began to think of their imperial
destiny; and, to round off their states, proposed to create a
Scandinavian empire from the Slavic shores of the Baltic across
Denmark, Norway, England and Ireland, to the rim of the Atlantic, with