Irish Nationality

								

London as the capital. King Sweyn Forkbeard, conqueror of all England,
was acknowledged in 1018 its king. But the imperial plan was not yet
complete. A free Irish nation of men who lived, as they said, "on the
ridge of the world"--a land of unconquered peoples of the open plains
and the mountains and the sea, left the Scandinavian empire with a
ragged edge out on the line of the Atlantic commerce. King Cnut sent
out his men for the last conquest. A vast host gathered in Dublin bay
"from all the west of Europe," from Norway, the Baltic islands, the
Orkneys, Iceland, for the landing at Clontarf. From sunrise to sunset
the battle raged, the hair of the warriors flying in the wind as thick
as the sheaves floating in a field of oats. The Scandinavian scheme of
a northern empire was shattered on that day, when with the evening
floodtide the remnant of the broken Danish host put to sea. Brian
Boru, his son, and his grandson lay dead. But for a hundred and fifty
years to come Ireland kept its independence. England was once again,
as in the time of the Roman dominion, made part of a continental
empire. Ireland, as in the days of Rome, still lay outside the new
imperial system.
At the end, therefore, of two hundred years of war, the Irish emerged
with their national life unbroken. Irish kingdoms had lived on side by
side with Danish kingdoms; in spite of the strength of the Danish
forces, the constant irruptions of new Danes, and the business
capacity of these fighters and traffickers, it was the Irish who were
steadily coming again to the top. Through all perils they had kept
their old order. The high-kings had ruled without a break, and, except
in a few years of special calamity, had held the national assemblies
of the country at Telltown, not far from Tara. The tribesmen of the
sub-kingdoms, if their ancient place of assembly had been turned into
a Danish fort, held their meeting in a hidden marsh or wood. Thus when
Cashel was held by the Norsemen, the assembly met on a mound that rose
in the marshy glen now called Glanworth. There Cellachan, the rightful
heir, in the best of arms and dress, demanded that the nobles should
remember justice, while his mother declared his title and recited a
poem. And when the champions of Munster heard these great words and
the speech of the woman, the tribes arose right readily to make
Cellachan king. They set up his shout of king, and gave thanks to the
true magnificent God for having found him. The nobles then came to
Cellachan and put their hands in his hand, and placed the royal
diadem round his head, and their spirits were raised at the grand
sight of him.
Throughout the wars, too, the tribes had not lost the tradition of
learning. King Ælfred has recorded the state of England after the
Danish wars; he could not bethink him of a single one south of the
Thames who could understand his ritual in English, or translate aught
out of Latin, and he could hear of very few north of the Thames to the