THE VIKING LONGSHIP came slowly up the main channel into Dublin. The great red-and-white-striped sail had been furled out in the bay and the oars were run out as they passed the red lighthouse on the end of the harbor mole. A crew member stood at the carved dragon prow, blowing a blast on a great cow's horn, its plaintive bellow reverberating back from spiderlike cranes and stacks of containers that lined the north side of the River Liffey. Except for the horn-blower and a man at the steering oar in the stern, the rest of the crew strained at wooden oars big as telephone poles, twelve feet long and thicker than the spread of a man's hand. "Eight . . . nine . . . ten! Come on, lads, put your backs into it." The skipper's voice called the rhythm of the stroke. "Once again, everybody together. One . . . two . . . three . . ." The Dyflin was coming home, and a ragged cheer rose from a watching group of Polish sailors who lined the rail of a rust-streaked freighter moored on the south side of the river. The rowers barely noticed, sweat streaming down their faces, ten men struggling to row a ship designed for more than thirty.
The Dyflin—old norse for "Dublin"—was built for Dublin's official 1988 millennial celebrations, copied from the Gokstad boat in Norway, seventy-seven feet long and eighteen feet wide, and built in the traditional Viking style with planking tied rather than nailed to the ribs. Over the past quarter-century the Dyflin has sailed several times to Britain, once as far as Norway, but now it spends much of its life tied up and forgotten at the Dublin Port Authority dock on Custom House Quay. On a winter Sunday with a heatless sun hanging low in the sky, a group of sailing enthusiasts had taken the ship out into Dublin Bay to put it through its paces. It sailed well, driven by a southerly breeze, before the wind dropped and everyone waited, chilled to the bone and tossed around in the wake of ferries coming and going from the Port of Dublin before a turning tide helped them pull back up-river with just a third of the rowers required for such a ship. Billy King, Dyflin's skipper, said it was hard to get enough crew to maintain and sail the ship properly. "People are too busy, they don't have the time anymore," he explained. "This boat's not getting the attention and repair it needs. It's been in the water almost twenty-five years, a unique part of Dublin's past, but most people don't even know it exists." The same could be said for the remains of Viking Dublin, covered up by layers of concrete roadway and high-rise office buildings in the heart of today's city.
Only in the past generation has Ireland come to understand how important the Vikings were to their country. But even today old stereotypes survive—how Vikings were bloodthirsty plundering pagans finally kicked out of Ireland in 1014 by High-King Brian Boru at the Battle of Clontarf. But Brian could not have become high-king without their support, and Ireland would be a very different place today if they had never existed. They built the first towns—Dublin, Limerick, Cork, Waterford, and Wexford—and turned Dublin into a great European trading center that became the economic heart of the Irish Sea. For several decades in the tenth century, Dublin's kings also ruled the north of Britain from York, challenging Anglo-Saxon England for supremacy across all the lands of Britain. Viking fleets provided naval support for Ireland's kings in their dynastic wars for the high-kingship. They brought the first money into Ireland, established the first royal mints. Over the centuries the Norse gene pool merged with the general population to such an extent that few Irish today are without some Viking blood. "One of the things the Vikings lacked in Ireland was women," Pat Wallace explained. "And women are a fairly vital ingredient if you want to stay in business for another generation. So they married Irish women right from the start." Some Norse women came over from Scotland and Norway, wives and daughters of important men, but never enough. So the first settlers in Dublin and the other longphorts looked to Irishwomen to warm their beds on cold winter nights.
Standing beside the Liffey and watching the Dyflin row upstream, Pat Wallace explained how different things looked twelve hundred years ago. "The whole story of Dublin is the story of the Liffey," he said. "It's tamed today, flowing sluggishly between river walls. You've got to imagine huge fleets of ships coming and going on a fast flowing tidal river that was shallow and subject to flash floods. Their ships had a draft of only three feet, and you could probably have walked across the river anytime. It wasn't the best anchorage, but it was politically ideal, a no-man's-land between two rival Irish kingdoms. The town of Dublin grew up at the junction of the Liffey and the Poddle. There's high ground here: a good defensive place protected by two rivers with easy access to a big tidal estuary to float off the ships."
Viking Dublin did not become a proper town—the first in Ireland—until the tenth century. Prior to that the longphort at Ath Cliath, upstream from modern Dublin, was the center of Norse operations, a fortified camp and market that traded in slaves from around the Irish Sea. Ath Cliath was not the only Viking settlement in the Dublin area. Pat Wallace has dated the earliest Viking occupation around Fishamble Street—in downtown Dublin—to approximately 880, and the original monastery site on the Black Pool—Duiblinn—was still being used in 849, after the move to Ath Cliath. Mid-ninth-century Viking graves at Kilmainham, another nearby monastery, suggest it was occupied at the same time. The Annals of Ulster recognized the area around Dublin as a kingdom in the 850s, so there were clearly a number of Viking sites spread out along the Liffey and its tributaries. Since the monastery at Kilmainham continued to exist, along with other monasteries within easy walking distance of Dublin, the invaders must have quickly reached an accommodation with local abbots.
"Viking raiding on monasteries really belongs to the earlier period," historian Donnchadh Ó Corráin said. "After they set up in Dublin and got to know how Irish society worked, they came up with a more effective way of collecting wealth. They levied a tax on the monasteries; in other words, the monasteries paid protection money. When you get raids after the second half of the ninth century, it's usually a case of the arrangement breaking down, rather like a modern inner-city gang torching a store that won't pay up."
Dublin and Annagassan were not the only longphorts established in the 840s. There were bases on the Shannon, at Cork and Limerick in the south, Wicklow in the east, and a number in the north on Lough Neagh and Strangford Lough. This part of Ulster, conveniently close to the Viking lands of Scotland and the Western Isles, was as thickly settled as the area around Dublin. Had the Northern Uí Néill not been so efficient about getting rid of Vikings in their territory in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, a major Viking town might have grown up close to where Belfast is today, challenging Dublin for control of the Irish Sea and perhaps altering Irish history down to the present. As with Dublin, other longphorts were often established on the borders of rival kingdoms. Monasteries in most of the areas occupied by Vikings held onto their lands and continued to function normally, just like the ones around Dublin. Richard Warner, keeper of antiquities at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, explained why.
"Once they'd settled a particular area," he said, "they needed to trade locally. They couldn't survive if they antagonized the Irish living around them, so they did their raiding in other parts of the country. You had Waterford Vikings being a nuisance in the north while northern Vikings with fleets on Lough Neagh pillaged further south. Vikings who lived for years on Strangford Lough were probably on excellent terms with the monasteries around them because they needed food, cattle, someone to sharpen their knives—all those good neighborly things that murder and mayhem tend to discourage. In fact when they did start being a nuisance locally they didn't last very long—the local king destroyed them. So the Vikings were very good at not messing in their own backyard."
Dublin and other longphorts may have been set up with the agreement of local Irish kings. Certainly the Irish were quick to see the advantage of Viking allies in their own dynastic wars. When in 850 the Annals of Ulster record that the king of Connaught's son rebelled against the Uí Néill high-king "with the support of the foreigners and plundered Uí Néill lands from the Shannon to the sea, both churches and states," Norse and Irish alliances were already accepted practice. "There was intermarriage at the very top levels of Norse and Irish society from the middle of the ninth century," Donnchadh Ó Corráin said. "The king of the Northern Uí Néill married his daughter to the Viking King of Dublin. And the Irish aristocracy seems to have been even happier to marry Viking women. The literature of the time makes it clear they found them very attractive." The Vikings had settled in but were becoming too successful. Ireland's kings—especially the Uí Néill—felt increasingly threatened. It was time to show who ruled in Ireland.
In 847 Máel Sechnaill, the Uí Néill king of Meath who had drowned the Viking leader Tuirgeis in a lake two years earlier, became king of Tara and so high-king of Ireland. For centuries Uí Néill propaganda had built up the symbolism of the kingship of Tara—a sacred site with origins going back to Neolithic times—until everyone accepted Tara's ruler as having a special status in Ireland, even though the high-king was only "first among equals." The squabbling family of dynasties called the Uí Néill had held the high-kingship so long that they were the ones to beat for any ambitious king who wanted a chance at the title. Feidlimid—bishop king of Munster—tried to take over the high-kingship between 820 and 847, waging the war that allowed Viking invaders to get settled in Ireland when Irish kings were too preoccupied to pay them much attention.
There were Viking longphorts in Feidlimid's Munster, but it was Uí Néill lands in the midlands and the north that were most at risk. The Northern Uí Néill, ruling from Donegal to the Irish Sea, had problems with the Vikings on Lough Neagh while the Southern Uí Néill, with their rich agricultural heartland between the Boyne and the Liffey, were threatened by the settlements at Dublin and Annagassan. Throughout the ninth century the high-kingship alternated between the Northern and Southern Uí Néill, who fought each other as vigorously as they fought everyone else. But after 845, with the future of the country in the balance, Ireland's kings started getting serious about the Viking menace.
"The Irish put up a ferocious resistance," Donnchadh Ó Corráin said. "More Irish kings were killed fighting the Vikings than anywhere else in Europe. Few Anglo-Saxon kings in England were killed, although the Vikings conquered three-quarters of the country. They ruled all Scotland as over-kings and took a huge bite out of France—the future duchy of Normandy—yet they were unable to destroy a single Irish kingdom. Clearly the Irish had no intention of being overrun."
Máel Sechnaill, the new high-king, was from the Southern Uí Néill. At a battle in 848, the annals record he killed seven hundred "heathens." This was clearly a bad year for the invaders. The kings of Munster and Leinster won a major victory further south, killing two hundred Vikings including the heir to the Viking kingdom of Lochlann. The king of Cashel dispatched a further five hundred "heathens" while another twelve hundred were slaughtered in an oak forest up north. If the figures are accurate—and there is no reason to doubt them—the Vikings lost at least twenty-five hundred warriors in a single year, a huge number by the standards of the time. An Irish mission to Europe's Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Bald—Charlemagne's grandson—boasted that their Viking problem was under control. The emperor, who was having less success with his own Viking problem, was probably extremely envious. Yet Norse settlements in Ireland continued to expand, suggesting that large numbers of new Viking settlers were pouring in from Norway and the Scottish Isles.
From 849 Viking leaders in Ireland had more to worry about than newly energized Irish kings. The king of Lochlann—either part of Norway or a Norwegian kingdom already established in Scotland—sent a fleet of 140 ships to enforce his authority over the Vikings in Ireland. Slaves and monastic treasures must have been generating huge profits for the new longphorts, and he probably was not getting his cut. Norwegian warlords in Ireland clearly resented his attempt at a hostile takeover since the annals record "there was confusion in the whole country."
Soon the Norwegians in Ireland faced a different threat when in 851 the Danes attacked the longphorts at Ath Cliath (Dublin) and Linn Duachaill (Annagassan). Ireland was clearly getting the reputation as a land of opportunity, luring the Norse with a golden potential of plentiful slaves and fertile farmlands. A year after the Danes seized Dublin—they were initially driven off at Annagassan —160 ships arrived with Norwegian reinforcements, more than 5,000 "white foreigners to do battle with the dark foreigners." The battle must have been epic; the Annals of Ulster say it lasted "three days and three nights" before the Norwegians were finally beaten off, survivors abandoning their ships to flee inland where no doubt they caused even more trouble for the Irish.
Irish kings found the dark foreigners preferable to the Norwegians, and the Danes held Dublin and Annagassan until they were dislodged in 853 by Amlaib—in Norse Olaf—son of the king of Lochlann, who arrived with such overwhelming force that Danes, Norwegians, and local Irish kings in the area promptly acknowledged his authority. The Annals of Ulster state that "the foreigners of Ireland submitted to him, and he took tribute from the Irish." For the next twenty years Amlaib and his brother Imar—in Norse Ivar—ruled Dublin, but their focus was split between Ireland and increasing their power in northwest Scotland. How many other Viking settlements around Ireland accepted their authority is debatable since there was as much war between Vikings as there was between Irish kings. Vikings were as likely to use Irish allies in their own wars as the Irish were to have Viking allies. These were confused times.
Throughout his sixteen-year reign, the Uí Néill high-king—Máel Sechnaill—always needed to keep one eye on Viking invaders and the other on Irish kings who would not accept his authority, especially his Uí Néill cousins in the north. In 851 he had taken revenge on the son of the king of Connaught—who had joined the Vikings in plundering his lands the previous year—by drowning him "most cruelly" in a pool. This may have been a form of ritual execution involving no shedding of royal blood, since in 845 Máel Sechnaill had disposed of Viking leader Tuirgeis the same way. Or maybe he just liked drowning people. The high-king then marched on Munster and took hostages, the traditional way of ensuring a rival king's obedience, but was soon back in action against the Vikings. The Annals record "great warfare between the heathens and Máel Sechnaill" but the Vikings had plenty of Irish help. When Amlaib and Imar of Dublin attacked the high-king's heartland of Meath in 859, they were joined by Cerball, an Irish king whose lands centered on the Barrow River flowing into the Irish Sea at Waterford.
Máel knew that his rival Irish kings were just as great a threat as any Viking. Later that year he called a council of "the nobles of Ireland"—probably under the auspices of the bishop of Armagh who, as successor to St. Patrick, had great moral authority across Ireland—to make peace and amity between the men of Ireland. Since the king of the Northern Uí Néill was not present, the high-king's purpose seems to have been to make peace with Cerball and get enough support to bring his northern rival under control. In 860 a combined army from Munster, Connaught, Leinster, and the Southern Uí Néill marched north under Máel Sechnaill's command.
His chief rival and leader of the Northern Uí Néill was a warrior called Áed mac Néill, son of the previous high-king. By 860 he had already smashed a large Viking army in the north and married his daughter to Amlaib, the Viking king of Dublin. This was an astute political move since Dublin could strike at Máel's heartland whenever his back was turned. The high-king's "Army of the South" was camped at Armagh when Áed launched what seems to have been a preemptive night attack, only to be beaten off with heavy casualities. Máel Sechnaill had won the battle but the war continued, and Áed invaded Meath the following year, accompanied by his son-in-law's Viking army. In 862 Áed and Amlaib again plundered Meath. Máel Sechnaill died in November, and Áed was chosen as the new high-king of Ireland; the Northern Uí Néill had taken back the title.
For the next few years Áed focused his attention on bringing the Vikings in the north under his control, perhaps with the approval if not the active support of Dublin's Viking rulers. In 866 "he plundered all the strongholds of the foreigners in the north and took away their heads, their flocks and their herds." The annals record that he collected 240 heads in one particular battle. According to custom he would have displayed them on spears around his camp. Collecting and displaying the heads of conquered enemies had been a common practice throughout Celtic Europe and continued in Ireland and Britain. As late as the seventeenth century, the heads of executed traitors were still being displayed on London Bridge as a warning to any who would dare rise up against the rightful king.
By the time Aed was high-king, the Vikings had already been settled in Ireland for twenty-one years, and the immediate threat was over. The Norse—especially the kings in Dublin—had simply become players in the complex dance of dynastic alliances across Ireland. Amlaib must have understood there would be no new Irish lands to conquer and hold; Irish kings were simply too determined. Leaving his brother Imar as king in Dublin, he went back to Scotland where in 866 "he plundered the entire Pictish country and took away hostages from them."
Scotland at the start of the ninth century was split into four different regions. Britons held the kingdom of Strathclyde in the west. These were the same Celtic people who—centuries earlier—had sent Ireland a number of early saints from their monastery at Whithorn in Galloway. East of Strathclyde and bordering the North Sea was the kingdom of Northumbria, established by earlier Germanic invaders known as Angles. Scotland's north was occupied by another Celtic people called the Picts, while the Dál Riada—Irish colonists who had settled the west coast of Scotland above Strathclyde—ruled a kingdom centered on present-day Argyll. This was Scotland at the time of the first Norse attacks. By the 830s the Picts were so weakened by Viking raids that a Dál Riada king—Kenneth MacAIpine—was able to make himself king of both Picts and Dál Riada. It was the birth of a united Scotland.
There is no agreement about the location of the Norwegian kingdom of Lochlann mentioned in the Irish annals. It used to be assumed it was somewhere on the west coast of Norway, but Donn-chadh Ó Corráin is convinced Lochlann is the name of an independent Norwegian kingdom in Scotland established prior to 837, when its king sent Viking fleets up the Liffey and Boyne Rivers in Ireland. Such a kingdom would have encompassed the Western Isles and Orkney and could also have included Scotland's far north and the coastal parts of the Western Highlands.
After Amlaib plundered the Picts in 866, he sent his captives back to the Dublin slave market at Ath Cliath, which was already the most important trading center in the Irish Sea. He then turned his attention to the Strathclyde kingdom of the Britons, which he and his brother Imar ravaged in 870 after a four-month siege of its royal fortress. The following year "Amlaib and Imar returned to Ath Cliath from Alba with two hundred ships, bringing with them in captivity to Ireland a great prey of Angles and Britons and Picts." A conservative estimate has longships carrying twenty slaves per ship meaning as many as four thousand captives might have been brought back for re-export through the Dublin slave markets—a "great prey" indeed!
The annals describe the captives as Picts, Angles, and Britons (from Strathclyde), but there is no mention of Dál Riada Scots. The Dál Riada suffered as much as the Picts from earlier Viking attacks, but they may have been allied with Amlaib and his Norwegians during this campaign. Constantine, king of the "Scots," would certainly have favored a weaker Strathclyde on his southern border as he was already having trouble with the Danes who had invaded England five years earlier from the east and taken over most of Northumbria. Although the motives of kings and warlords from such confused and distant times are unknowable, there is an intriguing possible reason for why the Dál Riada might have sided with their Norwegian enemies. The Dál Riada had always maintained close links with the Northern Uí Néill back in Ireland. Constantine, the Scottish king, was probably even related to the High-King Áed mac Néill—marriage links were common between leading Irish tribes. Since Áed was also Amlaib's father-in-law, one reason for the absence of Scottish captives and a possible alliance between traditional enemies could have been a family arrangement. By the time Amlaib returned to Dublin with his captives in 871, Constantine and the British king of Strathclyde had almost certainly acknowledged him as over-king.
Ruling a land kingdom was not Amlaib's primary concern, even though he controlled Dublin and large parts of Scotland and the Isles. Richard Warner of the Ulster Museum explained that "Norwegian Vikings saw the Irish Sea as a large pond which they controlled. Their settlements and centers of power tended to be on islands and the coastline around the edges of this big pond. The Irish Sea was their kingdom, their country. If they were kicked out of a particular place, they just set up somewhere else. So long as they ruled the Irish Sea and controlled trade on both sides of it, especially trade in silver and slaves, they had what they wanted."
Amlaib disappears from history after dropping off his captives at Dublin, killed somewhere in Scotland, while his brother Imar ruled the kingdom of Dublin until his death in 873 when the Annals of Ulster called him the "king of the Norsemen of all Ireland and Britain." It was the beginning of the end for the first period of Viking colonization in Ireland. They were still active, allied with or attacking various Irish kingdoms, but the energy seems to have gone out of their efforts. Many left for Britain and France, where there were still opportunities for plunder and new Viking lands could be carved out of Anglo-Saxon England and Carolingian France. This period became known in Ireland as the Forty-year Rest. In 893 the kingdom of Dublin was divided in civil war. The Annals of Ulster report "a great dissension among the foreigners of Ath Cliath and they become dispersed, some following Imar's son, others Sigfrith the jarl." It led to the main period of Icelandic settlement by the Vikings, most of whom came from either Ireland or the Western Isles of Scotland. Irish slaves were an essential part of this settlement, but many free Irish went as well. Hundreds of years later, many of the leading Viking families of Iceland could trace their ancestry back to certain Irish kings, especially Cerball—king of Osraige—who in 859 had helped the Dublin Norse invade Meath.
Cerball's kingdom was strategically located between Leinster and Munster on the river Barrow—a favorite Viking waterway with Waterford at its mouth—so he had become deft at manipulating Viking and Irish interests to his own advantage. He had married his daughters to Viking nobles and, after becoming king of Leinster, acted as protector of Viking Dublin for a while. But in 902, aware of Dublin's weakness, he attacked the Viking kingdom in partnership with the king who ruled north of the Liffey. The annals report "the heathens were driven from Ireland. They abandoned a good number of their ships and escaped half-dead after they had been wounded and broken."
"The kingdoms on either side of the river finally got their act together," Pat Wallace said. "A few Vikings may have stayed on as merchants, but the majority abandoned the settlement with what was left of their fleet and went first to the Isle of Man (named for the pre-Christian Celtic sea god Mannon Mac Lir), then on to England where they got involved in the Viking wars around Chester and York. This crisis in Ireland precipitated the main period of Norwegian settlement in northwest Britain."
Most of the Danes forced out of Dublin by Amlaib in 863 had joined the Danish army that invaded Britain two years later. In 866 Northumberian York fell to the Viking invaders. By 873 they had conquered Mercia, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom in the British midlands. The Danes now divided up the country, half going north to establish the Viking kingdom of York while the other turned south to invade Anglo-Saxon Wessex. When his kingdom collapsed, a Wessex king called Alfred was first powerless to resist the Vikings and hid out in the Somerset marshes until he could gather a new army and restore his kingdom. Alfred—known as Alfred the Great and the Father of England—eventually forced a Danish withdrawal from Wessex and defeated all further attacks on his territory until his death in 899. England was partitioned along a line running from Chester, on the northwest coast above Wales, to London in the southeast. The kingdom of Wessex, south and west of this line of demarcation, was the foundation on which Anglo-Saxon England would develop. North and east of the line was the Danelaw, a Danish "colony" where language, law, and social customs were all Norse. Alfred's successors gradually whittled away the Danelaw and eventually brought it under their control, but it would retain a distinct Norse character for another five hundred years. The ancient Roman city of York became the capital of the Danelaw and was first ruled by Danish kings. But after the fall of Dublin in 902, when so many Norse-Irish settled in northwest Britain, the kingdom of York became the new battleground between "white and dark foreigners," the Norwegians and the Danes.
Further south, Alfred's victories encouraged the Danes to look for easier pickings in present-day Spain, France, and Germany. They had raided frequently since the 840s, but in 879 a massive Viking fleet left Britain's Thames estuary on a twelve-year rampage through northwest Europe. The Carolingian Empire, already breaking apart, was incapable of mounting a concerted defense, although the Norse often faced stiff resistance from individual Frankish leaders. For thirty more years Viking attacks along major rivers like the Rhine and the Seine were an ongoing calamity, contributing to the fragmentation of the Carolingian Empire, until in 911 the king of Western Francia—modern-day France—bought off a Viking leader called Rollo by offering him lands in northern France that became known as Normandy—the Land of the Norsemen. A century and a half later, in 1066, William, duke of Normandy, would return across the English Channel to finish the job his Danish ancestors had been unable to do, completely conquer England.
During the second decade of the tenth century, Norwegians who were settled in the northwest of England and Scotland resumed their attacks on Ireland. Control of the Irish Sea trade may have been hampered by the loss of Irish bases. In 913 the Norse destroyed what annals called "a new fleet of the Ulaid" (Ulstermen) off the English coast. Ulster was probably trying to carve out part of the profitable Irish Sea trade for itself and the Vikings did not like it. Then the annals of 914 report the presence of "a great new fleet of the heathens" at Waterford. The Forty-year Rest was over and Ireland was again under siege.
Over the next two years, large numbers of Viking ships arrived at Waterford where they either reoccupied an old longphort or built a new base from which to plunder the lands of Munster and Leinster. In 917 a terrible sense of doom hung over Ireland. The winter was abnormally cold with rivers and lakes hard-frozen and cattle, fish, and birds dying across the country. The Annals of Ulster report; "horrible portents too, the heavens seemed to glow with comets and a mass of fire appeared with thunder in the west, and it went eastward over the sea." People must have imagined their worst fears realized when two enormous new Viking fleets appeared off the south coast of Ireland, commanded by Sitriuc and Ragnall, grandsons of Imar—the king who had ruled Dublin until 873.
Ragnall is described as "king of the white and dark foreigners," and probably had Danish as well as Norwegian ancestry, so the attack must have been a joint operation. Sitriuc landed farther north while Ragnall sailed into Waterford to attack the Vikings who had arrived earlier. Clearly they had muscled into territory he wanted for himself, so he lost no time slaughtering them. The Irish finished off most of those who got away.
Niall Glundub, the new Irish high-king, knew he had serious trouble on his hands. Niall was son of the same Aed mac Néill who, as high-king, had married his daughter to the Viking ruler in Dublin more than fifty years earlier. Through the complex web of intermarriage that now linked Norse and Irish aristocracy, Niall was related to both Viking leaders. Now he led an army of the Northern and Southern Uí Néill against Ragnall in Munster while his Lein-ster allies attacked Sitriuc at his camp. It was the first of two tragic disasters for the Irish. Although Niall's campaign was inconclusive, the king of Leinster and many Irish "leaders and nobles" were killed and a victorious Sitriuc reoccupied Dublin.
While the war in Ireland continued, Ragnall returned to Britain, defeating the Scots and the Northumbrians to make himself king of York. In 919 Niall gathered an army from across Ireland and attacked Ath Cliath, hoping to push Sitriuc and his people out of Ireland once and for all. The result was the single worst disaster the Irish suffered in all the Viking wars. The high-king of Ireland was killed, along with many senior Irish kings and nobles. A poem in the Annals of Ulster describes the horror and despair felt across the country:
Mournful today is virginal Ireland
Without a mighty king in command of hostages;
It is to view the heaven and not to see the sun
To behold Niall's plain without Niall
Where now are the princes of the western world,
Where now the horror at every clang of arms
Since valiant Niall of Cnucha
Has brought desolation to his great province?
The balance of power between the Irish and the Norse was shattered. Had Sitriuc wanted to conquer more of Ireland, it is unlikely any Irish king could have stopped him. The country was in shock. But the king of Dublin was more interested in his trading empire around the Irish Sea than in acquiring new territory in Ireland. The following year Sitriuc left Ath Cliath with most of his army to replace Ragnall as king of York, leaving his brother Goth-frith as king of Dublin. Gothfrith stayed in Ireland until his death in 934, except for a brief adventure in 927 when he too went chasing off to rule York as regent for Sitriuc's young son. During his reign in Dublin he plundered and raided, sometimes winning and sometimes losing against his Irish enemies, but spent much of his energy trying to bring Limerick and the other Viking settlements in the south under Dublin's control. Dublin was beginning to be more than just a fortified camp, developing into a recognizable town on the high ground between the Liffey and Poddle rivers.
In the south, Limerick, Cork, Waterford, and Wexford were still little more than fortified camps, although they too would develop into towns before the end of the tenth century. In the north the Uí Néill were strong enough to make sure no Viking settlements survived, scouring the land of all invaders. In the long run this hurt the north of Ireland, turning it into an economic backwater once the Viking towns—especially Dublin—became engines of economic growth for the rest of the country.
By 930 the Viking passion for further conquest in Ireland was coming to an end. Sitriuc and his family's preoccupation with York meant their energies were spent outside Ireland. Areas around the towns were Norse but the country was Irish, and as intermarriage continued and Vikings began converting to Christianity, the difference between the races would narrow still further.
"Here they came, these kings from Ireland, calling themselves kings of Dublin and York, kings of Ireland, and the pagans of Britain, looking to build their empire." Michael Wood is a British historian, well known for his documentary films on subjects like the conquistadors, the Trojan War, and Alexander the Great but with a passion for Anglo-Saxon England, especially the tenth century. He had come to York for the 2001 opening of the new Yorvik (Viking York) Center. Now he and its director, archaeologist Richard Kemp, were taking a route Sitriuc might have walked in 921.
York was the ancient Roman city built on the Ouse River that flows into the Humber estuary, one of the two best natural harbors on England's east coast (the other is the Thames). York was connected to similar estuaries on the east coast by a Roman road running through the only northern pass across the Pennine Mountains. It was the strategic heart of northern Britain, center of a kingdom that bordered both the Irish and North Seas. From its west coast kings of York and Dublin had complete mastery of the Irish Sea. From its east coast they were connected to highly developed Viking trade routes that ran across the North Sea and into the Baltic.
"The Roman walls were still standing very high indeed in the ninth century," Richard Kemp said, "so your impression entering York would be this great frontage of decaying walls and towers with the Viking town in front of them." Richard and Michael Wood climbed a ramp from the river—still called the Dublin Steps, where longships from Ireland once docked—and crossed the Ouse Bridge into Viking York, now covered by the later medieval city.
"There's a great description from the tenth century of the city teeming with people from different nations and crammed with the goods of far-off countries," Michael said, "with maybe tens of thousands of people. They're talking about a great mercantile city."
Richard agreed. "It was a tightly crammed mass of buildings, one on top of another. They're building cellars so they can create even more space. There are craftsmen working in their backyards, churning out goods. Yorvik was the place to be, all right." He and Michael went on to discuss the range of goods found during excavation—walrus ivory, silks from the Middle East, jewelry, pottery, amber, cowry shells from the Red Sea, silver coins minted in York, even a coin from Samarkand on the borders of China—it gave an incredible sense of the scale of Viking trade.
The historian and the archaeologist walked together along Coppergate, still following the course of the original Viking street. Richard had worked on the excavation of Yorvik and he pointed to where modern property lines still followed those established by Norse urban planners. A Burger King so narrow its customers must eat on two floors was built on an eleven-hundred-year-old ground plan. "It seems buildings and streets were laid out all at the same time in 910 on top of a ramshackle arrangement of earlier houses," Richard explained. York's Viking rulers built a new oak bridge, a new commercial district, and new streets where privately held house plots ran back from shop fronts and market stalls. These were the urban ideas carried back across the Irish Sea to create a true Norse-Irish capital in Dublin.
No wonder the kings of Dublin and York exchanged Ath Cliath—still little more than an overgrown fortified camp—for the wealth and comfort of a bustling and wealthy city. Even the Roman heating system of what was then a five-hundred-year-old citadel may still have worked. Sitriuc died in 927 when his son Amlaib—in Norse Olaf Sitriucsson—was only a child, so Gothfrith came over from Dublin as regent. He lasted less than a year. After the death of Alfred the Great in 899, his heirs had continued to expand Anglo-Saxon England into the Danelaw. In 927 a Saxon king called Athel-stan took York and expelled Gothfrith and the young Amlaib. Gothfrith returned to Dublin where he died in 934, described as "a most cruel king of the Norsemen." Amlaib went back to Scotland where history loses sight of him for a while, so it was another Amlaib—Amlaib Gothfrithsson—Gothfrith's son and the new king of Dublin, who next claimed York and came close to stopping Anglo-Saxon England's expansion in its tracks.
The great Norse and Celtic alliance that Amlaib Gothfrithsson put together to win back the Viking north of Britain from the Anglo-Saxons may have been years in the making. When in 936 the Annals of Ulster report that "Clonmacnoise was plundered by the foreigners of Ath Cliath and they remained two nights at it, something unheard of from ancient times," it is safe to say Amlaib was building up his war chest. Sometime in the summer of 937 he sailed with his fleet from Dublin, traveling north around the top of Scotland and down into the North Sea, gathering reinforcements along the way.
Standing in the shadow of York's fortress walls, Michael Wood explained the sense of destiny that gripped the allies. "There's a great Welsh poem that describes the buildup to the invasion," he said. "We'll all join together, it says, the Celts, the Welsh, the Cornish, the Irish of Ireland, the Vikings of Ireland, the men of Dublin, the Picts and the Scots, we'll all come together and we're going to drive the English out where they first landed 400 years ago."
In spite of the rhetoric, Vikings and their allies just wanted the Anglo-Saxons south of the demarcation line that had been agreed to by Alfred the Great fifty years earlier. Amlaib was a pragmatic Viking. So long as Athelstan held York and Northumbria, he was losing profits. And Amlaib's allies saw how easily Athelstan picked off Northumbria. What was to prevent him doing the same to Strathclyde and Dál Riada? Athelstan was already calling himself Rex Totius Orbis Brìtanniae—king of the whole world of Britain. He had to be stopped.
"It's pretty certain a huge fleet of 615 ships sailed into the Humber," Michael Wood said. "That's Amlaib Gothfrithsson and Amlaib Sitriucsson, like a sort of family mafia, come back to claim their property. We don't know whether the Scots, Cumbrians, and Strathclyde Celts sailed with them in the boats or marched to join them somewhere along the way. But there's no doubt the Northumbrians of York joined with the invaders. Imagine the scene: it's late in 937—maybe November—and the weather's bad. Northumbria's fallen to the invaders, and Athelstan suddenly finds his whole house of cards is collapsing. What's he going to do, leave the North to Sitriuc and his allies, or attack immediately? Towards the end of 937 he brings a great army out of Southern England, drawn from Wessex and Mercia."
According to the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, the armies met at a place called Brunanburh, probably somewhere along the old Roman Road leading south from York into Saxon-held Mercia. Generations later the battle was still being called "the Great War." One of the best-known Icelandic sagas, Egil's Saga, written around 1230, makes Brunanburh a centerpiece of the story, although the hero—a Viking—fought on Athelstan's side.
"It was a catastrophic defeat for the invaders," Michael said. "The Annals of Ulster report 'a great, lamentable and horrible battle was cruelly fought between the Saxons and the Norsemen in which several thousand of Norsemen, who are uncounted, fell but their king, Amlaib, escaped with a few followers. A large number of Saxons fell on the other side but Athelstan, the king of the Saxons, enjoyed a great victory.' An Irish source gives a list of famous dead—five Irish kings, the king of Strathclyde, the prince of Scotland, and the king of the Western Isles. You get the list of the great leaders that died like some kind of heroic poem."
The following year Amlaib returned to Dublin and immediately went off plundering monasteries to recoup his finances. What would have happened if he had won at Brunanburh? Like all Vikings, he was more interested in wealth and trade than lands. But York in the 930s was still the trading capital of Britain, and Dublin's king would have held great economic power over the south, which would have increased his influence back in Ireland. Also a reinvigo-rated king of the Scots after Brunanburh would certainly have extended his kingdom south into Northumbria, resulting in Britain being shared more equally between England and Scotland, with a Viking king of Dublin and York holding the levers of economic power. It is one of the great "what ifs" of history. The subsequent history of Britain, and therefore the world, could have been very different. But it was not to be, although Amlaib did end up with a victory of sorts. When Athelstan died two years later in 939, Dublin's king fought his way back into power at York.
Amlaib, followed by the other Amlaib—Sitriuc's son—ruled York on and off for the next ten years, but the tide of history had begun to flow against them. The Anglo-Saxon drive to unify all England under Alfred's successors continued. But when Almaib Sitriucsson was finally thrown out of York and returned to Dublin, he had learned the value of a major urban center. By the middle of the tenth century, Sitriuc's dynasty was creating an economic environment in Ireland heavily influenced by what they had already experienced in York.
On a wintry morning in modern Dublin, Pat Wallace took a taxi ride along the streets that still follow the lines of the Viking streets he had excavated between 1974 and 1981. "Dublin was the capital town," he said, "the big shopping center of Scandinavians in the west. There were no towns on Orkney, the Shetlands, the Faeroes, Iceland, Scotland, or the Isle of Man. Dublin was 'The Town,' the capital of the Irish Sea."
Dublin was cold and damp as only a northern European city can be in winter, rain coursing off buildings and running in torrents down the streets, buses and cars splashing unwary pedestrians who dodged from doorway to doorway hunched under black umbrellas. Viking Dubliners would have found such weather equally unpleasant. As Pat's taxi drove south over the Liffey at O'Connell Street Bridge and turned west along the river towards Wood Quay, he scrubbed at the misted window with his sleeve to point out the Liffey flowing sullenly between stone-lined banks. "All of this was underwater during the Viking period," he explained. "This was a broad tidal channel with fringing salt marshes, and maybe a subsidiary pool somewhere around here where boats could be moored. At high tide the water would be lapping at the walls of the town."
Halfway up Fishamble Street, Pat Wallace and his colleagues had excavated a huge earthen bank with a wooden palisade on top, the first of a number of different structures built before 1300 to push the Liffey back and defend the town from an attack from the river. They went on to find nine different stages where, between around 900 and 1300, the Liffey had been pushed back.
The taxi driver turned away from the Liffey into Fishamble Street, the steeply curving road that still follows the line of the earlier Viking lane. The taxi stopped halfway up while Pat explained the layout of the town. "This was where the river came to, the limit of the Viking town. Everything below here was reclaimed by the Normans in the thirteen century."
The National Museum of Ireland began excavations on Viking Dublin in the early 1960s, but it was not until 1969 that the main excavations at Fishamble Street and Wood Quay began. Derelict areas of Dublin were being cleared away to make room for extensive new municipal offices, and archaeologists like Pat Wallace had only a limited time until new construction covered the site. There was nationwide outrage. By 1979 thousands of Dubliners were taking to the streets to try to save the best-preserved urban Viking remains anywhere in Europe for posterity. But the saying "you can't fight City Hall" proved true when in 1982 the ancient Viking town of Dublin was covered up again with high-rise offices. But in the interim archaeologists had an opportunity to explore the lanes and visit the houses of Ireland's first town.
"We found all the evidence of town layout, the development of the dockside, ship timbers, environmental remains," Pat said. "We can reconstruct this town perfectly. It's different from Roman towns that are laid out in straight lines on a grid system. Here the accent was on defense, making use of the high ground. Dublin developed from the dockside up the hill in this direction. Up here we found twelve neighboring plots, all side-by-side with their houses, outhouses, backyards, laneways—the whole works."
Pat Wallace believes the waterfront settlement downstream from Ath Cliath started expanding soon after Sitriuc reoccupied the longphort in 917. By the mid 950s proper streets were being laid out, influenced by what was known in England. Sitting in a Dublin taxi waiting for the rain to stop, he drew a map of Fishamble Street with his finger on the fogged window. "The plots of ground faced onto the street. You bought your own plot, fenced it off from your neighbor, then built your house. This was your house, your property." Pat's finger traced out the Viking property lines on the window. "That's the essence of a Viking town, a neighborhood of individually owned plots and properties controlled by the king."
With the rain stopped, Pat Wallace left the taxi and tapped the pavement with his foot. "Eight feet under this roadway the Viking levels start," he said. This was the town of Amlaib Sitriucsson. For more than a generation, from 956 to 980, Irish kings left him mostly alone, and the growing town enjoyed political and military stability. During excavations in Fishamble Street, archaeologists discovered that the majority of houses from this period share a single design, rectangular with curved corners, thatched roof held up by interior posts to provide three distinct aisles—side aisles for sleeping and a central area for living. The size of a Fishamble Street house was—on average—twenty-five feet long by eighteen feet wide, which allowed room for manufacture as well as living. These houses were probably designed and built by local Irish carpenters and craftsmen who had come in from the surrounding area, using construction techniques employed in the local monasteries. They would need rebuilding about every fifteen years as supporting roof posts rotted away in the damp ground.
Wattle was the most common building material, hazel rods interwoven with springy tree-branches and saplings to make screens for walls, floor-surfaces and even to line the stinking cesspits that were dug in the fenced-off yards behind every house. "The smells must have been atrocious," Pat Wallace said. "I believe they insulated their wattle walls with cow dung. Can you imagine the stink of that: some fellow reaching inside a big basket to smear it all over the outside walls?" Dublin in the tenth and eleventh centuries was, as Pat Wallace described it, "a yellow, brown, organic, thatch, straw, and wattle hazel-rod world."
Interior floors were sometimes lined with gravel and paving stone but more often had a wattle mat laid directly on the ground. With no windows, light came in through doors at each end of the house, one opening into a backyard where animals shared the space with the cesspit and a small vegetable garden, the other onto the street where market stalls were set up and goods offered for sale. Houses were dark, smoky, and damp with a single cooking hearth in the center; no chimneys, just a smoke hole in the thatch. Houses were pressed so close together that a single out-of-control fire would endanger the whole town. And with cesspits leaking into the wells, epidemic disease was a constant reality. In 951 the Annals of Ulster record "a great outbreak of leprosy among the foreigners of Ath Cliath, and dysentery."
Walking up Fishamble Street to where it joins Christ Church Place, the modern name for Skinner's Row where cattle were brought into town for butchering, Pat Wallace explained the passion that grips all archaeologists. "It's not about verifying history," he said, "it's about discovering humanity. We found a jeweler bringing in raw lumps of amber from the Baltic Sea to make earrings, necklaces—all sorts of amber things. Not only did we find his house but we could see where he'd walked in and out of his neighbor's plot, tracking chips of amber on his shoes. I once found a clay mold broken where the craftsmen had thrown it away. Imagine all the good Old Norse swear words he must have let loose when he broke it! Things like this bring people from a thousand years ago back to vivid life; the whole town becomes real. It would be full of noise, dogs barking, people shouting, a mass of different accents and languages—Old Norse, Old English, and Middle English because there's an awful lot of English influence from Chester and the western ports, Gaelic and the beginnings of Scottish Gaelic, exotic languages from the Mediterranean, along with traders from even farther afield."
The town developed westward in the late Viking Age, along present-day High Street. Property owners were important men with a voice in running Dublin. "There was a parliament called 'the Thing,'" Pat explained. "It wasn't democratic; you were there because you were important enough to own a block of land and were in favor with the king." Kings of Dublin—like Amlaib—had their royal halls at the top of the town, where Dublin Castle is today. They ruled over the first real townsmen in Ireland, already a mixture of Irish and Norse.
By the middle of the tenth century Christianity was beginning to take root in the Viking towns. Amlaib Sitriucsson was Christian, and the first Viking church in Dublin may have been built during his reign. Late in life he married Gormlaith, daughter of the king of Leinster. The integration of Norse and Irish was well under way, although Amlaib still wanted to control the rich agricultural heartland between the Boyne and the Liffey Rivers, as his predecessors had tried unsuccessfully to do for a hundred years. Amlaib's hopes were dashed by another Irish king with the name Máel Sechnaill—the future high-king of Ireland—who defeated the Dublin Vikings at the Battle of Tara in 980, killing Amlaib's son. It was the beginning of the end for Dublin's Viking kings; the end of their hopes for a wider political role within Ireland. After the battle Amlaib Sitriucsson gave up the kingship of Dublin to another son—Sitric Silken-beard—and retired to the monastery island of Iona where he died "a Christian penitent" the following year. His wife Gormlaith lived on for another fifty years, next marrying Brian Boru and then—after Brian's death—Máel Sechnaill, her first husband's conqueror. But it was Gormalith's second husband, Brian Boru, who would become the most famous king in Irish history, nearly succeeding in uniting Ireland into a single European-style monarchy.