Between plundering and trading and marriages and alliances Norse and Irish got to know each other well, as we may see by the story of king Olaf Tryggwason and his dog. Olaf the Magnificent, most glorious and far-shining of sea-kings, famed beyond all others for the surpassing perfection of his warships, being married to Gytha sister of Olaf Kuaran king of Dublin, abode in England and occasionally in Ireland. “He happened once,” says the Saga, “to be present in Ireland with a large naval force engaged in war. A foray to get stores being necessary, the men went on land and drove towards the shore a multitude of sheep and cattle; and there followed them a yeoman, who begged Olaf to give him back his cows from among the flock that they were driving off. King Olaf answered: ‘Take your cows if you know them, and are able to separate them from the rest without delaying our journey; but, I think, neither you nor any other man can do that feat among so many hundred cattle as are in the drove.’ The yeoman had a big cattle dog with him. So he sent the dog among the herd as they were driven off together, and the dog ran up and down among them all, and soon picked out and put aside as many of the man’s cattle as in the yeoman’s opinion were there. As these were all marked with one and the same mark, it was evident that the dog must have had a perfect knowledge of them. Then the King said: ‘Wonderfully clever is your dog, yeoman; will you give him to me?’ And the man answered: ‘I will gladly do so.’ Then the King straightway, in return, gave the yeoman a large gold bracelet, and promised him his friendship therewith. This dog, the best and most sensible of all dogs, was named Wigi, and Olaf had him for a long time afterwards.” There came a day later when Olaf was entrapped by his enemies in the Baltic, sailing with his fleet on the far-famed Long Serpent—“never warship has been built in Northern lands its equal for beauty and size.” “Right and proper is it,” said Earl Eric, “that such a noble ship should belong to Olaf Tryggwason, for he is truly said to surpass other kings as much as the Long Serpent surpasses other ships.” The King, with shield and helmet overlaid with gold, and red silken kirtle, stood on the ship’s prow, a great dragon’s head ornamented so that it seemed of gold, and when it gleamed far over the sea as the sun shone upon it, fear and terror were shot into men’s hearts. “Lay the big ship more in front. My place in this warlike host is not at the back of all my men,” he called. “I had the Serpent built of greater length than other ships that she might stretch the more boldly beyond them in the battle.” The conflict of heroes raged long. As his enemies poured over the deck King Olaf, blood falling over his face and arm from under helmet and mail-sleeve, vanished, no man knew how, in the waters. The Long Serpent, sinking in the sea, was of no use to its conquerors. His queen was brought from under the deck weeping bitterly and so sore wounded with grief that she could neither eat nor drink, and died in nine days. Throughout the battle the dog Wigi lay without stirring before the castle of the Short Serpent; it carried him home along with Einar Thambaskelf, the youth of eighteen, hardest shooter of his time, who stood by the King in the Long Serpent, who when his own bow was broken stretched the King’s beyond the arrow head and flung it away (“Too weak, too weak, the great King’s bow”), who had sprung after the King into the water, and for his courage was given freedom by the victors. As they touched land Einar “before going on shore, went to the dog as he lay there, and said, ‘We’ve no master now, Wigi!’ At these words the dog sprang up growling, and with a loud yell, as if seized by anguish of heart, he ran on shore with Einar. There he went and lay down on the top of a mound, and would take no food from anyone, though he drove away other dogs, beasts and birds from what was brought to him. From his eyes, tears coursed one another down his nose, and thus bewailing the loss of his liege-lord, he lay till he died.” From that day grief and sorrow lay on Einar. And men remembered the prophecy of the blind yeoman of Moster that in one voyage Norway should lose its four most noble things—the king, whose like had never been seen, the queen, best for sense and goodness that ever came into Norway, the greatest ship ever built in Norway, and the Irish dog, wiser and more clever than any other dog in the land.
In Ireland the power of the Scandinavians was shown in the foundation of two kingdoms, along the two main lines of sea traffic—Dublin on the eastern sea, and Limerick on the Atlantic. The Norwegian kingdom on the Liffey had its centre in the mound raised by the river-side for its Thing or Moot, near where the Dublin Parliament House rose nine hundred years later. The kingdom stretched over a narrow strip of shore, the memory of which was preserved for a thousand years, till a generation ago, in the jurisdiction of the Dublin Corporation over a long line of coast from the river Delvin below Drogheda to Arklow. Four fiords—Strangford and Carlingford to the north, and Wexford and Waterford to the south—lay outside the actual kingdom of Dublin, but were closely connected with it. Waterford kings were at times of the same family as the Dublin kings, and in the ninth and tenth centuries Waterford was sometimes independent and sometimes united to Dublin.
Dublin commanded a double line of commerce—from Scandinavia to Gaul, and by York to Novgorod and the Eastway. The kingdom was in close connection with the Danish kingdom of Northumbria, with its capital at York. For Danish Northumbria, opening on the North Sea by the Humber, formed the common meeting ground, the link which united the Northmen of Scandinavia and the Northmen of Ireland. A mighty confederation grew up. Members of the same house were kings in Dublin, in Man, and in York. Their descendants were among the chief settlers in Iceland. The Dublin kings married into the chief houses of Ireland, Scotland, and the Hebrides. The sea was the common highway which bound the powers together, and the sea was held by fleets of swift long-ships with from ninety to a hundred and fifty rowers or fighting men on board. The Irish Channel swarmed with ships of the Dublin kingdom. It became the mart of the Scandinavian traders, of Icelandic sailors, and men of Norway, and merchant princes landing from their cruise to sell their merchandise or their plunder. “You must this summer make a trading voyage,” said Earl Hakon to his friend Thori Clack, “as is customary now with many, and go to Dublin in Ireland.” Far-travelled traders carried from Dublin and York, deep into the inland of Russia, English coins and weapons and ornaments such as were used in Great Britain and Ireland.
“Limerick of the swift ships,” looking out to the Atlantic and the Gaulish sea, was a rival even to Dublin. The Norwegians first fortified the town by an earthen or wooden fence, but presently by a wall of stone, “Limerick of the rivetted stones.” Behind it lay a number of Norse settlements scattered over Limerick, Kerry, and Tipperary. The first settlers were from the Hebrides where Irishmen and Norse and Danes mingled as one people, interchanging names and mingling speech so that the Norse used Gaelic words for goblets for which they drank their wine, and the oats for their bread. The name Maccus, a later form of Magnus, was in the tenth century only used by the reigning families of Limerick, the Hebrides, and the Isle of Man. United by kinship and by trade, the lords of the Isles and the lords of Limerick constantly aided one another, and made joint expeditions. Once more the Gaulish trade was revived, and vessels sailed out from the Shannon to fetch wine and silks from the harbours of the Loire and the Garonne. From every bay and river-mouth between Waterford and Lough Foyle streams of commerce poured into the main current of the Atlantic trade. After a brief interruption in fact Ireland was once more in the ninth and tenth century in the full current of European life, and that in a double way. The lines of merchant vessels carried her trade, while the stream of her professors and scholars and missionaries brought her fame to every court in Europe.
King Ælfred has left his record of the three Irishmen who came “in a boat without oars from Hibernia, whence they had stolen away because for the love of God they would be on pilgrimage, they recked not where. The boat in which they fared was wrought of three hides and a half, and they took with them enough meat for seven nights.” On the seventh day they drifted ashore at Cornwall, and were taken on to Ælfred whose captives they had thus become. Perhaps from them that great-hearted and far-sighted English king learned to honour the Irish. He sent gifts to monasteries in Ireland. He noted in his Chronicle the death of Suibhne, anchorite of Clonmacnois, “the most learned teacher among the Scots,” said Ælfred.
From this story some may have supposed that the “primitive” Irishmen had not yet got beyond the rude fishing-boats of savage life. But we have here in fact only an instance of the strange contrasts which make Irish history so full of wonder, so rich in human interest. In the midst of a world of furious trade and war, Irish poets and mystics, obedient to the ancient message of their masters, still went down to the sea-brink abiding there “the revelation of knowledge.” In the vast solitude of sea and sky beyond which, in which, waited the revelation, the seen and the unseen were confounded and limits of space and time fell away in infinity. The everlasting gates were there, the way of the soul’s escape from imprisonment in shadows, the opening of the Eternal Reality. Abandoning will and fear, they cast themselves on Nature and the God immanent in Nature, and summoned by the silent call went out in faith, “they recked not where.”
Thus in Ireland old worlds were ever intermixed with new. Pilgrims cast themselves on the sea in curraghs, and drifted to the Faroes and to Iceland carrying with them the power of piety and learning. But there were also Irish traders with business minds. They, like the French, learned from the Scandinavians to build ships, and like the French, used Norse words for their new sea-faring vessels, “brown-planked” warships, and merchant ships, ships large and small, and boats; and for the planks and sides, bottom-boards, row-benches, taff-rail, gunwale, the creaking, of the row-bench, the steersman. They learned too from the Scandinavians their method of raising a navy by dividing the country into districts, each of which had to equip and man so many ships which were to assemble at the summons to arms into the united war fleet—the levy and the fleet both called by Norse words. Sagas of the Danish time tell of “the fleet of the men of Munster,” of “Munster of the swift ships,” six or seven score of them ready to sail to Dundalk or to the Mull of Cantyre at the call of the king of Cashel.
The Irish had also their fleets of merchant ships. An old poem of about 900 a.d. gives a description of the dwellers on the coast from Carn or Mizen Head to Cork (the Irish clan of the O’Mahoneys chief among them)—