The inferiority of the Irish warriors in defensive arms gave little concern to their historian. Armed or unarmed, they were a match for the world. (This under certain conditions is our own belief.)
"Woe to those who attacked them if they could have avoided attacking them, for it was swimming against a stream, it was pummelling an oak with fists, it was a hedge against the swelling of a spring tide, it was a string upon sand or a sunbeam, it was the fist against a sunbeam to attempt to give them battle or combat."
Day at Clontarf.
The battle began with a single combat, there being a previous challenge in the case. Plait, the foreign warrior, came before his lines and shouted, "Faras (where is? an attempt at Danish) Donall?" "Here, thou reptile!" said the Irish champion. The battle was sharp and short, the two warriors falling on the sod at the same moment, their left hands clutching each other's hair, and their hearts transfixed by their swords.
Heaven and earth are ransacked for sublime images to give an idea of the dread struggle that took place between the iron-covered and the defenceless warriors on each side:
"To nothing small (we quote our text) could be likened the firm, stern, sudden, thunder motion, and the stout, valiant, haughty, billow roll of these people on both sides. I could compare it only to the boundless, variegated wonderful firmament that has cast a heavy, sparkling shower of flaming stars over the surface of the earth, or to the startling, fire-darting roar of the clouds and the heavenly orbs, confounded and crashed by all the winds in their contention against each other."
It was a terrible spectacle without doubt—the din and clang of sword and axe on shields and helms, the cries of the combatants, and the lurid flashes from the polished surfaces of the arms, and the effect of all intensified by dying groans, and the sight of bodies writhing in agony as life was about to quit them. It is not so easy to understand, taking distance into account, how the following circumstance could occur:
"It was attested by the foreigners and foreign women who were watching from the battlements of Ath Cliath, that they used to see flashes of fire from them in the air on all sides."
Malachy's forces remained inactive during the main part of the fight at least. Dr. Todd acquits him, however, of treachery to the national cause. We quote some passages of a description of the fight imputed to him:
"There was a field and a ditch between us and them, and the sharp wind of the spring coming over them toward us. And it was not a longer time than a cow could be milked that we continued there, when not one person of the two hosts could recognize another.... We were covered, as well our heads as our faces, and our clothes, with the drops of the gory blood, carried by the force of the sharp, cold wind which passed over them to us.... Our spears over our heads had become clogged and bound with long locks of hair, which the wind forced upon us when cut away by well-aimed swords and gleaming axes, so that it was half occupation to us to endeavor to disentangle and cast them off."