"Murchadh was the Hector of Erinn in valor, in championship, in generosity, in munificence. He was the pleasant, intelligent, affable, accomplished Samson of the Hebrews in his own career and in his time. He was the second powerful Hercules, who destroyed and exterminated the serpents and monsters of Erinn.... He was the gate of battle and the sheltering tree, the crushing sledge-hammer of the enemies of his fatherland and of his race during his career.
"When this very valiant, very great, royal champion, and plundering, brave, powerful hero saw the crushing and the repulse that the Danars and pirates gave to the Dal Cais, it operated upon him like death or a permanent blemish; and he was seized with boiling, terrible anger, and his bird of valor and championship arose, and he made a brave, vigorous, sudden rush at a battalion of the pirates, like a violent, impetuous, furious ox that, is about being caught, or like a fierce, tearing, swift, all-powerful lioness deprived of her cubs, or like the roll of a deluging torrent, that shatters and smashes everything that resists it; and he made a hero's breach and a soldier's field through the battalions of the pirates. And the historians of the foreigners testified after him that there fell fifty by his right, and fifty by his left hand in that onset. Nor did he administer more than one blow to any of them; and neither shield, nor corselet, nor helmet, resisted any of these blows, which clave bodies and skulls alike. Thus three times he forced his way backward through the battalions in that manner."
Sitric, the Danish prince, married as before mentioned to a daughter of Brian, is described as looking at the fight from his Dublin watch-tower, with his wife at his side. Seeing the mass of plumages and hair shorn off by the gleaming weapons, and flying over the heads in the wind, he exclaimed, "Well do the foreigners reap the field, for many is the sheaf whirled aloft over them." But in the evening he was obliged to endure the sight of his foreign friends and allies fleeing into the sea "like a herd of cows in heat from sultry weather, or from gnats, or from flies. And they were pursued quickly and lightly into the sea, where they were with great violence drowned, so that they lay in heaps and in hundreds and in battalions." Sitric's wife had not yet learned to feel strong sympathy with her husband's politics; and, if he had insisted on her presence in order to be a spectator of the defeat of her countrymen, he was sadly disappointed:
"Then it was that Brian's daughter, the wife of Amhlaibh's son, said: 'It appears to me,' said she, 'that the foreigners have gained their inheritance.' [Footnote 297] 'What is that, O girl?' said Amhlaibh's son. 'The foreigners are only going into the sea as is hereditary to them.' 'I know not whether it is on them, but nevertheless they tarry not to be milked.'
[Footnote 297: Sitric had used that expression at an early hour of the fight, when he imagined the Danes were gaining on their enemy.]
"The son of Amhlaibh was angered with her, and he gave her a blow which knocked a tooth out of her head."
Murcadh's death after a fatiguing day of fight has been already related. While the fierce struggle was going on, thus was the brave and devout old monarch employed:
"When the combatants met, his cushion was spread under him, and he opened his psalter, and he began to recite his psalms and his prayers behind the battle, and there was no one with him but Laideen, his own horseboy. Brian said to his attendant, 'Watch thou the battle and the combatants while I recite my psalms.' Brian then said fifty psalms, fifty prayers, and fifty paters, and he asked the attendant how the battalions were circumstanced. The attendant answered, 'I see them, and closely confounded are they, and each of them has come within grasp of the other. And not more loud to me would be the blows in Tomar's wood if seven battalions were cutting it down, than are the resounding blows on the heads, and bones, and skulls of them.' Brian asked how was the banner of Murchadh. 'It stands,' said the attendant, 'and the banners of the Dal Cais round it.'... His cushion was readjusted under Brian, and he said fifty psalms, fifty prayers, and fifty paters, and he asked the attendant how the battalions were. The attendant said, 'There lives not a man who could distinguish one of them from the other, for the greater part of the hosts on either side are fallen, and those that are alive are so covered—their heads, and legs, and garments, and drops of crimson blood—that the father could not recognize his own son there.' And again he asked how was the banner of Murchadh. The attendant answered, 'It is far from Murchadh, and has gone through the hosts westward, and it is stooping and inclining. Brian said, 'Erinn declines on that account. Nevertheless so long as the men of Erinn shall see that banner, its valor and its courage shall be upon every man of them.' Brian's cushion was readjusted, and he said fifty psalms, fifty prayers, and fifty paters, and the fighting continued during all that time. Brian then cried out to the attendant, how was the banner of Murchad, and how were the battalions. The attendant answered, 'It appears to me like as if Tomar's wood was being cut down, and set on fire, its underwood and its young trees, and as if the seven battalions had been unceasingly destroying it for a month, and its immense trees and its great oaks left standing.'"