Page 113 - Demo

Chapter Four 113
he Dead at Clonmacnoise
(Translated from the Irish by T. W. Rolleston)
In a quiet-water’d land, a land of roses,
Stands Saint Kieran’s city fair:
And the warriors of Erin in their famous generations Slumber there.
There beneath the dewy hillside sleep the noblest
Of the clan of Conn,
Each below his stone with name in branching Ogham And the sacred knot thereon.
There they laid to rest the seven Kings of Tara,
There the sons of Cairbre sleep-
Battle-banners of the Gael, that in Kieran’s plain of crosses Now their inal hosting keep.
These adventurous, ierce, hardy, warlike sea-rovers, were known to the Irish as the Lochlannaigh, or Danes, and were classiied into two divisions, Dubh-Galls-Dark Foreigners, Fingalls-Fair Foreigners. The former were from Denmark proper, the latter from Norway and Sweden. These “Norsemen,” to give them their universal name, originally inhabited Northern Germany, but were driven out of their lands by the Emperor Charlemagne be- cause they refused to accept Christianity, as decreed by him, their conqueror. Following their expulsion, they then took refuge in the Scandinavian countries of Norway, Sweden and Denmark, simply because they were closest to their former homeland, and which, as a result of their raw climate and cold infertility, were at the time sparsely inhabited. As a result there was little, if any, resistance made to the new settlers.
There are many reasons put forward as to why the Norsemen became the scourge of so many civilizations then in existence. First of all, the freezing almost barren mountain- ous lands of Norway and Sweden, and the peat-forming fens of Denmark, could not yield enough food to support and sustain the ever growing numbers of these new inhabitants, without the expenditure of huge amounts of toil and industry in farm husbandry. As these