Page 114 - Demo

114 Stephen Dunford: The Journey of The IrIsh
Norsemen were warriors by inclination and habit, they were unwilling, it would appear, to devote the time and energy required to make fertile their new lands. Moreover, they were expert mariners and shipbuilders who were not afraid to trust their light, oak-built, shallow-draught galleys on unfamiliar waters, far from their own shores. When referencing the Norsemen in her History of Ireland, the Irish scholar Dorothea Casserley said of them:
“...they were undeterred from raids and murder by any fear of God or regard for the next life...Small wonder, then, that they neglected to toil with spade and ploughshare, in or- der to win a scanty living from the hard, reluctant soil, when they could spend the long sum- mer months in their ships on the blue expanse of the Atlantic and the sunny Mediterranean, amassing stores of plunder-gold, grain, cattle, to be carried home and consumed during the stormy winter months. The danger only made the sport more exciting, and the Viking (i.e Norse lord) who fell during a foray was considered to have died the only glorious death. ‘What is the lot of a brave man,’ said one of their poets, ‘but to fall among the foremost?’ ”
So it happened that about the end of the eight century, the Norsemen began making concerted attacks on the countries of western and southern Europe, and Ireland, England, Spain, France, even Russia, all suffered at the hands of these fearless sea-faring warriors. They would arrive in shallow though swift warships, some of which were up to 100ft in length which enabled them to sail both the oceans and rivers.
Adorned with fierce carved dragons on the bows, the vessels would have been packed with tall, fierce and well armed, tattooed warriors whose shields dangled from the boats’sides. According to one 10th century chronicler, the invaders “as tall as date plums, blond and ruddy” would pour from the ships, their well sharpened broad-bladed swords gleaming and their hearts hungry for plunder. It was said, ‘that for three hundred years these marauding invaders wreaked radical changes across the political map of Europe, from Norway to Sicily and from Galway to Kiev.’
With her many rich monasteries, her almost non-existent defences, her innumerable navigable rivers and broken coastline, unsurprisingly, Ireland soon attracted the attention of these Norsemen, and in 795 they raided the island of Reachra, now named Lambay, near Dublin; the name comes from the Norse meaning ‘lamb/ewe-island.’ The invaders plun- dered and sacked its monastery, and began a nightmare of continuous attacks which lasted
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