An important distinction must be made at this point between the effects of the Northern invasion in England and in Ireland.  In the former the invaders and natives became after a while more or less assimilated, and, under Canute, an orderly government, composed of both nationalities, was, we know, established.  In Ireland this was never the case.  The reason, doubtless, is to be found in the far closer similarity of race in the former case than the latter.  In Ireland the “Danes,” as they are popularly called, were always strangers, heathen tyrants, hated and despised oppressors, who retorted this scorn and hatred in the fullest possible measure upon their antagonists.  From the moment of their appearance down to the last we hear of them—­as long, in fact, as the Danes of the seaport towns retained any traces of their northern origin—­so long they continued to be the deadly foes of the rest of the island.

Even where the Northmen accepted Christianity, it does not appear to have had any strikingly ameliorating effect Thus we read that Godfrid, son of Sitric, embraced Christianity in 948, and in the very next year we discover that he plundered and burnt all the churches in East Meath, killing over a hundred people who had taken refuge in them, and carrying off a quantity of captives.  Land-leaping, too, continued in full force.  “The godless hosts of pagans swarming o’er the Northern Sea,” continued to arrive in fresh and fresh numbers from their inexhaustible Scandinavian breeding grounds—­from Norway, from Sweden, from Denmark, even, it is said, from Iceland.  The eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries are, in fact, the great period all over Europe for the incursions of the Northmen—­high noon, so to speak, for those fierce and roving sons of plunder,—­“People,” says an old historian quaintly, “desperate in attempting the conquest of other Realmes, being very sure to finde warmer dwellings anywhere than in their own homes.”

VIII.

BRIAN OF THE TRIBUTE.

At last a time came for their oppression to be cut short in Ireland.  Two valiant defenders sprang almost simultaneously into note.  One of these was Malachy, or Melachlin, the Ard-Reagh and head of the O’Neills, the same Malachy celebrated by Moore as having “worn the collar of gold which he won from the proud invader.”  The other, Brian Boroimhe, commonly known to English writers as Brian Boru, a chieftain of the royal Dalcassian race of O’Brien, and the most important figure by far in Irish native history, but one which, like all others, has got so fogged and dimmed by prejudice and misstatement, that to many people his name seems hardly to convey any sense of reality at all.

Poor Brian Boru!  If he could have guessed that he would have come to be regarded, even by some who ought to know better, as a sort of giant Cormoran or Eat-’em-alive-oh! a being out of a fairy tale, whom nobody is expected to take seriously; nay, as a symbol, as often as not, for ridiculous and inflated pretension.  No one in his own day doubted his existence; no one thought of laughing at his name.  Had they done so, their laughter would have come to a remarkably summary conclusion!