In Our Time - The Battle of Clontarf

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the best known events and figures in Irish history. In 1014 Brian Boru, High King of Ireland, defeated the Hiberno-Norse forces of Sigtrygg Silkbeard and allies near their Dublin stronghold, with Brian losing his life on the day of battle. Soon chroniclers in Ireland and abroad were recording and retelling the events, raising the status of Brian Boru as one who sacrificed himself for Ireland, Christ-like, a connection reinforced by the battle taking place on Good Friday. While some of the facts are contested, the Battle of Clontarf became a powerful symbol of what a united Ireland could achieve by force against invaders.WithSeán Duffy Professor of Medieval Irish and Insular History at Trinity College DublinMáire Ní Mhaonaigh Professor of Celtic and Medieval Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John’s College, CambridgeAnd Alex Woolf Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of St AndrewsProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Howard B. Clarke, Sheila Dooley and Ruth Johnson, Dublin and the Viking World (O'Brien Press Ltd, 2018)Howard B. Clarke and Ruth Johnson (ed.), The Vikings in Ireland and Beyond: Before and After Clontarf (Four Courts Press, 2015)Clare Downham, ‘The Battle of Clontarf in Irish History and Legend’ (History Ireland 13, No. 5, 2005)Seán Duffy, Brian Boru and the Battle of Clontarf (Gill & Macmillan, 2014)Seán Duffy (ed.), Medieval Dublin XVI: Proceedings of Clontarf 1014–2014: National Conference Marking the Millennium of the Battle of Clontarf (Four Courts Press, 2017)Colmán Etchingham, ‘North Wales, Ireland and the Isles: The Insular Viking Zone’ (Peritia 15, 2001)Colmán Etchingham, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Máire Ní Mhaonaigh and Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, Norse-Gaelic Contacts in a Viking World (Brepols N.V., 2019)David Griffiths, Vikings of the Irish Sea (The History Press, 2nd ed., 2025)James Henthorn Todd (ed. and trans.), Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh: The War of the Gaedhil with the Gaill, or, the Invasions of Ireland by the Danes and other Norsemen (first published 1867; Cambridge University Press, 2012)Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, Brian Boru: Ireland's greatest king? (The History Press, 2006)Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, ‘Tales of Three Gormlaiths in Medieval Irish Literature’ (Ériu 52, 2002)Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, ‘Cogad Gáedel re Gallaib: Some Dating Consierations’ (Peritia 9, 1995)Brendan Smith, The Cambridge History of Ireland, vol. 1, 600–1550 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), especially ‘The Scandinavian Intervention’ by Alex WoolfIn Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, the Battle of Pontarf 1014

is one of the best known dates in Irish history, akin to 1066 for England in significance, but not in outcome. as in 1014, the Irish won. As medieval chronicles relate, Brian Baru, King of Ireland, led this fight against the Vikings near their Dublin stronghold,

and he gave up his life, defeating the foreigners. While, as we'll hear, defence are disputed, the Battle of Clontarf became a powerful symbol of what a united Ireland could achieve militarily if politics and diplomacy failed. With me to discuss the Battle of Clontarf, I Sean Duffy, Professor of Medieval Ireland, Irish and insular history at Trinity College, Dublin.

Alex Wolfe, Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of St Andrews. And Moira Nifuene, Professor of Celtic and Medieval Studies at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. Moira, what were the different powers in Ireland in 1014? Who ruled what? Well, as was starting furthest south in Munster, the main power there was a group called Thalgash, who were ruled by the king

that we're going to talk quite a lot about today, I imagine, namely Brian Baru. They were relatively newcomers to the scene. Brian's grandfather was the first person in his dynasty to have become powerful. His name was Canadig, and Brian's brother, Matraven, also gained some degree of power. So they were in the very far south of the country

and Brian was certainly trying to kind of extend his power northwards. I suppose his main rival, they were the, O'Neils, the Innail, and particularly the southern Inal, that were around the area that we might think of as Meath and West Meath today. The main kind of ruler there was a man called Mojal Shahnal, Makdovnal, and he really was Brian's main opponent. So that was in the northern part of the country. I suppose between them, we have the Vikings of Dublin, who really had built up a very, very powerful centre and an extended trading network and because of that had come into contention with all of the groups around them. Immediately south of the Dublin Vikings were the Leinster

men and they allied with these various groups in turn. Then in the middle of the country we have a group called Osriga or Osir and then I suppose in the far west but not as significant from a power point of view in this period were the men of Konacht. So a kind of kaleidoscope, really, of groups and alliances. Was it a warring kaleidoscope? I suppose it was a shifting kaleidoscope, and there's no doubt that alliances, allegiances were constantly moving,

and I suppose you were only really as good as your last battle or as your last strategic manoeuvre. So I think it is fair to say that, yeah, alliances, both military alliances, political alliances and indeed marital alliances were constantly shifting. So certainly the power groups weren't stable, but there's no doubt but that Munster, the southernmost territory and the southerny nail, they were the kind of the two most stable power blocks immediately in the period

coming up to the Battle of Cantarf. Are we talking about this early in the century, constant skirmishes and wars between these different areas? Certainly constant skirmishes, that's certainly what the chronicle sources would lead us to believe. I mean, you know, not a constant state of warfare, but certainly constant skirmishes, but there were other kinds of engagements as well. So defences, for example, were being built, or indeed bridges over the Shannon to try and get across strategic areas. But also we do have references to formal alliances. It wasn't just a warring state. Thank you. Sean, Sean Duffy. The bottle was going to take place just outside

Dublin, and Dublin plays a very significant part in all of this. Can you tell listeners about Dublin at that time, around 10-14-ish or just before? Yeah, I mean, Dublin, as Moira said, Dublin was controlled by Vikings. It was, it had been established. Sorry, when you say controlled by Vikings, what do you mean by that? Well, I mean, in early medieval Ireland, there were no towns. There were no cities, towns, villages, it's a consequence of Ireland, never having been part of the Roman Empire.

So it had been an entirely rural landscape until the first Viking raids began around the year 800. and they tended to initially to make just sort of smash and grab raids as it were, but before long they were bedding themselves in and building camps for their ships from which they could raid further inland in Ireland. And there are a number of them therefore established around the coast and very quickly Dublin became the lead centre of Viking activity in Ireland. So I'm not sure if the explanation for that was geographical. Dublin, of course, controls a magnificent bay on Ireland's eastern seaboard,

whether they were strategic because of the fact that Dublin is, you know, geographically in Ireland, it's right at the very centre of the country. And in early medieval Ireland, there was a kind of a symbolic division of the country between the northern half of the island and the southern half of the island. and that boundary was formed by the River Liffey on which the Viking settlement in Dublin was located. So strategically and geographically it was significant, militarily it became very important

because the naval camp that they established quickly developed into a trading base, some kind of a trading emporium. And by the 10th century, say the 930s, the 940s, the 950s, we can certainly begin to, think of that as a town. And being Ireland's first and most significant town, it was the single greatest concentration of economic wealth on the island of Ireland. And therefore, that inevitably leads to a political importance for it, because you are nobody in Ireland if you don't control

the levers of wealth. And if they are largely concentrated in Dublin, the Irish king who wants to be the paramount lord on the island must gain control of Dublin if he's to be, you know, if he's able to achieve his objectives. So it was a significant goal for Irish kings in the 10th and the 11th centuries and that feeds into the background of the Battle of Clontarf. Thank you. Can you tell us something about Brian Baru and his powerhouse and why that is significant at this time? When Moira referred to his origins which are in Munster in the south-west of Ireland, I think it's significant that his family, there were a relative, even if you go back a hundred years, they were a relatively minor dynasty based in what is now County Clare

just across the Shannon at the base of the Shannon. One of the few permanent Viking bases that were established in Ireland was that limerick in the Shannon Estuary, which controlled the entrance to the river Shannon, which is the largest river in either Britain or Ireland, and therefore a hugely important strategic routeway in an age before roads and bridges. If you can control the river network, you can penetrate to the very inland heart of the country. His dynasty emerged fairly rapidly in the early 10th century, and I can't help thinking that that has to do with their interrelations with the local Vikings in Limerick. their capacity to get, having got control of them,

they had access to much more sophisticated Viking naval craft, which Irish kings, even though we are an island people, we were not a particularly maritime nation. So we acquired Viking fleets. We acquired a more sophisticated, probably a more sophisticated way of behaving militarily in battle, you know, more organized battle techniques. and very significant access to trade and therefore wealth.

And for example, to things like armor, chain mail. If you control the Viking towns, you had a very significant military and political advantage over your opponents. And I think that is the thing that explains how this man from a relatively minor dynasty was able to begin to threaten the hitherto dominant forces on the island. Thank you. Alex Wolfe, how intertwined were the families that might in the face of it be clear rivals? They were actually extremely intertwined. If we start with the Viking King of Dublin, Citrig, or Citric, as he's called in Irish sources,

his mother, Gormler, was the sister of the King of Leinster, his immediately southern neighbour, and she had been married to Brian. And Citric was married to Brian's daughter, Slonia. So his mother was his wife's stepmother. And his sister was married to Mielshacknell, the king of Mitha, the southernly Nail, who we heard about from Moira. And to make things even more complicated, his predecessor as king of Dublin, Gluniarne, who was Citrix half-brother, was also Malshekno's half-brother. So Malshekno's wife was the half-sister of her husband's half-brother. I'm sure everybody's followed that very thing.

Exactly. But the point is that. When we think about these people, it's very easy to think about them as kingdoms or peoples that are sort of essentially against each other like orcs and elves in Tolkien. But in reality, the leadership were one family. All of them will have sat and eaten and drunk together at one time or another. So this is really a family at war. We have to be very careful about thinking about these people as sort of essentially ethnically opposed.

They're extraordinarily closely interwoven. and Brian and Citric and Wehmerda of Leicester and Wehrushchlem will all have broken bread together at one time or another. So were obviously all they were gathered together. They're intertwined them, and they're at each other. They didn't seem to be afraid to fight each other. No, but I suspect it wasn't personal. As Royer said, it's all about power and it's a kind of game. And of course, in most battles of this sort, it isn't the kings who die.

You know, it's a... Or did they leave from the back? Well, Citric certainly did, because as we'll see, he never actually left the city during the battle and got away with no problems at all. But Kings did die in battle sometimes, but I think they're all just jockeying the position for this dominance, a hierarchy of rulers and so on.

And what they thought they were going to get out of it, how many of these campaigns might have been more bluff than anything else with somebody then doing a ritual submission and not much fighting happening. That happened, for example, in 2002 when Brian first really challenged Melcheknal for dominance. Melcheknell submitted and handed over dominance to Brian. So sometimes these things didn't lead to bloody battles.

One thing that's curious about Clontarf is that it was so bloody and so many people died. That's unusual. But the Vikings, you've mentioned that word, a great number of times, had a very emphatic influence on all this, didn't they? Oh, certainly. as Sean has said, they changed the economy completely.

There was, as well as there being no towns in Ireland before the coming of the Vikings, there was no coinage. For about the middle of the 10th century, we start seeing vast amounts of English coinage turning up in Ireland that's probably coming through places like Dublin and Limerick as part of the slave trade. Initially, the Vikings are doing the raiding, but soon they set up symbiotic relationships with kings like the kings of Miller or the kings of Munster, and they're the people who are probably.

providing them with slaves and they're selling them on. But you do have to remember that Citric, the Viking King of Dublin, is a fifth generation immigrant. He's been there for a long time. His mother is Irish. And so these people, I suspect people like Citric who almost certainly spent part of his youth at the court of his uncle, the King of Leinster, he was probably able to code switch. He could probably comb his hair a different way, change his clothes and pass from being Irish. Whereas he would probably also equally wearing a different clothes.

and speak in a different language, pass for being a Norseman. And I think that's the way we have to think about that the people who, modern scholars often call Hiberno Norse, to represent this hybridisation. Thank you very. Well, let's gather our forces for this battle. Moira, why were they gathering at Clontarf in 1014? Who was gathering and why were they gathering? Well, I suppose why they were gathering had to do with these kin relations

and also this power of politics that we've been talking about. and or I suppose really the ambition of Brian Baru and what would have been considered increasingly bold moves on his part. So about 10.05, for example, he marched to the north of the country and went to the Church of Armagh, you know, ostentatiously laid, you know, 20 ounces of gold there on the altar and took the hostages of the northern part of Ireland and I think for some that would certainly have been deemed a kind of a move too far. So he was getting increasingly bold.

but I think also why they were gathering and what lay at its heart was really a desire for control over this Hiberno-Norse trading emporium we've been talking about. Dublin, as Sean has discussed, was getting increasingly powerful. So there's no doubt that Brian also wanted control of Dublin and Leinster. And indeed, the Vikings of Dublin and their Leinster neighbours were absolutely sure that they were going to try and stop him from getting it. So that led to, well, first of all, a three-month season. around Dublin and they all returned home and then they returned and the Battle of Clontarf ensued.

Sean, do you want to come in on Brian Barun? He was a very old man as we get towards the time of the Battle of Clontarf. Some sources say in his late 80s, probably in his early to mid-70s. But in the final years of his life, he did actually manage to get every single other king in Ireland of note to accept him as his overlord. Finally, even the people of Donegal, and it's very hard to get the people of Dunigal to agree with anything, but they agreed ultimately to accept Brian as their king. But the trigger for the Battle of Clontarf was when this man, Citric's silken beard that we heard about from Alex earlier, the King of Dublin, decided to reject Brian's overlordship and then to ally with the King of

Leinster and to ally with other forces from outside Ireland to we don't entirely know to be honest what Citric Silkbeard's ambitions were at the time of the Battle of Clontarf, but quite possibly they were to do what his father had tried to do back in the 980s, a man called Olaf Coron, to seize the kingship of Ireland for himself. So the Battle of Clontarf is not a minor

interprovincial contest between the king of Munster and a local Irish rival, the king of Lennox. there is much more going on than that. Alex, you want to take that up? Yes. I mean, one of the things that we haven't talked about much is the external people who turned up. The one we know for certain the most about is Sigurd Earl of Orkney, who is the ruler of the Orkney Islands, probably also Shetland and Keith Ness in the north of Scotland. He's from a very Scandinavian background.

But we also told that there's another major Viking leader who the sources all call the name something like Brother which is slightly odd name, it doesn't appear in any other Scandinavian sources. And he's sometimes said to be an apostate deacon. But he's supposed to be a Viking, maybe based on the Isle of Man, maybe in the Hebrides, maybe coming from Norway. And also there are supposed to be a thousand male-clad Norwegians, Lothanak, as they're called in the Irish sources. And sometimes they're said to be brothers, men,

sometimes they're said to be an additional group. What's really odd is that this battle took place at about this time of year in April. And if they've come from Norway, it's not really the time of year that you would sail either from Norway or Orkney. Usually you'd expect people to be sailing later in the year when the weather was better. It's quite risky sailing in the North Atlantic in the early spring. So one possibility is that it's connected to what's happening in the wider insular world. Because in late 1013... What do you mean by insular here?

I mean Britain and Ireland and the various islands associated with them. So insular as opposed to continental. And in 1013, the end of 1013, as Sven Forkbeard, the king of Denmark, had conquered England. But then at the end of February, he died mysteriously and unexpectedly in Lincolnshire. And the English recovered their independence briefly. And for a couple of years before his son, the famous Canute, came back. And it seems to me quite likely that some of these Scandinavians

who are available for Syctric to hire are perhaps people who were expected. to be or had been part of Sven's army and that they were to get out of England because things are going pear-shaped there. I was just going to add to that. I mean, if we think about contemporary England and contemporary Ireland, England is a much wealthier country than Ireland.

And yet it was conquered by the Danes then. It was conquered by the Normans in 1066. The Swedes regularly contemplated its conquest throughout the 11th century, as did the Norse. And so in the 11th century, These islands were up for grabs by people from a Scandinavian background. So there's no reason to think that the experience of Ireland would have been any different from the experience of England at the time.

That's to say there were people from the Scandinavian world who had political and economic ambitions here. So if we are to understand the Battle of Clanta fully, we can't allow ourselves to look at it in an entirely insular way. in other words, to confine us as just to thinking of the island of Ireland. What is happening in England must be significant. Historians do not believe in coincidence. And the fact that England was conquered a matter of months beforehand and that the Danes had been kicked out of England about 10 weeks before the Battle of Clontov,

is not just happening at the same time. These matters are all interrelated. Can we take on that battle now? Do you want to start with you, Alex? Well, some people say it went on for... three days. But let's start with who's on whose side. The principal people on the right-hand side

are the King of Leinster Moirda and his nephew, Citric of the Silken Beard, the King of the Hiberna Norse in Dublin. They have brought to their to help them and who are camped north of Dublin near the shore, the

Earl of Orkney and other Norsemen of various backgrounds. Against them is Breon himself and many of the other lesser kings of Ireland. And then there's a slight mystery about how Mel Shackland fits into this. And different accounts give different things. He seems to have arrived late, and whether that was deliberate or not is a question.

So he seems to have been on paper on Brian's side, but he didn't do very much. On the day of the battle, the Lenteman and the mercenary Vikings, should we call them that, seemed to bear the brunt and to begin with do very well, Citric decides not to leave the city and keeps the gates shut and stays inside. City being Dublin. City being Dublin, yes. And so he stays inside Dublin

and the Leicestermen and the mercenary Vikings attack Brian's camp. Brian has sent one of his sons Donachar south to ravage Leicester, so part of his army isn't there. And so that's how the battle starts. That's the opening sort of phase of the battle. That's sometime in the morning, is it? Sometime in the morning, yes.

Maura, do you want to take it up? One of the things I think that's really, really important to stress is that we don't have any neutral sources. So even contemporary sources, in effect, show bias. So there's a Munster Chronicle that gives a very, very brief account of the battle. All it says is that it was a great battle between Munster and Vikings, and then in the list of slain gives us a couple more. But what we might expect to be a neutral chronicle, the Annals of Ulster, again, already has a very dramatic flourish at saying that this was a battle, you know, the like of which never before had been encountered. So I think it's really important to acknowledge all the time

that really we don't know fully what happened on the day of the battle, nor can we know, because all of the sources, even contemporary ones, are really being driven by one agenda or another. I mean, in terms of its significance, and I couldn't agree more that we have to see it in a kind of a wider context, it very, very quickly news of the battle spread. And, for example, in there's a set of Latin, annals from Wales and the Annalis Cambria that make mention of it. About a decade after the battle,

there's a French chronicler, a Desmar of Chabin, who is again presenting an account of a three-day battle. You had mentioned the three days where, you know, Norse women and children were drowned, where all of the Norse men had to flee. We don't know where he's getting his information, other than that we know from elsewhere that he does kind of make things up. But he must have been, at least drawing on some kinds of sources. But I think it's really, really, really important to always acknowledge that all of the sources we have are biased. So we're just trying to, I suppose, piece together as best we can, little bits and pieces from kind of fragmentary sources. Yes, because some of the most graphic stories that you see represented in

popular retellings actually come from Icelandic saga, has written 200 years later in Iceland, because a number of Icelanders were said to be present at the battle in the retinue of Earl Shingdon of Orkney. But these are the very graphic details of exactly how different people died. nearly all come from that kind of source. But there are simple facts that have some sort of ring of truth, or don't they? One is that battles of that kind, we usually took two or three hours. This took an entire day with an enormous, in order of slaughter going on. Do you think there's any truth in that?

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the main sources that we use is a text called the Kogokai Lregalov, which is the war of the Irish with the Vikings. And now it's written very early, about two generations later, maybe upwards of a century later. But it has interesting details which have actually subsequently been corroborated if one can do that by science. So it says, for example, that what happened very early in the morning was that the Viking fleet landed taking advantage of a full tide very early on just at dawn. And science, you can check what the tide is on such and such a day even a thousand years ago. and apparently the full tide there was on that day was at half five in the morning.

So they were able to use the full tide apparently to land. Then what happened, of course, is the tide went out. Their ships began to float around and got scattered in the bay. So when the battle started to go against them, the problem was that they could not access the ships. And as the battle went on during the course of the day, the tide, of course, was coming back in. If you were struggling at Clontarf, this place called Clontov,

which is about three or four miles north east of Dublin, of the city of Dublin, on the way to Hoth, the only way you could get it, because Mullahlachlan and Muel Shachlan's army seems to be into the west. There was a forest up towards Hoth to the north, but the tide had come in preventing them going there. If they were to try to make it back to Dublin, the walled city of Dublin for protection there, They had to cross a little river called the Tolka,

which was linked by one bridge. It's near, if any of our listeners are familiar with the Fairview Strand in, and Fairview Park in Dublin, it was located there. The tide came in there also. So what they ended up doing was standing with their backs to the sea trying to defend themselves. This is the Viking force. And of course, as the tide came in,

they were up to their knees in water gradually. So all of the accounts are very clear that many of them were not killed in battle so much as drowned. What did it matter that Brian Buru was killed in battle and how was he killed in battle? The contemporary sources simply say he was killed, but these later sources like the Kogogelra Golov that Sean has just mentioned and indeed later North sources give us very, very detailed depictions of what was happening. He was a very, very old man apparently. So this 12th century source tells us that he, himself,

couldn't take part in the battle, so he'd handed over kind of leadership to his favourite son, and he was outside the battlefield in a tent praying. He had a sorter in his hand, and as I say, this 12th century story then tells us that Broder, this man, this Viking that Alex mentioned, came along and thought he was a priest. And it was only then later that he realized that this wasn't a priest, that this was a king. So he jumps from saying something like priest, priest, to King King, according to the source. And it's presented very much as a kind of an opportune killing. He then kills him, but not before Brian Buru manages to be utterly heroic in death.

But that really is a later. I mean, that's an example of one of these kinds of embellishment. So very, very quickly, he became, I suppose, a saint, a holy martyr. And this particular theme is developed and exemplified, particularly in Old Norse sources. We get a reference to it already in about, at the middle of the middle, kind of towards the end of the 11th century, an Irish chronicler called Marianas Cotas, who moves from Ireland to Mainz, he in his account of the battle, he doesn't really talk about the Battle of Cantarf at all,

but he does talk about Brian dying with his hands lifted to prayer. So very, very quickly he becomes this holy, saintly figure. But this is all part of the development of the legend of Brian, and, you know, an awful lot of that has to do with his own followers, with his own descendants, who clearly want to bask in the glory of this constructed leader. Yes, and it's interesting that that martyr model may be one of the reasons why the sources often present Broder as an apostate or a pagan because most of the people like Citric were Christians. His father had died as a penitent on Iona.

So in order to make Brian a martyr, you have to have the guy who kills him as a non-Christian or a heretic or an apostate. And so part of the mythology and the rather bizarre stories that are told about Brothier's backstory, which is never very clear, but always very graphic with visions of hell and so on, probably relates to emphasizing this idea that Brian is a martyr. But I think we can probably be fairly certain that the core element that is true is that he probably wasn't, he was probably too old to actually fight and is killed in some sort of side action. Who would we say won? Welsh-Echelin won.

He dodged the bullet. He dodged the bullet. He didn't actually really get heavily involved. He had his army, as Sean said, to the north, arriving a bit late to get involved. And, of course, he was the person who, as I mentioned earlier, about a dozen years earlier, had ceded the over-kingship to Brian. And with Brian out of the way, and most of the other, and Brian's favourite son also dead, he was able to just resume as the leading king

and had another, well, he continues as the dominant. King in Ireland until I think 1022. So I would say he sort of wins, but he wins by default. Yeah, I mean, obviously, it seems like an extraordinary thing because most people assume that Brian Baru won the Battle of Clontov. If you stopped 100 people in the street in Ireland and asked them about Brian Baru, they'd say, well, he was the guy who won the Battle of Clontar. But some historians seem to doubt it.

I personally don't have any doubt of it. I mean, it is the case that the contemporary. sources, insofar as there are contemporary, strictly contemporary sources, they don't clearly state that he won the battle. But to my mind, it is implicit in all the counts. And it is stated in, you know, there's an early Norse text that, I think it's a poem that refers, that says Brian fell and won the day. I get what the precise wording of it is. But so this man seems to have died and yet is considered a victor. And I think he's a, he's considered a, he's considered a victor because of what he achieved.

I mean, it is the case that you can argue that if he had won, if his side had won, they would have done, as all victors do, and pressed home the advantage, and they would have marched on Dublin and so on. But if the numbers killed on both sides were so severe, that they were both so heavily depleted that nobody was capable of continuing, then you can understand why nobody pressed any advantage home from. it. And so I think one of the problems with history is it's very hard to argue from a silence. You know, to argue that Brian achieved what he sought to achieve while dying in the process,

you have to accept that the reason contemporaries implicitly viewed it as a success is because he helped avert what would have happened had he not died on that day. So in other words, Ireland, it seems to me, was being hostilely invaded by people intent upon seizing the kingship that he was claiming. By the end of that day, they had abandoned that hope. Within a matter of months, Knut had done for the Danes what the Scandinavians failed to do in Ireland, and England was comprehensively conquered for a generation by the Danes. That did not happen in Ireland. and Ireland was not conquered for another 150 years

until the descendants of the Normans did it in the late 1160s. So I think it was a major achievement on Brian Baru's part. In other words, Brian Baru has been deemed a hero implicitly by a thousand years of Irish people and Irish scholars and Irish writers writing about it because there is no more plausible explanation for what occurred on the day. than that his side,

you know, whilst suffering great losses, achieved what they wanted to achieve, and the death of this elderly king was a price worth paying. Let's bring you back to Dublin. Alex, let's bring it back to Dublin. What happened to Dublin? Well, Dublin, as Sean has implied, it wasn't sacked. But from this time onwards,

the kings of Dublin were always second division leaders. And over the next 150 years, between the time of Clontarf and the Anglo-Norman invasion in the 1160s that Sean just mentioned. Dublin becomes a kind of prize. It usually retains its own kings, although sometimes the sons of Irish major kings are put in lieu of Hibern and Norse kings. The fleet is an important asset, but it's the first thing that people go for now when they're trying to assert their dominance over Ireland. So, for example, Brian's great-grandson Murkichuk, who's probably the... the patron behind the cogath text that Moira and Sean have talked about.

One of the first things he did was seized Dublin when he wanted to become King of Ireland, another 11th century king from Leicester, Giamch Montalneboe does the same thing. And it's now become rather than one of the symbolic ritual centres in the middle of Ireland, which in the earlier times were the places people went to like the Hill of Tara. Dublin is now the prize that gives people the right to the sovereignty of Ireland. But the Dublin themselves are no longer major players. They just have a supporting role in the competition between Irish provincial kings for over kingship. Moira, how did this story of the battle spread?

Who spread it and what effect did that have? The spreading started very, very quickly. Because of the fact that Ireland, as we've been saying, was very much part and parcel of this connected world. I've already mentioned this French chronicler who got wind of it and certainly took it up relatively quickly. I think what we also have then are, you know, very, very skillful, sophisticated Irish scholars, you know, writing detailed accounts of the battle. And this text that we've mentioned, Koguel Ra Ghalov, is extraordinarily sophisticated and skillful in that regard.

Because, in effect, not alone does it draw on chronicle evidence to build up Brian as this, you know, major fighter against Vikings leading up to the kind of the Battle of Cantarf. but it presents him and his son very much in Trojan mould. So his son, for example, is presented as Hector. And in Brian's own obituary in this text, he's identified with Augustus, with the Roman Empire. He's identified with David. He's identified with Solomon. So what these scholars are trying to do

is, in effect, claim for Brian, you know, the same kind of power as these extraordinary kind of biblical and classical characters had. And that, of course, had resonance. And that absolutely spread. Because, of course, Dublin in particular was a bilingual milieu. The story of Clontarf moved from an Irish milieu into an Old Norse one. And Alex has already mentioned the number of Old Norse sagas

and indeed one particularly powerful kind of prophetic poem, that of Alio, that may be concerned with the battle. So I suppose it spread as part of this intercourse. connected world and because of its significance. I'll ask each of you in turn on this one, but start with you, Sean. When did it become such thought of, more generally, as such a defining moment in Irish history? Yeah, I mean, it is extraordinarily powerful thing in the Irish psyche, I think, still. I think there's a tendency of some people to assume that this is a relatively modern thing,

that all modern nation states look back on some romantic battle as being a pivotal moment, you know, so for the Scots it may be Banach-Burner for the English, it might be Agincoors, something like that. But it seems to me that throughout the Middle Ages, from a very early stage, Klontov was perceived in those terms.

So there's a lot of bardic poetry from the Middle Ages, which looks back on Klontov as a truly national thing. and there's a famous, I think it's by Murdoch albanacodal, a early 13th century poem, which talks about what Brian succeeded in doing at the Battle of Clontov and how now, 150 years later, now what he prevented happening has now happened, Ireland has been conquered by the Anglo-Normans, and every year it says another fleet load of foreigners is coming into Ireland.

But Brian is the one, and it says what we need, is another Brian who will achieve what Brian achieved. And I'm always struck by one of the, we talked a lot about the Irish annals today, one of the most important late medieval collections of annals are called the Annals of Lough Cay. And the Annals of Locke, the authors of those were professional family of historians. They probably had access to all sorts of data relating to early medieval Ireland, going all the way back to the time of St. Patrick.

but the book actually begins with the year 1014. They could have started a century earlier or half a millennium earlier, but they start with 1014 because as far as they were concerned, that was the start of a whole new era in the Irish story. So it is not a modern nationalist myth to imagine that Clontarf was one of these epic moments in the Irish story. It is something that was generated from, you know, within, a decade or two of the battle itself taking place. Alex, would you like to take that up?

Yes, I think a key moment is the period when the Cogath is written for Brian's great-grandson Murrchok. Murrchok also becomes effectively king of Ireland, but I think importantly for this, for the sort of national myth element, is that he entered into a quite sticky relationship, a kind of cold war with Henry I of England. Henry tries to blockade Ireland and stop trade coming in

because certain rebels have been given succour at Murukhtok's court. He faces a Norwegian invasion, which he deals with. This is Magnus Bearleg, King of Norway, arrives with a fleet. Muratok deals with that by meeting him in Dublin, having a feast with him and marrying his daughter to his son. But he also sends fleets out and asserts his control over the Isle of Man and maybe some other parts of what's now South West Scotland. And so I think he's someone who presents himself as representing Ireland,

on an international stage and seeing off potential existential threats from Henry of England and Magnus of Norway. And so I think for him, it's important to say this is my heritage, this is what my great-grandfather did as well. And the claims I'm making to get other Irish people to help me in this project is a just one, there's precedence in the past.

And Moira, what's your view on this? What would you say about it, based on the sources? Yeah, no, I absolutely agree that at that moment at the beginning of the 12th century when this text comes into being is very important. But it's, I suppose, more important almost for the significance of this particular group, the descendants of Brian Baru,

rather than for a kind of an All-Ireland movement at that stage. I think what's significant in that regard is perhaps much later after the English invasion and settlement, and I think it's significant there, that the word used for foreigner in Irish, so the word used for Viking, namely Gael, is a...

exactly the same word that's used then later for English. So the nature of the foreigner changes, but I suppose you could then use the same rhetoric. If the word for foreigner, the word you use for Viking is the same as the one you use for English, then of course it's very, very easy to adopt that rhetoric after the English have come. So I think looking back to past rhetorical models, looking back to past literary sources, becomes very important from the time of Murdoch-Albenoch that Sean mentioned and indeed much, much later as well. Sean, we're coming towards the end now. How has Brian Barreux's reputation

developed over the centuries? I think it's one of the things that Brian, his death at Clontarf, it did, I suppose, begin the idea that dying for Ireland was a noble thing. So there's been a long history in Ireland of viewing the world

as a war between the Irish and a foreign oppressor. The very title of that text that we have been talking about a lot, which is, you know, about events that happened a thousand years ago, Kuguguel Raghav, the war of the Irish with the foreigners, it's like a motif that you could, that applies all the way through Irish history afterwards, and that began with Brian Baru. And this battle, there are several contemporary, near contemporary sources that date that it happened on Good Friday. And on Good Friday, Christ died, to save humankind, and he was resurrected on Easter Sunday.

So Brian, and that poem that we talked about by Murdoch-Arba, Abouac, actually likens him to Christ, his death, his sacrifice. As Christ saved humankind, Brian died to save the Irish. And that feeds all the way through the Irish story of resistance to their perceived oppressors through the centuries, so that, for example, most Irish people will think of the 1960s, rising against British rule as a pivotal moment in Irish history, that took place at Easter by people who felt that they were giving their lives for Ireland.

And whether it was stated at the time or not, what was motivating them in part of the back of their mind was the idea that they were following in the footsteps of Brian Baru. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Moira Nimuini, Sean Duffy and Alex Rul. For next week, how people are the very very very very. in the Old Testament as seen as foreshadowing those in the new.

That's typology. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I'd like to say, what didn't you have time to say that you would like to have said? Oh, I think we need to talk about Gormla, surely.

Yes. We never talk, yeah. Sorry, where you go. As was one of the characters who's become highly developed, in her own right is one of Brian's wives, Gourlomla. And she's presented both in the Irish 12th century source, this text we've been talking about Koko Gailwa Ghalov,

and indeed in particularly one of the Old Norse sagas, namely Nyaul's saga. She's presented very much as the kind of the villain of the piece, but in very, very different ways. And I suppose in a way, I think that all has to do with also how Brian is being developed, because certainly in the Old Norse material, She's the villain to Brian's holy man. You know, Brian wouldn't do anything bad to anybody we're told,

and yet she was so evil and malicious. And she, in the Old Norse material, she said to be working in consort with her son, Citric, Silicon Beards, the King of Dublin. And what she says there is that he may promise, she's supposed to be absolutely beautiful, and that he may promise her hand in marriage to anybody that will come and fight for him.

So, you know, she does to, or he does in terms of Sigurther of Orkney as well. Whereas in the Irish material she's very much presented as part and parcel of her own dynasty which is the Eastern dynasty of Leinster and she taunts her brother who's on a visit

to Brian's court and she's there as well and she taunts him that in effect he's accepting gifts that Brian Baru is giving her and she does it very dramatically she takes a kind of a silken tunic according to this 12th century text and throws it into the fire and in this dramatic

account of the Battle of Cantarf. She's very much presented as a catalyst, really. Her brother marches off then, and then we're told that he goes and gathers allies. But of course, this is a not unusual literary theme, but it's interesting how it's developed in different ways in different sources in Norse and Irish material. Yes, I think one of the things that's really puzzled scholars

I read the lot of this material is that the similarities between the Norse and the Irish material are very close. And you could argue that, means they go, that means they're true. But as Moira has said, many of them have a very literary field to them. And so people are puzzled over whether the Icelandic saga writers had access to Irish literature, whether there was a saga written in Old Norse in Dublin itself, or the Isle of Man, or the Hebrides or somewhere. So this intriguing cross-fertilisation and the fact that of all

the battles, the sort of major battles of the period, it's the one that FIT has the highest profile in Icelandic literature other than the one possible except for be Stiklostad where St Olaf is killed. But even then, I think fewer Icelanders were present there. I think there's maybe only two Icelanders present there, whereas this appears in several Icelandic sagas, several Icelanders were there, the detail is always quite thick. It's almost like they go off a big digression, even though these might be a saga like Nialsa. and it's mostly about feuding farmers in a small part of South Iceland, but suddenly there's this big digression with a huge amount of detail

about Brian's personal relationship and so on. And so it's a great puzzle as to why the Icelanders felt so strongly about this battle and why their version of it is so close to the Irish version. Well, what is the answer to that then? Why is it in the 13th century in Iceland? They are fascinated in this, what should have been a very obscure encounter that had taken place in Ireland. a quarter of a millennium earlier.

Well, I think one of the answers to that is because the Norwegian king, namely Howcome the Fourth, was very much interested in all of Britain and Ireland. And he certainly had retentions and ambitions. So, I mean, certainly I think it's in that context that we can see, you know, an old north account of the battle actually moving northwards. And, of course, that would be absolutely what we would expect, that it would be via Norway that it would go to Iceland. So I think 13th century politics basically is the answer to that question.

Yes, because Hock on this 13th century king in the 1260s, he leads a fleet into the Scottish islands. And what we're told in his saga, which is written by a contemporary Stirlathodharsan, who knew him personally, we're told that when he was in Kintyre, men came from Ireland and offered him the crown of Ireland. If he would come and liberate them from the English. English, yes. If I can make an unprecedented intrusion in this space, which is supposed to be sacred to just the three of you, going through the notes and listening to you now and reading around a bit, the literary content of the reports on this are very extensive and very fluid. And is this a precursor of the written life in Irish culture?

Do you think there's any connection now? Well, I mean, I think, you know, obviously it is the case that something happened. The correct answer is yes. Happened on that that, you know, that fed into the, the imagination, because there were all sorts of extraordinary phenomena in it. We mentioned earlier about this, you know, the fact of it having happened on Good Friday, which I think, I mean, as far as I'm aware, there are three different sources that tell us that. So I think we can believe, therefore, that it fed into sort of Christian ideas of their conflict with these,

with non-Christian Vikings. and the Vikings, it seems, have always thrilled the imagination. But, I mean, one of the things that I think, and it's something I don't think we discussed earlier, was, you know, if you like, the negative, Brian Burrough's negative achievements, you know, the bad stuff as opposed to the good stuff. I mean, he was, what had Brian Baru succeeded in showing during the course of his life? when you boil it down he had kind of shown

that might is right because he had come from nothing he acquired the military resources to push his weight around and force himself to the top so to an extent after he died I mean he opened up the floodgates

to anybody who felt that they were you know wealthy enough or brave enough courageous enough or lucky enough to have a go at the top to do so and so I think when you look at say the 150 years between 1014 and 1169 when you have the Angrenormon invasion of Ireland,

what are those years? I mean, they seem to me to be years of near incessant warfare amongst the competing Irish province kings. Each one of them trying to emulate Brian Baru and, you know, elevate their province from having been a backwater to being at the centre of Irish life. And so it did have that. I think it did have that his career was an unhealthy exemplar in that way, I think, and don't often pay enough attention to that, I think. I might just go back to the question about, I suppose, about this extraordinary corpus of writing that we have, and certainly as you suggest, influenced what came after.

But I think what's also important to say is it was influenced by a huge body of rich, varied literature that was composed in Ireland in the couple of hundred years before the Battle of Clontarf. I think medieval Ireland is extraordinary in terms of the variety and the extent of literary culture that has survived. Only, I suppose, you know, there's a huge amount as well in Norse, but that's much, much later.

So I think it's important that we look at this corpus of really imaginative stuff about Clantarf in the context of what went before as well. And the fact is that it ended up really, really quickly So this text we were talking about Coga in a hugely significant manuscript from the 12th century. There's this large compilatory manuscript called the Book of Leinster. And it ended up in that alongside an adaptation of the destruction of Troy.

So it was very quickly seen in that kind of way. So yeah, so it's certainly not the beginning. It builds on what went before and absolutely influenced what comes after. Well, thank you all very much again. Thank you very much. That was terrific. Loved it. Does anyone want tea or coffee?

Tea, Melvin? I love some tea, lovely, thank you, yes. Nothing stronger now. If not, I love a glass of water, please. Two, cheese. A glass of water would be great, please. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson, and it's a BBC Studios audio production.

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