Greek and Roman
in conflict, and levy tribute everywhere, had kept up their
constantly-recruited waves of incursion, until they had raised a barrier
of their own blood. It was their own kin, the sons of earlier
invaders, who stayed the landward march of the Northmen in the time of
Charlemagne. To the Southlands their road by land was henceforth closed.
Then begins the day of the Vikings, who, for two hundred years and more,
"held the world at ransom." Under many and brave leaders they first
of all came round the "Western Isles" (2) toward the end of the eighth
century; soon after they invaded Normandy, and harried the coasts of
France; gradually they lengthened their voyages until there was no shore
of the then known world upon which they were unseen or unfelt. A glance
at English history will show the large part of it they fill, and how
they took tribute from the Anglo-Saxons, who, by the way, were far
nearer kin to them than is usually thought. In Ireland, where the old
civilisation was falling to pieces, they founded kingdoms at Limerick
and Dublin among other places; (3) the last named, of which the first
king, Olaf the White, was traditionally descended of Sigurd the Volsung,
(4) endured even to the English invasion, when it was taken by men of
the same Viking blood a little altered. What effect they produced
upon the natives may be seen from the description given by the unknown
historian of the "Wars of the Gaedhil with the Gaill": "In a word,
although there were an hundred hard-steeled iron heads on one neck,
and an hundred sharp, ready, cool, never-rusting brazen tongues in each
head, and an hundred garrulous, loud, unceasing voices from each tongue,
they could not recount, or narrate, or enumerate, or tell what all the
Gaedhil suffered in common--both men and women, laity and clergy,
old and young, noble and ignoble--of hardship, and of injury, and of
oppression, in every house, from these valiant, wrathful, purely pagan
people. Even though great were this cruelty, oppression, and tyranny,
though numerous were the oft-victorious clans of the many-familied
Erinn; though numerous their kings, and their royal chiefs, and their
princes; though numerous their heroes and champions, and their brave
soldiers, their chiefs of valour and renown and deeds of arms; yet not
one of them was able to give relief, alleviation, or deliverance from
that oppression and tyranny, from the numbers and multitudes, and
the cruelty and