Battle of Clontarf

On Good Friday 1014 the high king Brian Boru brought his army to the strand north of Dublin to face a coalition of the town's Norse rulers, the king of Leinster, and Norse contingents from Orkney and the Isle of Man. The fighting ran the length of the day and ended, tradition says, with the coalition broken against the sea as the returning tide cut off their retreat to the ships. Brian's side won and his dynasty gained nothing by it: Brian himself, his son and his grandson were all killed, and the high kingship he had built dissolved within a generation. Norse Dublin, which the battle supposedly ended, went on trading and minting coin for another century and a half. What the day actually settled was which Irish dynasty would not rule.

For most of a millennium Clontarf was told as Ireland against the Vikings, a national liberation with a martyred king, and that reading is now largely abandoned: there were Norsemen and Irishmen on both sides, and the battle sits more comfortably as the climax of a dynastic war over the high kingship. The main source, Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh, was written a century later under the patronage of Brian's descendants, which explains a good deal about its shape. The Norse Njal's Saga supplies the other half of the tradition along with its supernatural material and cannot be treated as a record. The battle's millennium in 2014 produced a wave of reassessment, and also a reminder that nobody knows exactly where on the Clontarf foreshore the fighting happened, since the shoreline has been reclaimed and moved substantially since.