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 the
wrath of the brutal, ferocious, furious, untamed, implacable
hordes by whom that oppression was inflicted, because of the
excellence of their polished, ample, treble, heavy, trusty,
glittering corslets; and their hard, strong, valiant swords; and
their well-riveted long spears, and their ready, brilliant arms
of valour besides; and because of the greatness of their
achievements and of their deeds, their bravery, and their valour,
their strength, and their venom, and their ferocity, and because
of the excess of their thirst and their hunger for the brave,
fruitful, nobly-inhabited, full of cataracts, rivers, bays, pure,
smooth-plained, sweet grassy land of Erinn" -- (pp. 52-53). Some
part of this, however, must be abated, because the chronicler is
exalting the terror-striking enemy that he may still further
exalt his own people, the Dal Cais, who did so much under Brian
Boroimhe to check the inroads of the Northmen. When a book does
(5) appear, which has been announced these ten years past, we
shall have more material for the reconstruction of the life of
those times than is now anywhere accessible. Viking earldoms
also were the Orkneys, Faroes, and Shetlands. So late as 1171,
in the reign of Henry II., the year after Beckett's murder, Earl
Sweyn Asleifsson of Orkney, who had long been the terror of the
western seas, "fared a sea-roving" and scoured the western coast
of England, Man, and the east of Ireland, but was killed in an
attack on his kinsmen of Dublin. He had used to go upon a
regular plan that may be taken as typical of the homely manner of