King Harald agreed to this and confirmed Sigurd in the earldom before he departed for Norway. [Illustration: _Harald Fairhair_] When King Harald had returned home again, and was feasting one day in the house of Ragnvald, Earl of More, he went to a bath and had his hair combed and dressed in fulfilment of his vow. For ten years his hair had been uncut, so that the people called him Lufa or “Shockhead”; but when he came in with his hair shining and combed after the bath, Ragnvald called him Harfager, or “Fair Hair,” and all agreed that it was a fitting name for him, and it clung to him thenceforward, so that he is known as Harald Harfager to this day. Chapter VI The Northmen in Ireland There is yet another direction to which we must turn our attention, if we would understand the grip that the Northmen at this time had taken on the British Islands, and the general trend of Norse and Danish history outside their own country. Their conquests and influence in Ireland were even more widespread and equally lasting with those in England. We find them from the beginning of the ninth century (from about A.D. 800 onward) making investigations all round the coast of Ireland, and pushing their way up the rivers in different directions. The Norse, many of whom probably reached Ireland by way of the Western Isles and Scotland, consolidated their conquests in the north under a leader named Turgesius (perhaps a Latinized form of Thorgils), who ruled from the then capital of Ireland and the ecclesiastical city of St Patrick, Armagh. Thorgils was a fierce pagan, and he established himself as high-priest of Thor, the Northman’s god of thunder, in the sacred church of St Patrick, desecrating it with heathen practices; while he placed his wife Ota as priestess in another of the sacred spots of Ireland, the ancient city of Clonmacnois, on the Shannon, with its seven churches and its high crosses, from the chief church of which she gave forth her oracles. Soon after this there arrived in Ireland another chief, named Olaf the White, who chose Dublin, then a small town on the river Liffey, as his capital, building there a fortress, and establishing a “Thing-mote,” or place of meeting and lawgiving, such as he was accustomed to at home. From this date the importance of Armagh waned, and Dublin became not only the Norse capital of Ireland and an important city, but also the centre from which many Norse and Danish kings ruled over Dublin and Northumbria at once. We shall see when we come to the time of Athelstan, and the story of Olaf Cuaran, or Olaf o’ the Sandal, who claimed kingship over both Ireland and Northumbria, how close was the connexion between the two.