We now come to a battle that is famous alike in Norse and in Irish story. It was the final effort made by the Norsemen to assert their supremacy over Ireland, and the last of several disastrous defeats which they encountered at the hands of the Irish. Both the story-tellers of the North and the historians and bards of Ireland wrote long accounts of it, so that we know the details of the battle of Clontarf perhaps better than we know those of any other ancient battle fought in the British Isles. Except the battle of Brunanburh, no other fight in these islands excited half so much attention at this period. On the Norse side forces were gathered from the Orkneys, the Isle of Man, and the Scottish coast to support the Norse of Dublin; on the other were the united forces of Munster and Connaught, supported by Danish auxiliaries, and led by the aged King of Munster, Brian Boru, or “Brian of the Tributes.” Brian had risen from being an outlawed prince of part of Munster, in the south of Ireland, to the position of High-King of the whole country. When he was a boy the foreigners had become so powerful in the south of Ireland that the Irish princes despaired of either driving them out of the country or defeating them in battle. They had adopted the weaker policy of paying the intruders a heavy tribute, in order to keep them quiet; and when Brian’s father, Kennedy, died, and Brian’s elder brother, Mahon, came to the throne, he carried on the same policy. But Brian utterly refused to make any truce with the Northmen, or to pay them any tribute whatsoever; and when he saw that Mahon was determined at all costs to keep peace he left the royal palace of Kincora, on the Shannon, and he and a band of the most hardy and independent of the young chiefs of the neighbourhood betook themselves to the forests and wild parts of North Munster, whence they issued forth by day or night to attack and harass the Northmen. Many of them they cut off and killed, but on the other hand a number of Brian’s followers were slain, and they were all reduced to great straits, from lack of food and shelter. For, like Alfred the Great in similar circumstances, they had to live in huts or caves or wherever they could get refuge; and often they could get no food but roots and wild herbs, so that their strength was reduced, and in the wet weather they became in wretched plight. Brian’s brother, Mahon, hearing of this, sent for him, and tried to induce him to give up his roving life and return to Kincora; but Brian, in no wise daunted by all that he had gone through, reproached Mahon for having made a dishonourable truce with the foreigners, which neither their father nor any of their ancestors would have approved. When Mahon excused himself, saying that he did not care to lead his clan to certain death, as Brian had led the young chiefs, his brother replied that it was their heritage to die, and the heritage of all the clan, and whatever they might do they could