Of these Vikings it was said they carried arrows anointed and browned in the blood of dragons. Themonks who wrote this account were highly partisan. After all, they’d been commissioned by a descendant of Brian Boru. Of his men they said they had beautiful white hands, hands that they would now use to hack, hew and maim.
The battle lasted all day. Late in the afternoon, the Dublin men and their allies began to fall back to the River Liffey and into the advancing tide. An account written years later records that they retreated to the sea like a herd of cows tormented by heat and insects. They were pursued closely.
By nightfall, bodies drifted on Dublin Bay, and the field of Clontarf was strewn with corpses.
Brian had won the battle but he wouldn't live to enjoy the fruits of victory. A Danish Viking called Brodar came hacking his way through the Irish lines and found Brian's tent. Entering inside, he saw the old king on his knees at prayer, and lifting his giant battleaxe, he cleaved Brian's head from his shoulders. In this version of the story, Brian becomes the first martyr for faith and fatherland in Irish history.
Without Brian, his dynasty declined. There would be no all-powerful high king of Ireland. Clontarf resolved nothing. Indeed, so great was the fighting after Brian's death that one annalist described how competing kings had turned the country into a trembling sod. Ireland was now a ripe prize for foreign adventurers, and they would come here in the shape of the greatest military force in Europe to launch on these shores a fateful conquest.
