A monk wrote later of the terror of Viking attack. “There were 100 hard-steeled iron heads on one neck, and 100 sharp, ready, never-rusting brazen tongues in every head, and 100 garrulous, loud, unceasing voices from every tongue.” The age of the Vikings had arrived. 

 

We’re probably standing about 3 meters under street level and this is where people would have been walking in the Viking age. 

 

You mean there’s no whitewashing the incredible terror that they sold. 

 

From a fairly early stage, once Vikings are raiding the Irish coast, they’re taking people captive to sell them all as slaves. So a good early example of that is in the 821, the Vikings raided Howth, just north of Dublin, and took a great prey of women, so I think their fate was probably the slave market. 

 

It must have stricken absolute fear into the hearts of people, the idea of being  captured and then sold abroad. 

 

Yeah, absolutely. I mean there are some kind of snippets of Irish poetry testifying to the fear that people had. “Lord protect us from these foreigners coming in and taking people away.” There’s an early 11th-century tale about an Irish poet who’s said to have been taken captive by Vikings and even as a man, he’s been gang raped by the Vikings on the ship. There’s also a record in 940 of an Irish bishop taken captive in Dalkey Island. And he’s so eager to escape. He tries to swim out from the island and he drowns. 

 

The Vikings offer us the earliest example of those figures who will dominate the written and spoken stories of Ireland, the foreign invaders.