Clontarf — Brian's Battle & the Weaving of the Doom

The threads of the great feud run on out of Iceland. Earl Sigurd of Orkney makes ready to sail to Ireland to join the war against the Irish high king Brian, and Flosi — leader of the Burning, now far from home on his long penance — offers to go with him; but Sigurd bids Flosi stay, for he has a pilgrimage to make.^[1] Among the host are men of the saga's own feud, carried to a foreign war.

It is the saga's great widening-out. The quarrel that began on a small Icelandic island over killings and a burning now reaches the largest stage in the western world — the battle for Ireland. The saga's people do not vanish when they leave Iceland; they turn up in Orkney, in the Hebrides, and here in the host gathering against Brian Boru. Clontarf is where the local feud is woven into the great history of the age, and the saga follows its men into it.

The viking Brodir — once a Christian deacon, now an apostate skilled in sorcery — tries by magic how the fight will go, and the answer comes back doubled and dark: if they fight on Good Friday, King Brian will fall but win the day; if on any other day, all who oppose him will die.^[1] They choose Good Friday.

The prophecy sets the battle's strange, fated shape: Brian will lose his life and win his war on the same day. The Norse saga, telling a Christian-Irish victory, wraps it in heathen sorcery and doom — the apostate Brodir reading the future, the holy day chosen for the killing. From the first the battle is hung with omen, a thing fated and foreknown, its outcome already woven before a blow is struck.

King Brian, old and devout, would not fight on the fast-day of Good Friday; so a wall of shields was thrown round him, and his host drawn up in array before it, while he stayed within at his prayers.^[1] The armies met, and the battle was joined fiercely on both sides.

The image of the praying king behind his shield-wall is central to the saga's telling — the holy man who will not bear arms on the day his Lord died, trusting his host to fight for him. It is both his sanctity and his vulnerability: he wins the day by staying out of the fight, and loses his life because of it, alone in his tent when the rout sweeps a killer toward him. Brian is the still, devout centre around which the slaughter wheels.

Earl Sigurd stood in the mid-battle under his banner — the raven banner woven by his mother, which brings victory to the host it flies before but death to the man who bears it.^[1] As his standard-bearers fall one after another, none will take it up; Asmund the white warns that all who bear it die. At last, when no one else will, Sigurd tears the banner from its staff, hides it under his cloak, and carries it himself — and falls, pierced through.^[2]

The fatal banner is one of the great doom-objects of the corpus — a standard that buys victory at the price of its bearer's life, so that men flee from the honour of carrying it. Sigurd's choice to bear it himself, knowing what it means, is the grim heroism the sagas prize: better to take the death-token in his own hands than to lose the battle. The raven flies, the host wins, and the earl pays the banner's price.

Brodir, who had fled the press, saw that Brian's men were chasing the routed enemy and that few were left by the king's shield-wall.^[1] He broke through to the praying king and cut him down — and afterward cried out that men should tell each other that Brodir had felled Brian.^[2] When the king's men heard their lord was dead they turned back, and took Brodir, and put him to a hideous death.

So the prophecy is fulfilled to the letter: Brian falls, and Brian's side wins. The killing of the old praying king by the apostate sorcerer, in the very hour of victory, is the dark heart of the battle — and Brodir's boast, naming himself the king's slayer, brings his own grisly end down on him at once. The saga, characteristically, gives the death both its horror and its swift reckoning: the king dies, the killer is taken, the doom runs exactly as foretold.

And then the saga turns to its strangest vision. That same Good Friday, far off in Caithness, a man named Daurrud saw twelve riders come to a bower and vanish within; looking through a window, he saw women at a loom — and the loom was a thing of horror: a warp weighted with men's heads, a weft of human entrails, the shuttles arrows, the reels swords.^[1] The women were valkyries, and as they wove they chanted the Darraðarljóð, the Song of the Woof of War, foretelling the slaughter and choosing who should die.^[2] When the weaving was done they tore the cloth apart, mounted, and rode away.

The Darraðarljóð is one of the most famous and chilling passages in all Norse literature — the valkyries literally weaving the fate of the battle, the dead made into the very fabric of the loom. It binds the human slaughter at Clontarf to the cosmic machinery of fate: the men fall because the weaving-women have woven it so. In a saga obsessed with law and feud and human choice, here for a moment the curtain lifts on the powers that decide the doom beneath all choosing — and they are women at a loom strung with the bodies of the slain.

The omens reached the saga's living men. In Orkney, Hareck thought he saw the dead Earl Sigurd ride to meet him and vanish; and a week after, Hrafn the red came and told them all the tidings of Brian's battle — the fall of the king, the death of the earl, the slaughter of the Burners who had fled there.^[1] Fifteen of the Burners fell in Brian's battle, the saga notes — the great feud collecting its dead even in Ireland.

So Clontarf closes the saga's long reach into the world. The battle is history — the real, decisive breaking of Norse Dublin in 1014 — but the saga has made it the place where its own feud finally spends itself far from home, where Earl Sigurd and a dozen of the Burners meet their ends, and where the curtain lifts on the valkyries weaving the doom of all of them. From a killing over a dowry on an Icelandic farm to the loom of fate on Good Friday outside Dublin: this is how wide, and how deep, the greatest of the sagas reaches.