Anglesey (Öngulsey)

Anglesey — Öngulsey — is the island off the coast of Wales that marks the farthest south any king of Norway ever extended his rule. Here Magnus Barefoot, sweeping through the western seas on his great viking expedition, met an army led by two Norman earls at the sound of the island, and in the sea-fight his arrow found the one gap in Hugh the Brave's armour and felled him. Magnus took the island, and the saga marks the moment precisely: this was the high-water mark of the whole viking expansion, reached not in the ninth century but at the very end, by one anachronistic king. Anglesey is the corpus's image of the southern limit — a Welsh island where Norwegian power touched its farthest point before ebbing forever.