Clontarf (Ireland)

Clontarf is the great battlefield outside Dublin where, on Good Friday 1014, the high king Brian Boru broke the power of the Dublin Norse and their allies — and where Njáls saga reaches out of Iceland into the wider history of the viking world. Several of the saga's surviving feud-figures meet their ends here: Earl Sigurd of Orkney falls carrying his fatal raven banner, and the burner Brodir is among the slain after killing Brian himself. The saga frames the battle with the eerie Darraðarljóð, the song of the valkyries seen weaving the doom of men on a loom strung with human entrails and weighted with severed heads. Clontarf is the corpus's image of the far reach of the feud and the supernatural dread that hangs over great slaughter — an Irish battlefield where the threads of an Icelandic saga are finally cut, and where the weaving women of fate are glimpsed at their grim work.