Brian Boru: Legendary Irish Hero
A highly regarded figure in the history of Ireland
Like many great men of his period, Brian had a pedigree that was largely imaginary, an Arthurian fantasy of blood-drenched heroes stretching back through the dawn of history, through darkness and out into the magic world of mythology. But from the ninth century we can trace it with some accuracy, thanks largely to the vivid details we have been given of ceaseless, bloody war between Irishman and Dane.
The Danes came to Ireland early in the ninth century, stealing up the River Shannon in long, slender boats, leaping ashore to lay waste to the country, plunder what they could from it and move on: or, when the fancy took them, to settle.
A little later they met shattering, unexpected defeat at the hands of the tribal chief Corc and here history begins. We can follow Corc’s line down through his successive descendants, Lachtna, Lorcan and Cenedid, who died fighting the Danes, a hundred and twenty years after his great-grandfather had thought, with reason, that he had flung them into the sea forever.
Cenedid — a name more memorable in its modern form of Kennedy — was killed in 951. He left two sons, Mahon and Brian (the latter born in 926), and these continued the fight: waging non-stop, guerrilla war against the Danes from the…
