Brian Boru, High King of Ireland

As High King of Ireland, Brian Boru fought against -- and ultimately ended -- the rule of Niall Noigiallach's descendents. Tune in as Katie and Sarah take a closer look at the life of Brian Boru in this podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm their Dowdy and we put
a call out on our Twitter at Misston History if
you haven't followed us yet for some Irish history topics

(00:23):
in honor of St Patrick's day, and we got back
lots of suggestions. Today's choice is Brian Boru, who is
the High King of Ireland. But we also put out
a call for some pronunciation help because we have to
confess that even though we're both Irish girls, it was
easier for us to figure out the Chinese pronunciations in
the Opium Wars and it is for us to figure

(00:44):
out the Gaelic pronunciations for this one. So we owe
Roger and his Irish friends Caroline and Ashling a huge
thank you, and any mistakes we make are not their fault,
their hours. They did their best to spell them out
phonetically for us, So we're doing our best today, we promise,
so onto Brian Burrew and you know, we got some

(01:04):
suggestions for St Patrick which are really great, but we
were hoping that maybe most of you would have a
pretty good idea of the story of Ireland's other national hero.
But for Brian Beru, I mean, I don't think either
of us had ever heard of him. No, so he
is called by some the last great high King of Ireland,
and he's the originator of the O'Brien clan um. The

(01:27):
Kennedy's are supposedly descendants of Brian Beru, and apparently everyone
in an Irish pub I think if you ask around,
you're gonna find a lot of descendants of Brian Boru.
So to talk about him, we're going to go into
a little bit of Irish history first. So in four
hundred BC is when the Celts get to Ireland from
Europe and they introduced iron. On the fifth century a d. St.

(01:48):
Patrick introduced Christianity, and this is considered to be a
golden age for Ireland. There's peace, there's scholarly pursuits. But
that all changes in seven ninety five when the Vikings
showed up. And the Vikings are of course Scandinavian peoples
from Norway, Sweden and Denmark, and they called themselves the
Osman which is East, the men of these Um. And

(02:10):
at first they stick to stealing from the monasteries you know,
we talked about the Book of Kells sacking all the
good loot that you could find at a monastery and
burning fields. But then they decided that they might actually
like to settle down and trade, and there's not a
strong government to oppose them, so they can pretty much
do whatever they want. What were the Irish clans doing, well,

(02:32):
they were all fighting with each other. Europe's feudal system
had a way of dealing with interlopers like the Vikings,
but there was too much conflict between the tribes and
the clans in Ireland for it to work there. And
there were also a lot of weird rules about succession
and land ownership that made that difficult. And we should
also say that some say the Irish were just as

(02:53):
violent and aggressive as the Vikings. There's a tendency to
paint I guess the Irish people as as innocent, peace
loving people and then the Vikings is evil interlopers and
that's not quite the way it went. And there's not
an Ireland like we would think of today either. There
are a bunch of warring tribes. People are identifying themselves

(03:15):
with their families, not this country. Yes, the Vikings themselves
were united in Ireland. Either the Norse Vikings and the
Danish Vikings would get into conflicts, and they would also
team up with Irish people, and Irish king might get
together with a Viking against another Irish king, for example.
So you have weird black and white with this one.

(03:38):
And I love also that I said the Irish word
peace loving people when we're talking about the fighting Irish
kind of snicker that, Katie, We're just gonna gloss over
that one. The Vikings also intermarried with the Irish, and
they all traded with each other, so there's a little
bit more to it than you might usually get. We
can generally call this a period of chaos, however, and
the Vikings display some of these clans in Ireland that

(04:00):
have held power for so long, and it leaves a
power vacuum. There's an open space and somebody comes along
to phill it. And that person was Brian Boaru. He
was born around ninety County Claire and he was a
member of the dol Kosh tribe. His father, Kenn Tague,
was King of North munster Um. When he was growing up,

(04:20):
he was probably taught by monks and his experience with
the Vikings was negative, to say the very least. His
mother was murdered by Vikings and various other members of
his family and he was a witness to that, so
understandably he held a lot of animosity towards them. Yeah,
he has eleven siblings and his brother mahoun Or mcgauman,

(04:42):
took over as king after their dad died in nine
and they added more of Munster to their kingdom, and
he tries for peace with the Vikings. The brother Um Brian,
wants war though, and specifically he wants to wage guerrilla warfare,
which as we've mentioned, is becoming a bit of theme
in our podcast. So Brian heads to the hills and

(05:03):
attacks the Norsemen from there, and he's very very good
at what he does. The Irish people back him up
because many of them don't want the Vikings there either,
and eventually his brother comes around to his frame of
mind and joins him, you know, when things are looking
pretty good. So they get the Vikings out of South Ireland,
which some might say is is great an accomplishment of
St Patrick driving the Snakes out, but that's up to you.

(05:26):
So Brian becomes the leader of the doll cosh In
when his brother dies and he defeats mule Vidal, who
was the king of the Nacht, which was a very
powerful clan in so now he's king of all of Munster.
So Brian Baru is now in control of most of
southwestern Ireland, actually most of southern Ireland. But it's not

(05:50):
just the Vikings he has to worry about fighting anymore.
There is a man named mal Shucknal who's king of
one of the most powerful clans, if not the most
powerful clan in Ireland. And since this clan is just
so important, and also because we forgot to ask Roger
how to pronounce it, we're just going to spell it
for you. It's UI space and E I L L

(06:13):
and mal Shachnal is their king, and he doesn't like
the Vikings, and he also doesn't like how much power
Brian has. According to legend, even cut down a sacred
tree of the dog Casians to show that they didn't
have dominion over him, which is that's those are fighting.
Oh no, you did, Nottures. So mal Shacknall fought the

(06:33):
Vikings too, though, and he drove them out of Dublin,
becoming High King of Ireland there. But in Brian came
up the River Shannon and attacked mal Shacknal's holdings in
Connacht and Neath, and finally he and mal Shacknall split
up Ireland in Brian becoming High King of the South.

(06:55):
So we have um two rulers at this point, splitting
the country in half. But this didn't hold, of course.
One of the provinces, Leinster, rebelled. There were five provinces
at the time, Ulster, Leinster, Munster, connect and Meath. Today
Meath is just a county in Leinster, just so you know.
And the leinsterman rebelled. They didn't like being under Brian's rule,

(07:17):
so he basically smashed their army and then plundered Dublin.
He marched on Tara, which was the seat of the kings,
and made malsche Canal give him the High Kingship of
all of Ireland in ten o two. So Brian rules
of High King from ten o two to ten fourteen.
And we should say too that the role of High
King is more of a symbolic one because it's not

(07:39):
like we have a united Ireland. Even now. The feudal
system is kind of kicked in, but things are still
too fractured with all of these warring clans and tribes
for him to really rule them all. And sure there
are plenty of people who aren't um allied with the king.
And under Brian's rule we have a bit of a renaissance.

(08:00):
He does a lot to try to rebuild what the
Vikings destroyed. He's a patron of the arts of literature,
of religious architecture, and he tries to reclaim relics from
Europe that have been taken from Ireland. So as his
personal life goes, he had multiple marriages and sons, which
was apparently par for the course among the Irish kings.

(08:20):
But nothing lasts forever, even for Brian. And there's another
revolt in ten thirteen when the king of Leinster mel
Morda got the Vikings on his side, and we're reinforced
by lots of the other counties. And to quell this rebellion,
Brian got thirty thousand men together and headed to Clontarf

(08:40):
near Dublin in April of ten fourteen. But Brian is
very old by the time, somewhere in his eighties, so
he's not much for battle. His relatives are going to
lead the army instead, he'll be in a tent praying
for them, and much to his surprise and mine mal
Shachnal agrees to help him his rival, yeah, the other
old high king. And so we have the Battle of Clontarf,

(09:03):
which started on April fourteen, which was good Friday. Almost
four thousand irishmen died um, which was you know, a
large number, and including Brian's son barak or Market, who
supposedly behaved heroically. But it was even worse for the
Vikings and the Leinsterman. They lost around seven thousand people

(09:26):
according to some estimates. Um Brian ended up winning. The
Vikings retreated pursued to their ships, but on their way back,
according to the story, they found Brian in his tent
praying and they killed him with an axe, although supposedly
he was able to kill three of them before he died,
including beheading one of them. So the victorious, yet dead

(09:49):
Brian is honored with a twelve day wake, and we're
left with the question was the Battle of Clontarf important?
And some people say it marks the end of Viking
do nation in Ireland, so in that count, yeah, it's
very important, but the other side says not really. Most
of the Vikings ended up staying and it was just, uh,

(10:13):
it made a pretty story. It was something that was
easy to turn into, you know, literary loveliness. But as
far as actual political significance, maybe there wasn't a lot,
and maybe it even had a negative impact. What's interesting
to think about you Brian's male relatives mostly died in
the battle, as did he, of course, so their power
kind of fell apart. But if he hadn't died, and

(10:35):
if they all hadn't died they left heirs, would Ireland
have been a monarchy And that's a really interesting question
to ponder. Um if you imagine this unified, very cohesive
Ireland existing after this, and if you have any insight there,
please email us at History Podcast at how stuff works
dot com. We'd love to hear your ideas about what

(10:58):
might have happened had In and his descendants ruled on.
We'd also like to hear your viewpoint on Brian Boru,
because there are a couple of different ones. There's the
side of thinks of him as this great Irish patriot
and national hero who led the Irish people against the
Vikings and died for them. It's the story that's almost

(11:19):
mythical the Stone of Destiny was said to roar when
Brian was crowned, and his blood when he died was
said to have healed the injuries of an Irish boy.
But of course there's always another side. But of course
some people also say that Brian Burrew better epitomizes the
Irish infighting, Irish fighting Irish rather than Irish fighting Vikings,

(11:40):
and that the Vikings fought on both sides anyways, and
some people say that his allegiance to his clan was
more important than his allegiance to Ireland as a whole.
Regardless of what you think Brian Boru's place is, he
still very much has a place in Ireland. At trying
to be college, you can find what's called Brian Brew's harp,

(12:03):
even though it was not his and has nothing to
do with his life, but it's an instrument dating back
to the fifteenth century, and that same harp is seen
on the Guinness logo as well as the heraldic symbols
of Ireland. He's still very much around in their seven
fifty thousand O'Brien throughout the world, so he's made some

(12:23):
kind of impact. We plan to talk to Conan O'Brien
about this on Twitter Watch Out Conan, and that brings
us to listener mail. Today's email is from Ted of
Santa Cruz, California about our Zenobia Warrior Queen podcast, and
he says you made one slight error by referring to

(12:44):
corn in the podcast. Prior to Columbus's discovery of the
America's and North American maize, corn referred to any grain,
usually beat. Only after May's became the major staple crop
of the world did it become popularly known as corn.
The other grains are named nicely, such as wheat, rye, barbie, oats, etcetera.
So your listeners might have been confused by your use

(13:06):
of corn. I do love your podcasts, so please keep
doing them. So thank you to Ted for the correction.
So that about wraps up. Brian Baru. We're gonna wish
everyone happy St. Patrick's Day, Katie Blancha and pick up
a Guinness Brian Barreu. Celebrate that harp um And if
you have anything else you'd like to learn about Irish history,

(13:27):
you should visit our homepage. It's www dot How Stuff
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