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returned to Iceland, and married there, he gave his son the 
name of Kjartan, after his grandfather. Several names in 
Iceland, as Niall and Kjallak, are also said to have been 
brought over from Ireland. 
The Irish annals contain many accounts of the Pagan 
Danes and Norwegians having burned or plundered churches 
and monasteries, and killed the monks, in Ireland. It has, 
therefore, been often said, that the Christian Irish were 
much more civilized than the Pagan Norsemen, and that 
before the invasion of the latter, a high state of civili- 
zation had prevailed in Ireland, which their barbarism inter- 
rupted and defaced. Mr. Worsaae quite agrees with his 
friend Mr. Petrie and the other Irish antiquaries, who say 
that many of the monuments in Ireland, such as the round 
towers, which had often been referred to as proving the 
civilization of the Danes or Norsemen, were in reality not of 
North origin at all. But he thinks, on the other hand, thatsome 
antiquaries have now and then detracted too much from the 
Northmen, making them out—according to the tradition of 
the country—to be only rude robbers and plunderers. Being 
convinced that these opinions were not founded upon histori- 
cal truth, he would not omit this opportunity of trying to 
demonstrate their unsoundness. 
It cannot be denied that Ireland was christianized at a 
very early period, and several centuries before Scandinavia. 
The Icelandic sagas show traces of that, and of the influence 
Ireland exercised in the christianizing of the North. When 
the Norsemen went first to Iceland in the latter half of the 
ninth century, they found no traces of inhabitants there, except 
of Irish monks, who had left croziers, bells, and Irish books. 
This account, in the sagas, of Irish monks in Iceland, is con- 
firmed by the statement of an Irish monk, Dicuil, who wrote 
in the ninth century, and who mentions, that monks from 
Ireland had visited the Ferd islands, before these were yet 
inhabited, and also Iceland, where the monks had stopped 
