70 Norway and the Norivegians 



But this was not at the beginning of the Viking age ; 

 for the first Vikings in northern England came from 

 Denmark. 



The two streams of Viking invasion of which we have 

 spoken flowed all round the British isles ; the Danish 

 ascending from the south, having coasted round Frisia 

 till they reached the English Channel, or in other cases 

 sailed straio;ht across the Xorth Sea to the East Anglian 

 or Northumbrian shore ; the Norse stream descending 

 from the north, generally by Scotland, to England or 

 Ireland. Sometimes the two streams met in antagon- 

 istic currents, sometimes they combined and flowed in 

 imison ; they always ended by conquering and making 

 settlements. We have no record of the Viking conquests 

 in Scotland. But we know that, eventually, the settle- 

 ments of the Norsemen in that country included the 

 Orkneys and Shetland s, Caithness, a part of Sutherland- 

 shire, and the Hebrides. For Ireland we have more 

 details of the process of conquest ; but the accounts of 

 the wars of the foreisjners^ in Ireland are so confused 

 that it is very hard to form out of them anything like a 

 consistent picture. What we do see is, beside many 

 lesser attacks, a great fleet coming about the year 832, 

 led by a captain whose ambition was not satisfied by 

 anything less than the conquest of one-half of the 

 country. His name was Thorgisl, But this leader, this 

 first real A-^iking king, as one may call him, did not reign 

 long. He was captured by one of the Irish kings and 



1 Gaill, ' foreiguers ' simply, is the name usually applied to the invader 

 from the north in the Irish chronicles. Another name is Lochlann, lake 

 men (Fjord-men?) A third ' Gentiles.' 



