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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, that some 

 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 Fsero islands, before these were yet 

 inhabited, and also Iceland, where the monks had stopped 



