"There's a wicked wind tonight. / Wild upheaval in the sea; / No fear now that the Viking hordes / Will terrify me." That is Brendan Kennelly's translation in the Penguin Book of Irish Verse, which he also edited with customary elan. As to those dreaded longboats from the northern seas, amazing facts have emerged from what is described as "among the most significant archaeological discoveries made in northern Europe in modern times" - namely the Skudelev ships excavated by Danish archaeologists in Roskilde Fjord, Denmark. Dandrochronology or treering dating is described as the most precise scientific dating method. What is known as Wreck 2 in these sunken vessels, under examination, did not match any of the master chronologies from southern Scandinavia; then the experts tried to match the curves of the tree-rings with coastal areas of the Baltic.
They were puzzled as to why this ship's material did not fit in any northern context. Only when the chronologies of England and Ireland came to be reviewed did something happen. The curves from Wreck 2 corresponded best with the curve of oaks grown around Dublin. Niels Bonde of the National Museum of Denmark, who writes in the Autumn issue of the admirable journal Archaeology Ireland, tells us that "the ship, which was built around AD 1060-70, was not actually Danish, but, in fact, Irish and probably built in the Dublin region."
Further, he states that the research leads to the suggestion that there had been a tradition of building ships of the Nordic type (clinkerbuilt) in Dublin from the middle of the 11th century to at least the first half of the 13th, and that timbers used were taken in the same area. A photograph of the interior of the museum shows "the Irish Longship", of which the remains of the timber are mainly in the prow, while the skeleton of the whole vessel is filled out with what is presumably metal, gracefully done and a credit to the original builders.
There is a neat tradition that the two sons of Harold, the English king killed at Hastings in 1066, fled to the court in Dublin and then to Denmark, seeking shelter with the Danish king Svend Estridson (1047-74), and were likely incorporated into Danish society. Their sister married a Russian king and later became an ancester to the Danish royal family. The writer speculates that what we now call Wreck 2 was the vessel that bore them to Denmark.