Ragnall Ivarson and Jarl Otir

p are few periods of history so distressing to the historian JL as the two centuries during which the northern pirates, like a swarm of wasps, overspread the maritime districts of western Europe, and converted its rivers into mere highways for brigandage; when everything that men value as civilisation was being ruthlessly destroyed ; when abbey and church, palace and farmstead, were burnt and their inmates slaughtered; when the reviving arts with a reviving literature were being trodden under and almost stamped out, and the world seemed to be moving backwards towards the chaos whence it sprang. Among those who were most active and most ruthless in the savage work were Eagnall Ivarson and Jarl Otir, whose acts have never, I believe, been brought together into a continuous story. Eagnall was probably the grandson or greatgrandson of that greatest of all pirates, Eagnar Lodbrog, who stands with one foot in the heroic and the other in the sober world of history, and whose career throws a lurid light on the frontier between both. It was the savage way in which this arch-pirate was put to death in England-a fashion which he had doubtless practised on others-that probably led to the persistent campaign of heartless cruelty which his descendants dealt out to the Christian communities of the west, and especially to those of Britain and Ireland. He was the ancestor, in fact, of a clan whose handiwork was more prominent than that of all the other piratical clans put together. This clan in the Irish annals became known from his son Ivar, the father of the main subject of this article, as the Hy Ivar, or as we should now write it O'lvar. The initial particle in such names corresponds to that of Mac in the nomenclature of the Scottish clans. In either case it would seem to have originally meant ' son ' and is sometimes used in

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