Who beat the Vikings?

by ogad4u

Did the vikings encountered any army who defeated them?

Steelcan909

Yes, of course. The Vikings were an army like any other, and in the wide array of places that they raided and attacked they were inevitably in some cases defeated. It is worth keeping in mind that there was never one unified Viking state or entity. Different kingdoms and polities interacted in various ways, and there was never any one ruler over all the Norse. Indeed the Norse often spent as much time and energy fighting each other as they did raiding and attacking overseas.

While we will never able to have a full accounting of every raid and battle that the Vikings participated in, there are some more famous and well known campaigns and battles that ended in defeat for the Norsemen. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it should gve you the broader picture, that the Norse were in no way unbeatable.

The Micel Here, or more colloquially, the Great Heathen Army, under Guthrum was defeated by Alfred the Great in the late 800's. In the following decades his successors capitalized on their success and were able to eventually to subjugate the Norsemen in the Danelaw area of England.

The Kievan Rus were defeated by the Byzantines and forced to make peace in the aftermath of their attacks on Constantinople and Bulgaria. Indeed the terms of this peace were so harsh that the Rus King was assassinated on his way back to his homelands by those disgruntled by it.

Harald Hardrade's invasion of England ended in ignominious defeat at the hands of Harold Godwinson. In turn after the Norman conquest, the Danish attacks on England, depending on your source, were either driven off by the Normans and harassed by the population, or they paid their way out and got scattered by storms.

As I said above, this is in no way an exhaustive or authoritative list but I hope it does give you an idea that the Norse were not unbeatable and in many cases were defeated and driven off by those they attacked.

cnzmur

One big one was Clontarf in 1014, where Brian Boru, the Irish high king defeated a mixed Hiberno-Norse force, mostly comprised of the men of the king of Leinster, Mael Morda, and the Dublin Norse outside Dublin.

The main Irish annals (chronicles that list the key events of every year) were I believe being recorded at the time by 1014, so their entries are contemporary. Not much detail is given beyond a list of the more notable dead: in the Annals of Inisfallen it says

the foreigners of Áth Cliath gave battle to Brian, son of Cennétig, and he was slain, with his son Murchad, royal heir of Ireland, and Murchad's son, namely, Tairdelbach... There were also slain in that battle Mael Mórda son of Murchad, king of Laigin, together with the princes of the Laigin round him, and the foreigners of the western world were slaughtered in the same battle.

The Annals of Ulster's slightly long version adds: 'numerous indeed are the events of this year'.

About a century, maybe a little less, after the battle a literary version of the battle appeared in 'the war of the Irish and the Foreigners' Cogad Gáedel re Gallaib, composed for a great-grandson of Brian. You may think you like adjectives, but, compared to the unknown author of this work, you really don't.

Now on the one side of that battle were the shouting, hateful, powerful, wrestling, valiant, active, fierce-moving, dangerous, nimble, violent, furious, unscrupulous, untamable, inexorable, unsteady, cruel, barbarous, frightful, sharp, ready, huge, prepared, cunning, warlike, poisonous, murderous, hostile Danars; bold, hard-hearted Danmarkians, surly, piratical foreigners, blue-green, pagan; without reverence, without veneration, without honour, without mercy, for God or for man.

it's even better in Irish, where it all alliterates: 'glaim glonmar, gusmar, glecach, galach, gnimach, gargbeoda, duabsig, dian, demnietach, dasachtach, diceillid, docoisc, dochomuind, becda, borb, barbarta, boadba' etc. As well as the very showy style, the author also makes some attempts to define the significance of the battle, which have been pretty influential. 'For it was he that released the men of Erinn and its women, from the bondage and iniquity of the foreigners and the pirates'. A view that has had a big impact on the popular memory of the battle well into modern times.

About 170 years after the 'Cogadh', in probably the third quarter of the 13th century, an Icelandic saga called Njal's saga (despite his Irish name, Njal, or Niall was actually a viking) that included a description of Clontarf. The Norse are very much forefronted, not only in the Dublin army, but also in Brian's. While Brian may well have had some Norse from their Munster towns such as Cork, the Icelandic author of the saga has an entire wing of his army commanded by the (we would assume fictional) viking renegade and convert Ospak.