Looking out to sea in Proteus, Stephen casts his
thoughts back eleven centuries, to the time of the first
Viking invasions of Ireland: "Galleys of the Lochlanns ran
here to beach, in quest of prey, their bloodbeaked prows
riding low on a molten pewter surf." Lochlann (land of the
lochs, i.e. the fjords of Norway) is a Gaelic name preserved
to the present day in both Ireland and Scotland. It refers to
the first Viking raiders and settlers of Ireland in the last
decade of the 8th century and the first decades of the 9th. At
about the same time, other invaders from what is now Denmark
began settling Britain, and in 853 these new Scandinavians
arrived in Ireland. Stephen thinks of them in the next breath:
"Dane vikings, torcs of tomahawks aglitter on their breasts
when Malachi wore the collar of gold."
In a lecture titled
"Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages" (1907), Joyce observed
that "Anyone who reads the history of the three centuries that
precede the coming of the English must have a strong stomach,
because the internecine strife, and the conflicts with the
Danes and the Norwegians, the black foreigners and the white
foreigners, as they were called, follow each other so
continuously and ferociously that they make this entire era a
veritable slaughterhouse. The Danes occupied all the principal
ports on the east coast of the island and established a
kingdom at Dublin."
The invaders possessed the most formidable warships of the
time: light, slender, flexible, and shallow-drafting galleys
that could cut the seas swiftly, venture up rivers, and land
on beaches. As Gifford notes, the Danes also had "metal
bodyarmor (coats of mail and helmets with visors)" that the
Gaels could not match. He speculates that "torcs of
tomahawks aglitter on their breasts" refers to a
device of reversed battle-axes that the Danes often wore on
top of their mail coats.