The Princes of Ireland

In a little more than two weeks, I will be traveling to Ireland to participate in a Sierra Club tour focusing on Irish history and hiking scenic locations.  In preparation for this trip I read the historic novel The Princes of Ireland: The Dublin Saga by Edward Rutherfurd.  Princes, a 765 tome, covers the period from AD 430 to 1533.  As a novel, it is so-so.  The time span covered can't help but lack continuity.  As a readable history, it’s good, and according to a NYT review, it has been assigned reading in some high school history classes.  I think too it is good preparation for my trip which will cover much of the area written about in the novel.

As expected, my Irish ancestors were capable of great deeds and great brutality.  It is a story of invasions, battles, and assimilations.  The most difficult invasion of all was the arrival of King Henry II in the twelfth century. Rutherfurd introduces this section of book with this foreboding paragraph:

The invasion that was to bring eight centuries of grief to Ireland began on a sunny autumn day in the year of Our Lord 1167.  It consisted of three ships which arrived at the small southern port of Wexford.

It is one of those moments in history where a wrong turn is made followed by centuries of suffering.  Since the book ends in the sixteenth century, it doesn’t cover the more recent “troubles.”  I think Rutherfurd wrote another book to cover that.  It is those troubles that, until I first visited Ireland a couple of years ago, mainly informed by perception of Ireland’s history.  It’s been interesting to see that history as more beautiful, more complicated, and yes, more brutal than I ever imagined.  Some of this is covered in Rutherfurd’s book.