It was square in form, and possessed powers wholly or partly miraculous.  One of its strings, we are told, moved people to tears, another to laughter.  A harp in Trinity College, known as the harp of Brian Boru, is said to be the oldest in Europe, and has thirty strings.  This instrument has been the subject of many controversies.  O’Curry doubts it having belonged to Brian Boru, and gives his reasons for believing that it was among the treasures of Westminster when Henry VIII. came to the throne in 1509, and that it suggested the placing of the harp in the arms of Ireland, and on the “harp grotes,” a coinage of the period.  However this may be we cannot doubt that music had early wrought itself into the very texture and fabric of Irish life; airs and words, wedded closely together, travelling down from mouth to mouth for countless generations.  Every little valley and district may be said to have had its own traditional melodies, and the tunes with which Moore sixty years ago was delighting critical audiences had been floating unheeded and disregarded about the country for centuries.

The last ten years of the eighth century were very bad ones for Ireland.  Then for the first time the black Viking ships were to be seen sweeping shore-wards over the low grey waves of the Irish Channel, laden with Picts, Danes, and Norsemen, “people,” says an old historian, “from their very cradles dissentious, Land Leapers, merciless, soure, and hardie.”  They descended upon Ireland like locusts, and where-ever they came ruin, misery, and disaster followed.

[Illustration:  KILBANNON TOWER. (From a drawing by George.  Petrie, LL.D.)]

Their first descent appears to have been upon an island, probably that of Lambay, near the mouth of what is now Dublin harbour.  Returning a few years later, sixty of their ships, according to the Irish annalists, entered the Boyne, and sixty more the Liffy.  These last were under the command of a leader who figures in the annals as Turgesius, whose identity has never been made very clear, but who appears to be the same person known to Norwegian historians as Thorkels or Thorgist.

Whatever his name he was undoubtedly a bad scourge to Ireland.  Landing in Ulster, he burned the cathedral of Armagh, drove out St. Patrick’s successors, slaughtered the monks, took possession of the whole east coast, and marching into the centre of the island, established himself in a strong position near Athlone.

Beyond all other Land Leapers, this Thorgist, or Turgesius, seems to have hated the churches.  Not content with burning them, and killing all priests and monks he could find, his wife, we are told, took possession of the High Altar at Clonmacnois, and used it as a throne from which to give audience, or to utter prophecies and incantations.  He also exacted a tribute of “nose money,” which if not paid entailed the forfeit of the feature it was called after.  At last three or four of the tribes united by despair rose against him, and he was seized and slain; an event about which several versions are given, but the most authentic seems to be that he was taken by stratagem and drowned in Lough Owel, near Mullingar, in or about the year 845.