This study is an attempt to provide a new survey and interpretation of the activity and, in some cases, identity of several leaders of groups of Scandinavian ‘vikings’ who made their presence felt in Ireland and England from 850-851 onwards. These include the ‘dark heathens’ who arrived in Ireland in 851 as well as one part of the Danish great heathen army in England from 865. This interpretation makes use of all the major annals and chronicles in the Frankish kingdoms, England, Ireland and Wales. No use is made of later sagas. The article will demonstrate that in all probability the dark heathens who came to Ireland probably left Frisia in 850 and came by way of England and that these dark heathens are pretty definitately not to be identified with the Dublin viking ‘dynasty of Ívarr’. Also two of the most important Danish leaders or ‘kings’ of the great army in England, Hálfdan and Inguar/Inwær as well as their probable brother Ubba, were not members of a Dublin viking dynasty as proposed by Clare Downham and before her by Alfred P. Smyth and David Dumville; the two ‘Ívarrs’ were quite likely separate people. Although the origins of the leaders and warriors of the great army will not be examined in any great depth, Inguar, Hálfdan and Ubba clearly came from a Danish and/or Frisian-Danish context. On the interpretation of all the data proposed here there never was any dynasty of Ívarr which ruled on both sides of the Irish Sea, in Dublin and York, during the last decades of the ninth century. Certainly after 853 the Scandinavian viking grouping of Ívarr, Óláfr and Ásl and their immediate successors were a dominant Dublin-based power, but not one of them ever was a leader of part of the great army in England, and any Dublin-York axis would only be seen for a relatively short time after York was captured by a Dublin viking called Ragnald in 919.
Stephen M. Lewis (Wed,) studied this question.