Hello everyone and welcome back to the Viking Age podcast. My name is Lee and this is episode 17,

the moderndom of Blumach. This, believe it or not, is a community-supported podcast,

and that means that we need the help of listeners like you to help us keep this show running.

Your support could take the form of a donation that will help us buy books and keep servers

running.

Or you can help us grow our audience by leaving us a review on iTunes.

If you want to learn more about how you can keep this project going, you can head over

to our website,

Vikingagepodcast.com, or you can just stick around until the end of this episode.

All right, so we've spent the last few episodes exploring some of the activities Viking-R

in Ireland began to engage in following their initial hit-and-run

raids on isolated coastal monasteries. We saw how some of these crews began to engage in battle

with the local Irish forces, and how others began to take human captives in addition to the

gold and silver wealth of the church. We even

talked about how it's highly likely that Western Norwegians began to settle in Northern Scotland

during this period. These settlements, in turn, may have been used as the basis from which the

increased activity that we start to see in Ireland

could have been conducted. Today, we are going to return to the roots of Viking our activity

by following a series of raids on Irish monasteries which were conducted in the early 820s.

This will lead us nicely to the main focus of today's episode,

the martyrdom of the Irish aristocrat-turned-munk, Blamuck. But before we get ahead of ourselves,

let's head on to the history. Situated on the northern coast of Ireland, about 10 miles due northeast from the modern city of Belfast,

...