This episode of the Kings Hall podcast is brought to you by Backwards Planning Financial,

Alpine Gold, Max D-Trailers, Salt and Strings Butchery, Reformation Heritage Books,

Premier Body Armor, and by our supporters at patreon.com.

Thank you. supporters at patreon.com. Not for a thousand years. Not for a thousand years. Not since the Spartan Legion had perished at the hot gates of Thermopylae. Had Western civilization been put to such a test or face such odds?

Nor would it again face extinction, till in this century it devised the means of extinguishing all life.

As our story opens at the beginning of the fifth century, no one could foresee the coming

collapse. But to reasonable men in the second half of the century, surveying the situation of their

time, the end was no longer in doubt. Their world was finished. One could do nothing but, like Assonius,

retire to one's villa, write poetry, and await the inevitable. It never occurred to them

that the building blocks of their world would be saved by outlandish oddities from a land so

marginal that the Romans had not bothered to conquer it. By men so strange, they lived in little

huts on rocky outcrops and shaved half their heads and tortured themselves with fasts and chills

and nettle baths. As Kenneth Clark said, quote, looking back from the great civilizations of 12th century

France or 17th century Rome, it is hard to believe that for quite a long

time, almost 100 years, Western Christianity survived by clinging to places like Skellig

Michael, a pinnacle of rock 18 miles from the Irish coast, rising 700 feet out of the sea, end

quote. So writes Thomas Cahill about the strange moment when

Rome fell in Western civilization hung in the balance. We may take it for granted today, but our

literature, Christian culture, and heroes almost did not make it after the sack of the Great

Empire. And yet, as Cahill points out, a strange people from

Ireland all too often disdained by their English neighbors and the rest of the world, would save

the day for the West. As we tell the story of the Irish who saved civilization in this episode

...