D1B

2. This is intended to start the Submission Timeline on the road to a Norse-dominated Ireland, which despite the importance of the Hiberno-Norse, is not all that easy. In OTL, the Norse in Ireland were comparatively few in number and their permanent presence largely a matter of urban trading centers. Internal disunity and rapid Christianization led swiftly to the absorption of the Hiberno-Norse into Irish politics, although they remained a distinct cultural entity for centuries. In this TL, Submission prevents Christianization, but that's not automatically a plus, leading as it will to more substantial attempts to drive them out on the part of the numerically superior Irish, especially as these Outsiders are really not congenial neighbours.

So the grounding assumption of the above is that their fanatical Outsider Submissiveness enables the Norse to cooperate and concentrate their efforts at their points of greatest success in OTL, especially Dublin -- known in this TL by its Norse name, Dyflin. Effort is shifted away especially from Ulster, the area of weakest Norse influence and least success of OTL.

More specifically, instead of hanging around and being killed by Maél Sechlainn (in Giraldus' version -- alas, almost certainly unhistorical -- by means of a squad of crack Uí Néill transvestite hitmen), Turgéis (perhaps "Thórgestr" in Old Norse) joins the Dyflin settlement. Specifically, he founds a settlement at the same site as the tenth century Norse foundation that was in OTL the ancestor of modern Dublin. But in this TL the earlier ninth century settlement at Kilmainham is never wiped out by the Irish, but is instead supplemented and eventually replaced by Turgéis's settlement.

Blathmacc, in this TL, was not martyred on Iona -- rather he was converted to Submission rather after the manner of the Stockholm Syndrome. Authr and he have their little conversation in SE 73 [845 CE], at the very end of the ultra-Outsider period. In "reality," all of these personalities would be butterflied out of existence, of course -- but fleshing out Irish history of the ninth century involves so much exercise of what W. S. Ferguson delicately called the "reconstructive imagination" that it hardly matters.

Return to Dyflinarskiri 1.