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When I was young, my father’s oft repeated favorite riddle was: What is the richest country in the world? The first time he quizzed me, I wracked my brain and offered a few feeble guesses. When he could contain his mirth no longer, with a grin, a twinkle, and a nudge to my ribs he chuckled: “Ireland, of course! Because its capital is always doublin’!!”

My Irish grandmother, Margaret McCaffrey, was a psychic. “Pooh! Not possible,” you say. Maybe, maybe not, but here’s the story. You be the judge.

    Lately, I’ve been craving oysters, crab, and mussels. I could write it off to the fact that I keep seeing rafts of the succulent treats on shopping forays. Like many things I’ve written of, however, I’m sure the shellfish love affair that began in my childhood with clams, oysters, shrimp and crab, was my father’s doing.  During summer vacations we spent many a dawn netting crabs off a New Jersey pier.  We made monthly pilgrimages to all-you-can-eat Friday night shrimp feasts at Dad’s VFW Post. On rare restaurant outings, we shared plates of clams on the half-shell like co-conspirators in on some briny secret when everyone else was ordering chowder.
    One of Dad’s favorite ditties was “Molly Malone.”  I learned to warble the song before I learned the alphabet.  “In Dublin’s fair city where the girls are so pretty, I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone, as she wheeled her wheelbarrow through streets broad and narrow, crying Cockles and Mussels, alive alive-oh!” For some reason, I just never put it all together.  Molly.  Mussels.  Dublin.  Ireland. 
    The Irish have been eating shellfish since humans first set foot on the Emerald Isle.  Huge shell piles called middens have been found at every seaside archaeological site, which proves that shellfish were a dietary mainstay for Ireland’s Mesolithic hunter-gatherers.  Some mollusks were used to make the rare purple dyes reserved for garments of kings and princes, but for the most part shellfish provided a vital source of protein along with fish and marine vegetables like dulse, laver and carrageen moss.  Eons later, during the Great Famine, the inhabitants of fishing villages survived best.  Ironically, tales of starving famine victims desperately searching the beaches for food turned succeeding generations against shellfish.  It took more than a hundred years for the bitter memory to fade.
    Today, mussels and oysters take top billing on the list of Irish mollusks, but in times past all manner of shellfish were eaten.  The catch was especially rich in Galway Bay, once the exclusive territory of fishermen who lived in a settlement near the Spanish Arch, known as the Cladach (Beach).  A 19th century advertisement for fish sold on Claddagh Quay offers “...cods, lings, hawkfish, turbets, plaises, pilchards, liberal of oysters, scallops, cokles, musles, razures, and plentie of lobsters, crabs and shromps.”
    The wide-open Atlantic off Ireland’s western coast has always been known for its abundance.  Tomas O’ Crohan, who was born on Great Blasket Island in 1856, wrote about local seafood in his masterpiece The Islandman.  “The food I got was eggs, lumps of butter, fish, limpet and winkles – a bit of everything going from sea to land...My mother had brought a dish of limpets from the strand with her...She was roasting the limpets and throwing them to us one by one like a hen with chickens.”
    According to the Gaelic proverb: Ri sea Diuilicini ach ria tualaigh sea bairnight  (Mussels are the food of kings, limpets are the food of peasants.)  Certainly mussels are bigger, more flavorful and easier to prepare in a myriad of ways than tiny limpets.  But it was their easily acquired abundance that made the blue-black bivalves a primary food item for rich and poor alike.  Mussels grow almost everywhere.  They are found clinging to offshore boulders, adhered to the rocks of pebble beaches, and bound up in the seaweeds of muddy estuaries. When the tides retreat, they are effortlessly harvested by hand or with nets. In his book Irish Folkways, author E. Edtyn Evans related how the waters off the coast of Donegal were once home to so many mussels that they were regularly scraped off the rocks and used to fertilize potato plantings.
    Today, thanks to huge offshore farming operations, mussels are the commonest shellfish sold in Ireland, and thus the reason they are found on practically every pub menu. While mussel farming was perfected by the French, the method was actually invented in 1235 A.D. by a Corkman named Walton who was shipwrecked in the Bay of Aiguillon on the west coast of France.  Desperation being the mother of invention, Walton devised an ingenious way of trapping sea birds with a net attached by long poles to offshore mudflats.  When he discovered that the poles became covered in mussels, the savvy Irishman abandoned bird hunting for full-time mussel farming. 
    Today mussels are most commonly farmed on ropes suspended from rafts that are anchored in shallow waters.  Tiny mussels are seeded onto the ropes, and when the spawn reach a mature size, the ropes are simply pulled up and harvested.  Until recently, most of Europe’s mussels were grown in the Mediterranean Sea, but it is now so polluted that Ireland’s pristine waters have become the principal mussels source for the European market. 
    One of Ireland’s largest mussel farms permanently bobs in Cork County’s Bantry Bay. Washed by the warm waters of the Gulf Stream and sheltered from winds by the mountains that surround it, the bay, which is one of the world’s deepest, provided safe haven to sailing ships for centuries. Then, in the early 1980s local fishermen began setting out mussel pots in the calm waters. What began as an experiment has grown to become a major industry supplying jobs for hundreds of people and earning millions of euros in export trade annually.
    Unlike the more meaty mussel, cockles are mere tiny morsels, but delicious nonetheless and abundant as well.  In times past, fishermen believed that cockles could not be eaten “until they had three drinks of April water.”  Immediately after the third April tide, cockle pickers flocked to the beaches.  Where the sand curled like a worm was the place to dig.  Sometimes the meat was extracted from the shell with a pin and eaten on the spot, but usually the cockles were taken home, washed to remove the sand, and boiled in salted water.  Cockle Pie (cooked cockles and grated onions baked in a pastry shell) was once a favorite supper dish. 
    Few people go to the bother of gathering mussels or picking cockles anymore, it being easier to purchase from the wide assortment of seafood offered by a neighborhood fishmonger or supermarket.  But Molly has not been forgotten.  On Dublin’s Grafton Street, a bronze statue of a maid pushing her cart laden with mollusks pays eternal homage to the women who once sold cupfuls of cockles and mussels from wheelbarrows in the Liberties.  We always will love you, sweet Molly Malone.  Sláinte!

    One day while searching for I can’t remember what in my foot-thick Webster’s, which has been my word go-to since high school, I stumbled upon a most interesting linguistic factoid. Every single question word in the English language (who, what, where, when, which, and why, plus whose, whither, whence, whom and even how) has a Viking origin. It makes sense.
    Picture this: a Viking raiding ship has just dropped anchor and hordes of bloodthirsty marauders have come ashore. They chase down one poor fellow and bombard him with questions. Who are you? What place is this? Where is your leader? When did he leave? Which way did he go? Why won’t you tell us where the gold is? And the clincher: How many men are hiding in the forest?
    It doesn’t take much to imagine the scene, especially since Hollywood has done us the favor of putting it up on the big screen countless times. Huge, helmeted Viking warriors wreaking havoc on a sleepy pastoral setting provide spectacular action footage and big box office returns. However, it was not so entertaining a scenario some twelve hundred years ago in Ireland.
    The first recorded raid occurred in 795AD when the church on Lambeg Island was plundered and burned. While the Vikings were pagans, their assaults were not religion based. At the time, there were no true towns in Ireland but rather scattered communities near monasteries that served as ‘safe houses’ for valuables, food, and cattle. This made those locations prime targets for Viking raids.
    Why Ireland was singled out is not clear, but most historians agree that her lush landscape proved an enticement the Norsemen could not ignore as their own territory lay in such a harsh climate zone that farming was an arduous business at best.
    Another factor that played a huge part in the invasions was the Northerners seafaring knowledge. The Irish had not yet developed any shipbuilding skills, relying on coracles, small willow-framed one or two-man boats covered in animal hides, to ferry people and goods on the island’s network of rivers and streams. The Viking longboat, on the other hand, was an amazing example of advanced maritime technology for the time. It was durable enough to weather the worst storms of the North Atlantic, yet its slender design and minimal draft could easily navigate inland rivers and land on shallow coastal beaches.
    Initially, the Vikings were satisfied with seasonal lightning raids on their Southern neighbors. Men headed out to sea after their spring crops had been planted and returned home after a few months of pillaging to reap the meager autumn harvest, their boats heavy with plunder and slaves.
    It wasn’t long before Ireland’s mild winters and verdant hills convinced the offshore interlopers it would be wise to emigrate there. In the 9th century, invasions began in earnest. The monastery of Armagh was sacked in 832AD, and Clonmacnoise in 837AD. At the time, Ireland was divided into numerous ‘kingdoms’ that no one ruled outright, and no unified force defended the territory. The Vikings continued raiding Ireland, pushing ever deeper inland, marrying local women, and making trade alliances with the various chieftains.
    One of the earliest Viking settlements established at the mouth of the Liffey survived to become what is now modern Dublin. In 914AD, a fleet of ships established a base at Waterford, followed by a base at Cork. Somewhat later, an invasion up the Shannon estuary laid the foundation for Limerick.
    Archaeological digs at these towns and other sites around Ireland have shown that the Vikings assimilated almost seamlessly with Irish life. Like the island’s inhabitants, the newcomers were farmers and herdsmen and ate a wide variety of native vegetables, greens, dairy, grain (oats), game, wild fowl, and beef. Unlike the Irish, who although they were island dwellers did not consume much fish, the Viking diet included copious amounts of seafood, much of which was preserved by salting. The invaders also blessed the Irish kitchen with a new dietary staple – chicken – which the long-ranging seafarers had discovered and quickly adopted in China where the birds had their origin.
    For nearly two hundred years, the Vikings continued their pattern of invasion, settlement, and assimilation. Dublin developed into a wealthy trading center serving other Western European towns with slaves, commodities and shipbuilding skills.
    Meanwhile the individual Irish kingdoms began banding together, uniting finally under a single High King of Ireland, the great chieftain Brian Boru. His attempts to make everyone swear allegiance to him failed in only one key quarter. Mael Morda, King of Leinster, had cut his own deal with the Viking King of Dublin. Unable to iron out their differences, the opposing forces met at the bloody Battle of Clontarf on April 3, 1014. Despite the fact that Brian Boru was killed, the unified Irish chiefs prevailed, tolling the finale of major Viking influence on Ireland.
    While researching this article, I decided to look for more linguistic Viking connections to Ireland. Up popped Waterford and Wexford. Both were built on inlets from the sea that still in Norse are called fjords. The city of Howth comes from hofuth, Old Norse for ‘headlands’: Skerries comes from skjcby, meaning ‘a rock.’ Ulster, Leinster, and Munster all share the ending ‘ster’ which comes from Old Norse stathir, meaning ‘a place.’ Proving how pervasive and permanent the Vikings were on the Emerald Isle, even the word ‘Ireland’ is derived from Old Norse Iraland! For more info see: www.archive.org/stream/scandinavianrela00wals/scandinavianrela00wals_djvu.txt
    There were numerous other fascinating links, but the one that really flabbergasted me was my grandmother’s name: MacCaffrey! It stems from the Norse family name ‘Guthothr.’ I’m guessing here, but it could be an amalgam of gut (good) and Thor (the Norse warrior god whose hammer shook the heavens with thunderclaps) as many names were based on Norse deities. One thing is certain. Viking genes are floating around somewhere in my DNA chanting what has morphed from the warrior’s queries to the modern journalist’s six-word mantra: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? Sláinte!

Pop quiz: what’s the most popular Irish boy’s name? Odds are, the first one that came to mind was Patrick. Wrong. While Saint Patrick is Ireland’s patron, his name comes in at #18.