by Ben Thompson
Another thing that totally rocks about Wolf the Quarrelsome is that he only appears in history twice, and both times he’s kicking ass. It’s those folks that are shrouded in mystery who are often the most interesting, and Wolf is no exception. We never learn about his policy-making efforts. We don’t know anything about his childhood, his girlfriend, his favorite color, or what he liked to do in his spare time. When you read a history of his life, you learn only one thing—he enjoyed smashing people in the face with an axe. That’s it.
So when Brian Boru’s army went up against the Vikings at Clontarf, you can rest assured that Wolf was right in the middle of the near-limitless carnage. The main thrust of the Viking offensive was personally led by an ill-tempered warrior named Brodir of Man, a legendary berserker so manly that it was his name. Brodir was one of those helmet-with-horns-on-it bastards with a giant long axe and an exceedingly bad attitude, and his force was really whipping Irish balls all over the place. Wolf the Quarrelsome got sick of that pretty fast, sought Brodir out on the battlefield, and engaged him in one-on-one combat. Brodir of Man took one shot at Wolf; Wolf sidestepped him and bashed him in the face with his axe, knocking him to the ground. Brodir tried to scramble to his feet, but Wolf smashed him with another mighty blow that sent him crumpling back to the earth. Brodir stumbled to his feet again, and this time Wolf kicked his ass down the side of a hill. By this point, the big bad Viking warlord decided he’d had enough of getting his face wrecked by an obviously superior warrior and ran off like a little girl skipping away from an anthill. With the Viking commander no longer leading his army, Wolf the Quarrelsome almost single-handedly cut a swath of destruction through the enemy ranks, severing countless limbs and adding a nice glossy crimson sheen to his axe blade as the Irish forces began to rout their Leister foes. By the end of the day six thousand Viking warriors had been slain and the political power the Viking aristocracy held over Ireland was forever broken.
However, it wasn’t all unicorns, rainbows, butterflies, and giant piles of severed Viking heads for the Celtic warriors at Clontarf. You see, as Brodir of Man and his entourage of elite warriors was bravely running away from the serious ass-kicking Wolf the Quarrelsome had righteously laid upon them, by a sheer stroke of luck they came across the tent of Brian Boru. Now, while Brian Boru was a pretty strapping dude back in the day, at the time of the Battle of Clontarf he was like eighty years old. The Vikings busted into his tent, caught him in the middle of his prayers, chopped his head off, and ran off into the woods yelling about how awesome they were. About an hour later, Wolf the Quarrelsome returned to report victory and found the decapitated corpse of his older brother. This sent him into a completely insane rage, and he swore vengeance on the man who had killed his brother and his king. He immediately put together a force of tough-as-hell Celtic warriors and set out to jack Brodir up, because as you can probably guess, medieval badasses with names like Wolf the Quarrelsome don’t screw around for one second when it comes to living for revenge. He and his men hunted the Viking raiders down and engaged them in the most brutal hand-to-hand combat this side of the original Mortal Kombat arcade game. All of Brodir’s men were slain, and Wolf took down Brodir himself with a perfectly executed judo shoulder throw followed by a punch to the throat. Then he cut open Brodir’s stomach with a huge battle-axe, pulled out all of his entrails, and tied them around a tree, causing Brodir to die a horrible and painful death. This is what happens when you mess with Wolf the Quarrelsome—you end up being strangled to death with your own intestines.
After destroying Brodir, scattering the Viking army, and breaking Norse control over Ireland forever, Wolf the Quarrelsome promptly vanished from history.
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The Brian Boru Harp, currently housed at Trinity College in Dublin, is the national symbol of Ireland. This ancient instrument appears on the country’s coat of arms and coinage, and also serves as the official logo of Guinness beer.
The Druids, an enigmatic group of mysterious priests known for human sacrifices, communicating telepathically with aliens, and moving giant rocks around with their minds, believed that when a person died his soul wasn’t extinguished but rather was transferred to another living creature. The belief that death was merely a temporary setback inspired ancient Celtic and Irish warriors to go completely balls-out into combat without worrying about their own mortality.
Brian Boru came into prominence in a period following a series of devastating Viking invasions of Ireland. Through alliances, treaties, and wars, Brian was able to reunite most of the Irish counties, and as high king he used the money he earned from his campaigns to rebuild the monasteries and libraries that had been trashed by the Norsemen. He is remembered as one of Ireland’s greatest heroes and military commanders.
Irish warriors fighting the French during the Hundred Years’ War used to capture peasant children from small villages, strap them to cows, and then send the livestock out at the head of their battle formation. The astonished French archers refused to fire arrows at their own kids, thus saving the Irishmen from a pointy death. Isn’t that jacked up?
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BADASS MYTHICAL CREATURES
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ADARO
When most people think of mermen, they generally picture a bunch of wussy, effeminate metrosexual fish-people swimming around singing about how awesome life under the sea is and how much they love braiding each other’s hair and getting together for intense underwater basket-weaving sessions. Well, in the mythology of the Solomon Islands, mermen are insane murderous bastards who would just as soon gut you like a trout and filet your carcass as shake your crazy unwebbed hand. The Adaro are a race of mermen who resemble humans with flippers, dorsal fins, and gills. These sociopathic extreme-sports aficionados travel through the air by surfing on rainbows and use their mad archery skills to shoot poisonous flying fish at sailors. The high-velocity aquatic cruise missiles come out of nowhere and stab you in the heart, killing you instantly and in a totally humiliating manner.
CHIMERA
The bitchin’ chimera was a hate-filled demon from Greek mythology. This thing had the body of a lion, a tail like a lizard, and three heads—a lion, a dragon, and an irate goat. As if it’s not bad enough that this fiend could scratch your eyes out with its massive claws or head-butt the holy living god out of you with its crazy goat horns, it also breathed fire out of each of its angry heads. Honestly, is there anything more ridiculously awesome than a goddamned fire-breathing goat?
FENRIR
Fenrir is a gigantic angry wolf, kind of like Clifford the Big Red Dog if he got rabies and started biting the heads off everyone he saw. This massive beast is the offspring of the evil Norse god Loki, and when the great battle takes place at the end of the world, Fenrir will allegedly show up and chomp Odin in half. You know you’re pretty baller when you can chow down on the king of the Norse gods like he’s an oversized human-shaped bratwurst.
KAPPA
The Kappa are a race of small bipedal reptilian river demons that infest the lakes and ponds of rural Japan. These monsters have two favorite foods: cucumbers and the blood of human children. To this day, some parents have been known to throw cucumbers into rivers before allowing their children to go swimming…just in case.
UNICORN
The unicorn is another malevolent mythical creature that gets a bad rap. While most people generally think of this one-horned equine creature as something out of a bad cartoon musical about princesses in frilly pink dresses carrying around tulips and belting out duets with anthropomorphic singing bunnies, many medieval bestiaries refer to the unicorn as a fearsome executioner capable of using its powerful magical horn to gore the hell out of everything from African elephants to grizzly bears. According to legend, the unicorn was an unstoppable killing machine that destroyed everything in front of it, and was unbeatable in single combat by even the bravest and most badass knight. The only way to tame this destructive, rampaging beast was for a beautiful maiden to take her shirt
off—when unicorns saw topless babes they immediately stopped wantonly slaughtering everything they saw and became as docile as sedated newborn puppies. Personally, this kind of sounds like a ploy devised by some medieval naturalist to get a bunch of hot chicks to show their boobs, but who am I to argue with the primitive science of the Dark Ages?
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15
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR
(1027–1087)
King William came from the South unawares on them with a large army, and put them to flight, and slew on the spot those who could not escape; which were many hundred men; and plundered the town.
—ANGLO–SAXON CHRONICLE
THERE ISN’T MUCH KNOWN ABOUT THE MEDIEVAL WARLORD ROBERT THE DEVIL, BUT I CAN’T IMAGINE THAT HE WAS A SWEET-TEMPERED SOUL WHO COMPOSED ROMANTIC POETRY AND SPENT HIS WEEKENDS VOLUNTEERING AT THE LOCAL ORPHANAGE. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that with a name like Robert the Devil he was a lot more likely to be launching flaming arrows into the thatched roofs of small, disobedient European hamlets than pulling babies from the windows of burning buildings. What we do know about him definitively is that he was the duke of Normandy in 1027, a magical time when he became the proud father of a baby boy named William. Unfortunately, the mother of this tiny bundle of joy wasn’t his wife, the duchess of Normandy—it was some young peasant woman that Bob just so happened to be boinking on the side.
Well, Robert mercifully went catapulting headfirst into a grave a few years later, but since he and the duchess never actually produced a human male child, young William—affectionately known among the Norman barons and nobles who completely hated his guts as William the Bastard—was suddenly tapped to succeed his father as ruler of Normandy. Of course, the tightwad jackass barons weren’t super-omega pumped up about this turn of events, and they showed their displeasure by murdering the hell out of the first three men appointed to be William’s legal guardian. For his own safety, William had to be hidden away in small villages and boarding schools until he was old enough to rule.
Life on the streets made William tougher than an over-the-top Spike Lee joint about ten-year-olds knifing each other in the kidneys with homemade shivs, and he ascended to the throne of Normandy in 1047 at the age of twenty. Pretty much immediately a large group of the aforementioned jackass nobles decided to revolt and overthrow the bastard, so Duke William raised an army and started beating the crap out of everyone just to prove to his people that he did in fact have the concrete testicles and creosote-soaked veins required of all professional medieval conquerors. He crushed the rebel army wherever he found it and eventually laid siege to the traitorous stronghold of Alecon, a fortress where the dumbass defenders thought it would be an incomprehensibly brilliant idea to taunt William by hanging a bunch of nasty animal skins from the castle walls (Will’s mother was a tanner’s daughter and that apparently was like some sort of reference to tanning or something).
That was a mistake.
Before we go any further, I’d just like to take a moment to point out that William the Bastard really, really, ridiculously hated it when you talked smack about his birth, his bastardship, his legitimacy, or his mother. I know a lot of wannabe hardasses out there are all like, “Hey, fool, what you say about my momma?” but Will really took it to the next level. After the display I just mentioned, William besieged the town, busted through the walls like an intoxicated Kool-Aid Man, pillaged the city, burned everything that was even remotely flammable, and cut off the hands and feet of everyone he could catch. Like I said, he took that sort of thing very personally. Of course, you can’t necessarily say that the people of Alecon didn’t get what was coming to them; I mean, what did they expect when they decided to taunt a guy whose father was known as Robert the Devil?
Another good example of William’s deep-seated insecurity was when he courted Countess Matilda of Flanders, a highborn noblewoman who traced her family lineage directly to King Alfred the Great. Hearing of her great beauty, and wishing to further legitimize his position as a serious honest-to-God member of the nobility, William sent a messenger to ask for her hand in marriage. She responded by slapping the messenger in the face, spitting in his eye, and saying something to the effect of, “I would never stoop so low as to marry a bastard!” Then she kicked the dude in the junk with enough force to crack a coconut and body-slammed him through a table onto some thumbtacks.
Now, William had a temperament that made Bobby Knight’s most assholish violent outbursts look like Mahatma Gandhi playing Nerf basketball with Martin Luther King Jr., so when the duke of Normandy heard about this affront to his manhood he immediately got on his horse, rode out to Matilda’s castle, grabbed her long brunette braids, and threw her down on the ground by her hair (seriously). Amazingly, she pretty much immediately changed her mind and agreed to marry him. Even though the Pope himself protested the marriage (this was actually bonus points for William because, as I understand it, women really seem to dig forbidden love for some reason), they went ahead and got hitched, produced eleven children, and by all accounts had a very happy marriage, with neither one ever taking another lover.
Even though these two wacky newlyweds were having a grand old time constantly bitch-slapping each other in the face as hard as they could while telling the Pope to go hump himself violently with a chainsaw, some folks weren’t really feeling the love—namely, King Henry I of France. Henry put an army together to try to bust up William’s rapidly increasing base of power, but William responded by crushing Henry’s prostate on two separate occasions. He then further strengthened his position as one of the top dogs in northern France thanks to a steady diet of the three A’s of world domination—annexation, alliances, and ass-kickings. But consolidating his power over the Norman coast was just the beginning of William’s tale.
In 1066, King Edward the Confessor of England died, and all of a sudden there was total anarchy in the UK. Harold Godwinson of the Saxons and the Viking ruler Harald Hardrada of Norway immediately started punching each other in the face trying to figure out who should be the next king of England, and our friend Will didn’t want to miss out on an opportunity to get in on the sweet beat-down action.
Now, William didn’t really have a superstrong claim to the throne, but he totally didn’t give a crap either—he wanted the crown of England for himself, and damn it, he thought he deserved it. He put together a huge invasion force of roughly six hundred ships and seven thousand men, smashed full speed into the English coast, and immediately started marching toward London. Harold rode out to face William’s invading Norman army at the Battle of Hastings on October 14, 1066, a brutal engagement that would change the face of Britain forever.
In the opening hours of the battle, things weren’t looking so hot for William and his homies. The infantry on the Norman left broke and ran, hotly pursued by a horde of axe-swinging Anglo-Saxons. William had his horse moked out from under him during some particularly fierce hand-to-hand fighting, and everybody saw him bail out face-first into the turf and pretty much thought he was toast. However, just as things were starting to look bleak as hell, William sprang back onto his feet, took off his helmet to show everyone he was still breathing, and personally led a charge of heavy cavalry that chopped the enemy to shreds. For his trouble Harold Godwinson was shot in the damn eye with an arrow and died painfully on the battlefield.
You would think that capping the king in his ocular cavity with a goddamned bow and arrow would kind of cement your position as his successor, but this wasn’t the case in England in 1066. The Anglo-Saxons coronated some other dumbass instead, saying that they didn’t really want to be ruled over by some bastard from Normandy.
And there’s that word again.
William immediately went to London, beat the pants off whatever pathetic resistance remained, and personally wrenched the crown from the hands of the punk-ass bitch the Anglo-Saxons had put on the throne. He was formally coronated William I, king of England, on Christmas Day 1066 in Westminster Abbey.
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