Brian Boru is a half-mythical Viking era figure chiefly remembered as the man 'who drove the Danes from Ireland', and who died at the Battle of Clontarf on Good Friday 1014. But there was far more to his life than that. The youngest son of an obscure king from Thomond, he came closer than any other Irishman before him or after him to uniting Ireland. He tamed the Danes of Limerick and the Norsemen of Dublin, overthrew the six-century monopoly of the Uí Néill on the high throne of Ireland and became one of the few high kings to invest that throne with any real authority.