Bróðir[1][2] (also Brodir[3][4] or Brodar[5][6] or anglicised as Broderick) and Óspak[2] (also Óspakur,[1] Ospakr[4] or Ospak[3]) were two Danish brothers who lived on the west coast of the Isle of Man.
"[3] Bróðir was tall and strong, with long black hair that he wore tucked in under his belt, and he was clad in a coat of mail "which no steel could bite.
[3] She said there were two Vikings lying off the west of Man; and that they had thirty ships, and, she went on, " … Thou shalt fare to find them, and spare nothing to get them into thy quarrel, whatever price they ask."
Some time in the 1010s, Brian Boru divorced his second wife, the three-times-married Hiberno-Norse Queen Gormflaith, and she began engineering opposition to the High King.
[6] Gormflaith sent her son, the King of Dublin, Sigtrygg Silkbeard, to win first the support of Earl Sigurd of Orkney, and then of Bróðir and Óspak, at any price.
[6][9] Sigtrygg promised both Sigurd and Bróðir separately that, if successful, they would be allowed marry Gormflaith and become High King of Ireland; the terms of this agreement, however, were to be kept secret.
[11] According to Njál's Saga, one night a great din passed over Bróðir and his men on the Isle of Man, so that they all sprang up from sleep and dressed themselves.
[9] Until dawn, this din was accompanied by a shower of boiling blood, which scalded many of them even though they covered themselves with their shields.
[12] Bróðir had brought with him 1000 mail-clad Norsemen,[10] and led the "murderous foreign Danes" alongside Earl Sigurd of Orkney.
[12] Bróðir drove deep into the opposite wing, "and felled all the foremost that stood there", as his mail protected him from swordblows.
[4] The name only appears in Norse context twice – at the Battle of Clontarf, and in 1160 for the King of Dublin, Brodar mac Torcaill – and had a longer circulation in Irish literature.