The dreaded Vikings—In English waters—Descents on Iona—Monasteries favourite objects of attack—Destruction of books—Their own eddas and sagas—Modern discovery of the wonderful Icelandic literature—The Northmen in a new light—Literary effects of their invasions—Arrested development—Lamentable dispersion of the literary classes—Pilgrim Scots—The rise of Scottish Gaelic—Present-day differences between it and Irish—Introduction of Norse words—Decay of inflection—Gaelic examples of Viking beliefs and superstitions—The Norseman still with us.
Britain owes her proud pre-eminence among the nations as much to the sea as to any other external factor. Her empire seems to sit stable upon the waves. So far from disconnecting the broadcast parts, it is the ocean that links them well together into one mighty whole which keeps “the fretful realms in awe.” Thus as citizens of the British Empire we are wont to regard the sea as our most powerful ally and friend. We connect with it the idea of national defence. It is our bulwark. With it we associate also the spirit of freedom, and pleasure in summer time, when multitudes frequent the coast and drink in new life and energy there. And in reflective moments it wafts our thoughts to larger issues, and we recognise that the sea helps towards the realisation of the brotherhood of man, for it brings the nations into close touch with one another, and through the quiet channels of trade and commerce, tends to exorcise old and distant race antagonisms. And so in this country we are born to view the ocean with kindly eyes, and to rely upon it almost as our national foster-parent.
Yet it was not ever thus. We go back to a time in these western lands when the briny wave was a terror to men, for out there, in storm and shine, lurked their chief danger. Any morning they awoke, or any evening they retired to rest, they might see the dragon-prowed galleys of the wild Norsemen bearing down upon them. And in the night, when the winds howled or there came a moaning from the deep, they could not be sure but the dreaded Vikings were upon them. No part of the coast of these islands or of north or west France was safe from their incursions. The blue waves and the distant horizon of the watery main were then scanned with different feelings from ours. A secret fear haunted the imagination as it saw or fancied it perceived a distant sail on the seascape. The very children inherited the awe inspired by these ruffians of the deep; for ruffians they were, many of them, who massacred and laid waste, sparing not even the peaceful abodes of piety and learning.
Sometimes they bore down upon a reach of coast when the unsuspecting inhabitants had not the faintest presentiment of peril from the waves. A medieval writer (Monachi Sangale, Gesta Caroli, II. 14) tells how Charlemagne himself and his courtiers were thus surprised. They were seated at a banquet one day in the town of Narbonne, when all of a sudden some swift barks were seen putting into the harbour. The company started up, wondering who the strangers might be. Were they Jews, or Africans, or simply British traders? None could tell. The keen eye of the king alone hastily divined the situation. “No bales of merchandise,” said he, “are borne hither by yonder galleys. They are manned by terrible foes.” And then advancing to the window, he stood for a long time reflecting, his eyes moist with tears and bent on vacancy. No one durst ask him the cause of his foreboding, till at length he broached it himself. “It is not for myself,” muttered he, “that I am weeping, nor for any harm that yonder barks can do to me; but it grieves me sore to think that during my lifetime they have made bold to approach these shores, and greater still is my dejection when I reflect on the evils they will yet inflict on those who come after me.” And he was right. The crews that he saw in the offing were plundering Northmen, who were soon to be followed by kindred sea-rovers bent on conquest. Of little avail in his own time were his strong forts and garrison towns built to withstand the foe, and after his death his less imperious successors hardly dared lift a dagger to stem the tide of invasion that laid waste their fairest lands and cities. “Take the map,” wrote Sir Francis Palgrave in his history of Normandy and England, “and colour with vermilion the provinces, districts, and shores which the Northmen visited, as the record of each invasion. The colouring will have to be repeated more than ninety times successively before you can arrive at the conclusion of the Carlovingian dynasty. Furthermore, mark by the usual symbol of war—the two crossed swords—the localities where the battles were fought by or against pirates,—where they were defeated or triumphant, or where they pillaged, burned, or destroyed; and the valleys and banks of the Elbe, Rhine and Moselle, Scheldt, Meuse, Somme and Seine, Loire, Garonne and Adour, the inland Allier, and all the coasts and coastlands between estuary and estuary, and the countries between the river streams will appear bristling as with chevaux de frise.
“The strongly-fenced Roman cities, the venerated abbeys and their dependent bourgades, often more flourishing and extensive than the ancient seats of government, the opulent seaports and trading towns were all equally exposed to the Danish attacks, stunned by the Northmen’s approach, subjugated by their fury.”
According to Paul B. du Chaillu, one of the more recent and exhaustive writers on the subject, the Viking age extended from the second to the middle of the twelfth century A.D. For a long time—centuries no doubt—individuals were wont to come as traders, and in that capacity may have been welcomed. But towards the end of the eighth century an alarming development took place. Issuing from the viks or bays of Norway and Denmark, the notorious Vikings appeared as depredators and conquerors. 787 is given as the date when first their hostile vessels were seen in English waters. And henceforward concerted attempts were made to land on our shores and annex our territory. In 793 the work of plunder was effectively inaugurated by an attack on Lindisfarne and other points in Northumbria. The monastery on that island was laid waste, and the Northumbrian kingdom itself so crippled that it lost the commanding influence it wielded in the days of Adamnan and Bede and their friend King Aldfrid.
Next year the marauding Norsemen emerged in the Western Isles, which from this time till the middle of the thirteenth century were destined to be favourite haunts and special theatres of their operations.
They quickly found and sacked defenceless Iona, and for years took spoils of the sea between that Island and Erin. The Hebrides and the Isle of Man were at their mercy in 798, and still insatiate with former booty, in 802 they revisited Iona and burned its sacred buildings to the ground. Returning four years later, they put the whole community to the sword, numbering no fewer than sixty-eight persons.
Iona truly had cause to dread the unceasing attentions of these terrible strangers, for each visit seemed more appalling than the other. Baulked in their efforts to get the silver shrines and relics of the departed Columba, the freebooters made another swift and dire descent upon the island in 825. Trained by sad experience, the monks on this occasion had taken the precaution to bury their treasure-trove in a hole in the earth, covering the surface with sods. And when their fierce assailants burst upon the unprotected sanctuary, they found the holy St. Blathmac, who was probably acting-abbot at the time, standing before the altar. Of him they impetuously demanded the way to the hidden objects of their pursuit—the precious silver shrines—and when he calmly refused, insisting that he did not know the place of concealment which his brethren had selected, they savagely murdered him on the spot. The Annals of Ulster record the martyrdom, and Walafridus Strabo, a contemporary on the Continent, gives an interesting metrical account of the event in Latin, gathered no doubt from one or other of the monks who had fled to him from these islands through terror of the Norse.
Once more, on Christmas eve in 986, the famous monastery of Hy, ever rising on its own ashes, was attacked and destroyed by the successors of these old Danes, and this time the abbot and fifteen monks were put to a violent death. From Orkney and Shetland, and the coasts of Caithness and the Hebrides the hardy Norsemen swooped down upon Eastern Scotland as well as upon the English and Irish seaboards, until at length they made themselves for a time masters of a great part of the country.
How they went to work may be gathered from their own records. For example: Harold Fairhair’s saga, c. 22, says, “They ravaged in Scotland and took possession of Katanes (Caithness) and Sudrland (Sutherland) as far as Ekkjalsbakki. Sigurd slew the Scotch Jarl, Melbrigdi, and tied his head to his saddle-straps; the tooth which protruded from the Jarl’s head wounded the calf of Sigurd’s leg, which swelled and he died therefrom; he is mounded at Ekkjalsbakki.”
From these details it will be seen that they had much of the Vandal and the rough buccaneer in their composition. Monasteries were favourite objects of attack. They contained the richest plunder, and from their nature, as religious centres, offered the least resistance. And not content with merely carrying off the loot, the rovers mingled blood with their depredations. Hence the peculiar fitness of the introduction into the Litany of the significant petition: “From the fury of the Northmen, good Lord, deliver us.” And this coarse grain in their character accounts for their reckless conduct in other directions. They seem to have had a special aversion to monks and clerics and learning. They made short work of the books and bells of monasteries. We have contemporary evidence of their vandalism towards literature in a remarkable book of the period entitled, Wars of the Gael with the Gaill (Northmen). It is in Gaelic, and appears in the Book of Leinster, copied about 1150. The author may have been an eye-witness of many of the scenes, and particularly of the battle of Clontarf, which he so realistically describes. His accuracy on matters of fact has been fully attested. We can, therefore, credit his statement when he affirms regarding the few men of learning who had survived the Viking ordeal that “their writings and their books in every church and in every sanctuary where they were, were burnt and thrown into water by the plunderers from beginning to end” (of the Norse invasion).
Countless numbers of the illuminated books of the men of Erin and Alba thus perished. It was a mania with these illiterate rovers to destroy all learning. Eloquent testimony to this is borne by the historian Keating also. “It was not allowed,” he says, “to give instruction in letters.... No scholars, no clerics, no books, no holy relics were left in church or monastery through dread of them. Neither bard nor philosopher nor musician pursued his wonted profession in the land.”
And if modern evidence were necessary it might be found in the fact that while Gaelic MSS. of the Viking age are to be found in almost every other country of Europe, there is not one to be gleaned in the lands whence the Norsemen came. From which circumstance it may be inferred that they set so little value upon these literary acquisitions that they took no care to preserve them, or even to carry them away to their own territory. When the tide of invasion had well nigh spent itself, Ireland, once so rich in native literature, was found to be so depleted that King Brian Boru had to send delegates abroad, “to buy books beyond the sea and the great ocean,” as the records affirm, so scarce had they ultimately become.
Yet even in their roving days the strenuous Norsemen had rare eddas and sagas of their own, to which they were passionately devoted. These were not then written down, but recited orally, like the Celtic tales, till they found a literary embodiment in MS. books.
It was only towards the middle of the last century that their wonderful national sagas burst upon Europe, and thrilled and surprised the learned quite as much as if they had felt a whiff of the old Viking breath upon them. Prior to that time historians were largely dependent upon the English, Irish, and Frankish chronicles for their knowledge of this northern race and their deeds of spoliation, but since the discovery in Iceland of the literary remains of their immediate descendants, quite a fresh light has been cast upon their disposition and habits. And we recognise that they were not quite the demons and fiends the monkish scribes believed them to be. It is clear that, having suffered so much from the hardy invader the latter had the tendency to exaggerate his ferocity. For example, the author of the Wars of the Gael with the Gaill: “In a word, although there were an hundred sharp, ready, cool, never-resting brazen tongues in each head, and a hundred garrulous, loud, unceasing voices for each tongue, they could not recount nor narrate nor enumerate nor tell what all the Gael suffered in common, both men and women, laity and clergy, old and young, noble and ignoble, of hardship and of injury and of oppression in every house from these valiant, wrathful, foreign, purely pagan people.”
In every war and conquest there are dreadful happenings, and the Viking was not troubled with sentiment or too much conscience in his proceedings. He was rough and ready—like his trade, as we should say—as he needed to be in that age if he meant to be master or even to get a living.
Great upheavals, we must remember, were taking place in his mother country and driving him from his home.
To take one example, Harold Fairhair, in bringing the whole of Norway under his sway effected quite a revolution, changing the old ödal tenure by which the land was held into a feudal one. Rather than submit to the new order many nobles and people simultaneously sought freedom elsewhere. They settled in Shetland, Orkney, and the Hebrides, occasionally raiding back to harass the king. But by the year 872 the latter had so far established his rule at home that he was free to tackle these islands with their Norwegian rebels and annex the territory to Norway. Whereupon the more daring and independent spirits who had settled there and in Ireland, and had contracted alliances in marriage with leading native families, once more hived off, this time sailing away for Iceland to join friends and relations who had migrated thither from the mother country. And these were the nucleus of the colony whose descendants produced the wonderful Icelandic literature which is now reckoned among the most valuable assets of medieval Europe. Among the settlers were men who bore Gaelic names and left their impress upon this Norse heritage. From the parchments lately discovered upon which the history of the Vikings is written, and which are begrimed by the smoke of the Icelandic cabin and worn by the centuries that have passed over them, we learn many things that tend to show the Northmen in a new light. These men, who held undisputed sway of the seas for more than nine centuries, were not by any means barbarians. They had a civilisation rivalling that of the Gael, though of a different warp and woof, and they were not even without a script or mode of writing. The characters they used are known as runes, and may have been in use as early as the second or third century.
In the sagas we are often told that drawings on shields and embroidery on cloth were made by them to preserve the memory of heroic deeds and important events. And though the set who invaded our shores, in the stress of war and sailing were not likely to trouble much with learning or letters, their nation had doubtless retired literati just like our own.
To trace the effect of these Norse invasions on Celtic literature will now be our main endeavour.
I. The first and immediate influence was doubtless to arrest its progress. After ages of apparent barrenness, the genius of the Gaelic-speaking peoples had at length produced the germ of a literature which in the days of St Patrick and St. Columba took root and began to grow. For well-nigh four centuries it had gone on developing in a most promising way. The quiet and leisure of the monasteries furnished the atmosphere most suitable for its inception and subsequent growth. These religious retreats were then the centres of learning and nurseries of thought, and many men were arising within their sacred walls who had a genuine love and taste for writing—a love so great that they were not merely content with copying books, composing poems, or writing history, but they embellished them in a way which has excited the admiration of modern times.
Gaelic literature both in Ireland and Scotland was thus bidding fair to yield a rich and abundant harvest when the blight of the Norse invasion fell suddenly upon it, and effectually hindered its farther advance for several centuries. The history of literary work in every age and country shows that it is mostly in times of peace that this delicate plant flourishes. In the stormier periods, when wars are waged, changes frequent, and a spirit of unrest abroad, production of books is rare or even non-existent.
When the Celts themselves were a warrior race, living for the most part by the sword, and migrating from land to land, they had no literature that we know of. The conditions of life were not such that men could quietly cultivate the art and practice of writing. Life was too full of change, too turbulent, and too uncertain.
Similarly the Norsemen during the Viking age, till they gained a peaceful retreat in Iceland, were no litterateurs. Sailing and fighting were more exciting, and with these the habits of the scribe or of the author were not entirely compatible. And so when the tide of invasion burst upon the monasteries of Ireland and Scotland, when rest from strife and security from change could no longer be had, authorship, if it did not entirely cease, became more rare and spasmodic. This is particularly true of Scotland, for with the exception of the Book of Deer, with its Latin contents of the ninth century, and its Gaelic entries written towards the end of the Viking period, we have nothing to show, of known Scottish origin, from the beginning to the end of these incursions. Ireland was more fortunate in that in spite of invasion her literary output was more continuous, especially in the department of poetry.
II. Contemporary with this arrested development, the sinister influence of the Norse depredations may be traced in another result, and one which has left a deep and permanent mark in the history of Celtic literature. It is the lamentable dispersion of the literary classes—monks and missionaries—to the Continent with such books and MSS. as they were able to save from the violence of the invaders. Long before the inroads of these Norsemen became a terror to the Gael, we know that Irish missionaries had spread themselves over England, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. And in addition to their peripatetic preaching, they had established monasteries and colleges for the diffusion of Christianity and learning. From MSS. preserved in St. Gall, Switzerland, we gather that these pilgrim Scots usually travelled in companies, provided with long walking-sticks, leathern wallets, and water-bottles. They wore long flowing hair, and were clad in rough garments. Though thus rude and uncouth in appearance, they were accomplished scholars, many of them, and easily acquired the languages of the countries through which they passed, or in which they settled and preached with all the perfervid eloquence so natural to the Celt. To show the extent of their wanderings, and the distinguished calibre of the missionaries themselves, a few names may be given which still live in books and tradition. St. Columbanus, perhaps the best known of all, died in 615. His name is perpetuated in the town of San Columbano. It was he who founded the monasteries of Luxueil in France, and Bobbio among the Apennines. Almost equally prominent as an evangelist was St. Gall, his companion, who gave his name not only to the town which subsequently grew up beside his monastery, but also to a whole canton of Switzerland. Then there were St. Catald, from the school of Lismore in Ireland; St. Donnatt his brother, Bishop of Lupice in Naples; St Kilian the apostle and martyr of Franconia, still annually commemorated at Würzburg. At a monastery near Strasburg, also founded by an Irish bishop, there is a charter of date 810, which specifies grants made to that house, to the poor, and to the pilgrim Scots—the nine of whom therein mentioned are all bishops except the abbot. In the ninth century there was a convent of Scots at Mont St. Victor near Feldkirk. Dungall, of the same Scotic nationality, figures as the author of the famous letter to Charlemagne on the eclipses of 810, and he held the office of preceptor at the cathedral school at Pavia. Besides the numerous other places in which they laboured, from the middle of the seventh to the twelfth century, Scotic monasteries were founded at Ratisbon, Vienna, Eichstadt, Würzburg, Erfurt, Kelheim, and Constance.
These earlier retreats served as so many houses of refuge for the poor monks and scholars flying from the fury of the Norsemen, when life and property became insecure at home, in Iona, and elsewhere. It is known that a fresh tide of Gaelic pilgrims set out for the Continent from the time that the new peril appeared, seeking safe custody for themselves and their books among their countrymen abroad.
And thus it has come to pass that there are to-day hundreds of Celtic MSS. in Latin and Gaelic widely scattered throughout Europe, in places as far apart as Paris, Brussels, Dresden, Berne, Vienna, Rome, Florence, Milan, Schaffhausen, St. Gall, etc. And while in the British Isles we have only seven of these with Gaelic writing prior to the eleventh century, on the Continent there are as many as twenty.
It is surmised that it was in this manner in 825, after the attack on Iona and murder of St. Blathmac, that the famous Vita Columbæ of Adamnan found its way to Reichenau on the Rhine, where it remained for nearly a millennium, till it was ultimately transferred to Schaffhausen.
These are two far-reaching and long-lasting effects of the Viking troubles—the arrest of the literary development and the dispersion of the documents, but they by no means exhaust the category.
III. We have now to take into account the severance of Ireland from Scotland. Anterior to the Norse invasions the language and literature of both were one. There is no distinction to be made, for they were common to both countries from the time of St. Columba, and there was constant coming and going between Scotland and Ireland. But when the Norsemen came they effectually put a stop to this. For two centuries they kept the kindred realms apart, and never again was the original unity restored.
During the period of disjunction the separated parts began to travel on different lines, and when the Viking sway ceased to sever them, the language and literature of each had already taken on a character of its own sufficiently divergent to keep them for ever asunder. The Book of Deer is the first monument of this departure in Scotland, even as the Leabhar Na h’Uidhre and Liber Hymnorum are the earliest in Ireland.
The Norse invasions were thus directly responsible for the rise of the Scottish Gaelic and our native vernacular literature as distinct from the Irish. Had it not been for their interception there is no knowing how long the two dialects might have continued as one.
As it was, notwithstanding the growing divergence, the written, though not the spoken language of both countries might be regarded as still, for the most part, the same in form till the fourteenth century. After that they ceased to be even apparently identical, and to-day the chief differences between the two tongues are these four:—
1. The Irish has a future in the verb, whereas Gaelic uses the present tense to indicate futurity.
2. Inflection is fuller in written Irish than in written Gaelic.
3. In Irish (south especially) the accent remains on the end syllable, whereas in Gaelic it is nearly always on the first.
4. In Gaelic every noun outside the o declension forms the plural in n, whereas in Irish n is shown very rarely.
IV. Instead of the parent Irish, there was from henceforth a Norse linguistic influence upon the language of Scotland. There can be no doubt that the new element thus imported into the Gaelic is very considerable. Yet this is a department of philology which has never been adequately worked. It offers an interesting field for further research and inquiry, and it is gratifying to know that the study of Irish-Norse relations, in its various aspects, claims the attention of such eminent writers as Professor Zimmer, Professor Sophus Bugge, Dr. Alexander Bugge, Dr. Craigie of Oxford, and Miss Faraday.
We have to reckon with the fact that the Norsemen came in large numbers, and freely intermarried with the native races, so that to-day the inhabitants of Orkney, North-east Caithness, North and West Sutherland, and North Lewis, differ very little in physique and general appearance from the people of Norway and Iceland. And in Skye, Islay, and Kintyre there is a large admixture of Viking blood, as well as in the other Hebridean Islands, though not so marked in Mull and Jura.
As we should expect, the Norse element in the Gaelic is most in evidence in maritime terms and place names.
As examples of the former, we have vata, a boat; sgoth, a skiff; birlinn, a yacht; sgioba, a crew; stiuir, a rudder; ailm, a helm; sgod, the sheet of the sail; rac, the masthoop; stagh, the stay; reang, the rib; tobhta, the thwart; tearr, tar; spor, a flint.
Then we have eilean for island; haf, the open sea; ob, a land-locked bay, as in Oban; uig, a creek; aoi, an isthmus; geodha, a gully; sgeir, a reef; bodha and roc, sunken rocks; cleit, a cliff; grunnd, the bottom; bruic, sea-weed.
Of place names there is no lack. It has been calculated that in Lewis, Norse are still to Gaelic names as three or four to one; in Skye as three to two; in Islay as one to two; in Kintyre as one to four; in Arran and the Isle of Man as one to eight.
The Minch they called Skottlandsfjord. The smaller isles were nearly all renamed, Eriskay, Eric’s isle; Jura, deer’s isle; Pladda, flat isle; Staffa, stave isle; Sanda, sand isle. To the larger islands the invaders left their original names, though these were occasionally sounded in Norse fashion, as, for example, Sgith (Skye) as Skiō with long vowel.
Personal names were also imported; Rognvald as Raonall or Rao’all, Ragnhilda as Raonailt, Torcull, Goraidh, etc. The Latin Magnus, which was common as a personal name in Norway, we borrowed in the Gaelic form Manus; and such surnames as Macleod, Nicolson, Macaulay, and Macaskill with the Celtic Mac prefixed.
Other common words of Norse derivation are traill, a slave; nabuidh, a neighbour; sgillinn, a penny; mòd, a court of justice, meeting; gadhar, a greyhound; toraisgean, a peat knife, half Norse, half Gaelic; suith, soot; shearradair, towel; mal, rent; gleadhraich, noise.
The Vikings were called sumarlidi, “summer wanderers,” because they were most abroad at that season, and from this came the name once famous in the West—“Somerled” of the Isles. To the Norse is also attributed the insertion of t in words like struth for sruth, stron for sron.
V. But more important even than the introduction of new words was the influence upon the structure of the language. And competent authorities hold that to it we must assign the main share in accelerating the decay of inflection noticeable in the Scottish Gaelic and Manx as compared with the Irish. The latter was not so much exposed to Norse influence as the former. And it is very apparent that the change referred to began to assert itself soon after the Norse had ostracised the Irish, and taken its place as a rival language in the West, destined to influence the local Gaelic.
It is not contended that the Gaelic writers derived any help from the Norsemen. They were themselves the more advanced of the two. On the other hand, the Icelandic scholar Viglisson has traced Gaelic rhymes and measures as well as Gaelic ideas in the old Norse literature, and Professor Zimmer even suggests that the Icelander owes to the Gael his prose style. In the Islendinga Book, c. 1., we read that when Iceland was first settled from Norway in the days of Harold Fairhair there were Christian men, whom the Norsemen called Papa, but who afterwards went away because they would not remain with the heathen, and left behind them Irish books and croziers and bells, from which it could be seen that they were Irishmen.[26]
VI. How far the Norse ideas have entered into the warp and woof of Gaelic literature is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the whole subject, and one that offers a wide field for research. It cannot yet be said that we have sufficiently differentiated between the two sets of legends, beliefs, and customs to be able to affirm with certainty that such and such belong to the one race, and such and such belong to the other. The mythologies of peoples have so much in common, so much that seems characteristic of the thinking of the whole human race at certain stages of its development, that many ideas and legends have no exclusive value, and cannot be claimed as the original heritage of one people more than another.
Yet conceptions pass from land to land and folk to folk, like an epidemic, and become assimilated by each new race that breathes or imbibes them, and as the Gaels have contributed to the thought of the Norsemen, so have the Vikings in turn impressed their ideas, especially their legends and beliefs, upon the imaginative race with whom they mingled, and by whom they ultimately became absorbed.
When we remember that, in the opinion of the best authorities, even the very oldest of the Gaelic sagas could hardly have been written down before the seventh or eighth century, and that many of them are of much later date, we can well conceive how a Norse element might enter largely into them.
It is well known that the Lochlanners or Norsemen figure largely in the Ossianic poems, and “it is quite evident,” says Dr. Hyde, “that most of them, at least in the modern form in which we now have them, are post-Norse productions.”
In the Mythological, which is really the latest in point of writing, while the Fomorians who dwelt in Lochlann, vicious and troublesome invaders as they were, may in their origin be conceived as none other than the sea-powers personified—the rough chaotic tumult of the Atlantic Ocean, against which in the west of Ireland the various settlers had to contend, they might more literally represent the Viking rovers which later ages had to encounter, and by whom they were so often harassed and overcome.
In such stories as The Children of Lir, and more particularly The Children of Tuireann, we have Gaelic examples of Norse beliefs and superstitions. Take, for instance, shape-changing, of which there are many illustrations in the Viking sagas. We are reminded at once of the unhappy fate of the children of Lir, when we read in the Hrolf Kraki, cc. 25, 26, that “King Hring of Uppdalir in Norway had a son Björn, and when his wife died, he married a woman from Tuinmôrk. She changed her stepson into a bear in this way. She struck him with a wolf-skin glove, and said that he should become a fierce and cruel lair-bear, and use no other food than the cattle of his father.” She went on to say, “Thou shalt kill it for thy food, so much of it that it will be unexampled, and never shalt thou get out of this spell, and this revenge shall harm thee.”
Then it is told that the king’s cattle were killed in large numbers, as a big and fierce grey bear began to attack them. One evening the Bondi’s daughter (Björn’s sweetheart) happened to see this fierce bear, which came and fondled her much. She thought she recognised in the animal the eyes of her lover, and followed him to his den, where, strange to relate, she saw, not the bear, but a man. And Björn, for he was no other, told her he was a beast by day and a man by night.
As in this Norse saga we have the marriage, the stepmother, the revenge, the striking with the wolf-skin glove, the spell, all corresponding to the similar details in the Gaelic tale, with the exception that in the latter the objects are usually struck by a magic wand instead of by a wolf-skin glove. And comparing it with the story of the children of Tuireann, Cian went into the shape of a pig, while Björn figured as a bear.
The two Gaelic stories above referred to, though they profess to belong to the Mythological age, centuries before Christ, were actually written down much later than the Heroic tales. The Norse story, on the other hand, is supposed to be laid in the sixth century A.D., and it would be hard to say, we daresay, which originated first or found the earliest expression in writing.
Another Viking idea which has found its way into Gaelic literature is the belief in a Valhalla, or hall of the slain. It was held that to fall gloriously on the field of battle secured undisputed entrance into this heaven. In the “Aged Bard’s Wish,” an attractive poem of the Macpherson period, we find the bard desirous of obtaining entry at death into the hall where dwell Ossian and Daol. This conception of the future was evidently adopted from Norse traditions, for the Gael, so far as is known, had not originally the idea of a Valhalla. Transmigration was more in his line. And curious was the occupation of the warriors in the hall of the slain.
“Every day after having dressed, they put on their war clothes, and go out into the enclosure and fight and slay each other. This is their game; near day meal they ride home to Valhalla and sit down to drink” (later edda, c. 40).
The unworthy and fushionless had not this bliss. Their portion was a region cold, foggy, and cheerless. And it is thought that the author of Adamnan’s vision may have got his cold and wet imagery of the place of woe from the pagan invaders. St. Brendan, in his Navigatio Brendani, a book well known in medieval Europe, gives a legend which is one of the most singular products of Celtic imagination. He found Judas upon a rock in the midst of the Polar seas. Once a week he passes a day there to refresh himself from the fires of Hell. A cloak that he had given to a beggar is hung before him and tempers his sufferings. As St. Brendan lived in the middle of the sixth century the subject of the legend is pre-Norse, and it is the heat that is represented as infernal. Dante, it will be remembered, reserves the ice and cold for the last degree of torment in the Inferno. And of Highland bards, Duncan Macrae, David Mackellar, and others, down to the eighteenth century, have introduced the same idea. Indeed, it has even been hinted that the tendency of the Highland preacher to dwell upon the sterner aspects of our faith may well be due to the lingering influence of the northern paganism. But this we think rather far-fetched and unlikely, for other less ancient influences, local and potent, have been at work to depress the outlook of the Gael.
The Norseman, however, is still with us in hidden and often unknown corners of our life, our literature, and our history. Perhaps to him we owe our continuance as a race to this day. He has carried with him over the wave the breath of freedom and strenuous endeavour, and infused them into the life of this great nation, helping Britain to build up and maintain a world-wide empire and supremacy upon the seas.
But judging his influence upon Gaelic literature solely, we cannot say that, so far as it is known, it was of a helpful or even far-reaching kind. In the first shock of invasion it would rather seem to have been ruinous and deleterious in its effects, arresting development and dispersing the rising literary activity.
But what if it could be proved by further research that while distinctly hostile to the ecclesiastical order in all its manifestations and productions, and therefore its books, the appearance of the Norsemen in these islands revived the interest in the native sagas, so that the scribes were encouraged to write them down and preserve them for future ages. Then verily it might with strictest veracity be said that to the Vikings we owe the cream of our literature, for it is a recognised fact that “the sagas and historic tales, and the poetry that is mingled with them, are of far greater importance from a purely literary point of view” than all the ecclesiastical transcriptions and contributions of the period. But this is a suggestion we offer as not at all improbable, and, like the whole subject of Norse influence, is worthy of a fuller investigation than any it has yet received.