hunting, hawking, bird-clubbing went on as common pastimes[1], where slavery was widely prevalent[2] (the slaves being often of a different racial type to their masters), where harping[3] and carping went on in the hall to the merry clink of cup and can kept filled with beer and wine, where there was plenty of ‘Welsh’ cloth, ‘Welsh’ gold and ‘Welsh’ steel, where the Scandinavian led a roving life, fighting and sailing, and riding and feasting by turns? Where but in the Western Isles?
Again, where could those curious mythologic fancies, which created Walhall, and made of Woden a heavenly Charlemagne, which dreamed, like Cædmon, of the Rood as a tree that spread through the worlds, which pictured the final Doom as near, and nursed visions of an everlasting peace, holier even than Cynewulf's Phoenix figures,—where could such ideas as these, alien as they are to the old Teutonic religion and ritual and thought, have been better fostered than in the British Isles, at a time when the Irish Church, with her fervent faith, her weird and wild imaginings, and curious half-Eastern legends, was impressing the poetic mind on one side, while the rich and splendid court of Eadgar or Canute would stimulate it on the other?
But after all, we must remember that, however mixed in blood and however changed in circumstance and life, the authors of these poems were Scandinavians in the heroic age of the North. To what particular tribe of Scandinavia are we to assign their authorship? When we consider the choice of subject (Helgi, Frodi, Craki, Angantheow, etc.), certain curious phrases (Woden called the Gauts’ patron, ‘Gauta spialli’), the knowledge of the Huns, Iarizkar, etc., slight indications of language, the retention, in a few instances at least, of the ‘w,’ word [word], wreidr [O. E. wrath], the discrepancy in words for the commonest household objects, the different law terms, which neither fit West Norway nor Iceland,—we are inclined to hold that the authors must rather have been connected with the Southern Scandinavian emigration. And is not this what was to be looked for? The Wick [Scage Rack] is the very centre of the district whence came the first Wickings [named, most probably, from this Wick, not merely ‘men of the bays,’ but
- ↑ The prohibition, 81 in Cnut's Dooms, the frequent mention of hounds and hawks in early documents, the hounds, huntsmen, etc. of Domesday, the passionate love of the sport, which actuated Eadgar and the Confessor as well as the Normans, are to the point here.
- ↑ Wulfstan's sermons, the Conqueror's law itself (a repetition of Ethelred's), the plain words of William of Malmesbury, the manumission-lists of the MSS., speak loudly here. Mark further that the greatest slave-trade was with Ireland.
- ↑ The harping of the Irish, Welsh, and English poems, the special love of minstrelsy, which is marked in the tales of the tenth and eleventh centuries, Bæda’s story of Cædmon, Dunstan’s musical skill, and many other examples which might be collected, point to the British Isles, and especially the Keltic parts thereof, as essentially musical, and more than that, as especially skilled in harping.
William Rufus], the panegyrics which the rich dress of the English nobles extorted from the Norman populace, as William of Malmesbury notices, the splendid embroidery on the robes of saints and kings in the paintings of Old English MSS., are all evidences on this head.
