morning and Ammarik should extinguish every evening. In order to reward their faithful services, he told them they might be man and wife, but they asked Wanna Issi that he would allow them to remain for ever bride and bridegroom. Wanna Issi assented, and henceforth Koit handed the torch every evening to Ammarik, and Ammarik took it and extinguished it. Only during four weeks in the summer they remain together at midnight. Koit hands his dying torch to Ammarik, but Ammarik does not let it die; she lights it again with her breath. Then their hands are stretched out, and their lips meet, and the blush on the face of Ammarik colours the midnight sky.’[1] The interest of the legend is increased by the meaning of the names. Wanna Issi in Esthonian means the Old Father, Koit means the dawn, and Ammarik means the gloaming, in the language of the common people.[2]
The names Eastmen or Esterlings occur in early records as names referring in a general way to people coming into England from the East. The name Osgotbi,[3] which is mentioned in two Saxon charters as the name of a place in Lincolnshire, now Osgodby, is more definite. The name Osgotecrosse is mentioned in the Hundred Rolls of Yorkshire.[4] The name Osmington, or Osmenton, as that of an old place in Dorset, is mentioned in a Saxon charter and in Domesday Book. The Osgothi could scarcely be other than the Eastern Goths—i.e., the Goths on the eastern coast of Sweden, or east of the Vistula, or some people of that race. The purest remnant of the old Gothic stock are the Dalecarlians, sometimes called the Swedish Highlanders, who inhabit the secluded district that stretches westwards from the Silian Lake to the mountains of Norway. They have preserved comparatively unchanged the manners and customs of their Gothic forefathers, and, as Bosworth has pointed out, a peculiarity of the old Gothic language
