- ↑ “Son of the king of Lochlain.” It would take many a page to relate all that is said to have happened in the isles to a son of a king of Lochlain; but in every place he appears to have come off “second best.”
being a Pict’s house which has been inhabited till the present generation, and goes far to prove the original intent of those structures. I use the term “original” advisedly, for although they were constructed for dwellings, it is quite possible that they became the sepulchres and monuments of their former possessors. Although many cairns have been made for purposes of sepulture, yet it is to be noted that these cairns are modelled after the fashion of chambered cairns, which were undoubtedly dwellings. In fact, a chambered cairn with a hole in the apex is a dwelling; if it is closed, it is a sepulchre; so that those cairns which were constructed by or for the magnates of prehistoric times were literally houses for the dead.
IV.
ON CERTAIN BELIEFS AND PHRASES OF SHETLAND FISHERMEN. By ARTHUR LAURENSON, Esq., Lerwick.
The native population of the Shetland Islands is Norse in blood and origin. There is not, nor has there been, any appreciable Celtic element in it. To this day the Norse physiognomy of the people is distinctly marked; nowhere do you find the Celtic type. The language, now rapidly merging into English, has for the last three hundred years been departing from the old Norse which was once the tongue of the islands; but still the traces of the ancient speech are clearly manifest. An hundred years ago they were yet more so; at that period, in the remoter islands, old people might still be found who could repeat some corrupt Norse which tradition had preserved. Now, however, the relics of the old tongue consist of isolated words and phrases of Norse derivation still in daily use, of the substitution of the singular personal pronoun for the English plural form in all conversation, and of some peculiar modes of expression more Norse or German in idiom than English.
The fishermen retain more of the old words than any other class in the islands. Perhaps from boats and all pertaining to them having been in
