Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time Part 9

Of outward and visible monuments, save here and there a howe or grave-mound, the Vikings, unlike their Pictish predecessors, have left us little or nothing on the mainland. In Iceland the skali[7] or farm-house of the Norseman was built with some stone and turf below, and a superstructure of wood which has long ago perished,[8] and but slight traces of foundations are visible on the surface there. From the frequent burnings in the Saga we know that such houses were of highly inflammable materials which would soon perish. The place-name, "Skaill," remains both in Sutherland and Caithness. But no skilled antiquary, has as yet laid bare by excavation the secrets of likely sites of Norse dwellings in these counties, as Mr. A.W. Johnston has done at The Jarls' Bu at Orphir, in Orkney.[9] And yet, if Drumrabyn or Dunrabyn, Rafn's Ridge or Broch, be the true derivation of Dunrobin (and the name is found at a time when as yet no Robin had inhabited the place) possibly the Norse Lawman Rafn had a house of consequence there like his Pictish predecessors, if, indeed, he did not inhabit the Pictish broch whose foundations were found on or under the present castle's site. There was also a castle of note on the northern sh.o.r.e of the modern port of Helmsdale, which is probably the castle of Sorlinc of Mr. Collingwood's _William the Wanderer_, also called Surclin, both words being a corrupt form, it is suggested, of Scir-Illigh, the old name of the parish of Kildonan.

In Caithness especially, we have many a Norse castle site, such as Earl Harold's borg at Thurso, and Lambaborg, the modern Freswick, which we know to have been inhabited by noted Nors.e.m.e.n, while, in Sutherland, Borve near Farr, and Seanachaistel on the Farrid Head near Durness seem to be ideal Viking sites. _Breithivellir_[10] or Brawl Castle was a known residence of Earl John and later earls, and search for foundations might well be made on the coasts of Caithness, and round Tongue and at the mouths of the Naver and of the Borgie and other rivers, and at or near Unes or Little Ferry, possibly at Skelbo, (Skail-bo) and in Kildonan at Helmsdale. That the Nors.e.m.e.n used many of the Pictish brochs as dwelling-places is more than probable, and is proved by the Sagas in certain instances.[11] At the same time few articles used distinctively by Nors.e.m.e.n have been found in them.

No stately church like the Cathedral of St. Magnus at Kirkwall, itself the finest specimen of Norman architecture in Scotland, survives on the mainland from Viking days; nor, so far as is known, was any such edifice built there by any Norseman; but the original High Church of Halkirk, and also the old church of St. Bar at Dornoch, which preceded and is believed to have occupied a site immediately to the east of St.

Gilbert's later Cathedral, may have been used by the later jarls, and a few miles south of Halkirk are the foundations of the Spittal of St.

Magnus,[12] part of which, and of St. Peter's Church at Thurso may be Norse.

Though the towns of Wick and Thurso[13] are frequently mentioned in the _Orkneyinga Saga_, and earls and jarls stayed at both, no Sutherland village (if any save Dornoch existed) is named in it; but the site of modern Golspie (Gol's-by) appears in ancient charters as Platagall, "the Flat of the Stranger."[14]

If in his outward and visible man the Norseman has all but faded away in Sutherland, he remains more in evidence in Caithness, in spite of Celtic mothers and successive waves of Scottish immigration. The high Norse skull, the tall frame with broad shoulders and narrow hips,[15]

the fair hair and skin, the sea-blue eyes and sound teeth are still to be seen; and from time to time, amid greatly preponderating Celtic types, we are startled by coming across some perfect living specimen of the pure Viking type almost always on or near the coast.

But, if the outward type is rarely seen, its inward qualities remain.

What were those qualities?

The late Professor York Powell summed up the character of the Viking emigrant folk in his introduction to Mr. Collingwood's _Scandinavian Britain_, as follows:--

"A st.u.r.dy, thrifty, hardworking, law-loving people, fond of good cheer and strong drink, of shrewd, blunt speech, and a stubborn reticence, when speech would be useless or foolish; a people clean-living, faithful to friend and kinsman, truthful, hospitable, liking to make a fair show, but not vain or boastful; a people with perhaps little play of fancy or great range of thought, but cool-thinking, resolute, determined, able to realise the plainer facts of life clearly, and even deeply."[16]

Blend these qualities with those of the Gael, and what infinite possibilities appear; for the characteristics of the two races supplement each other. Fuse them together in proper proportions for a few generations, the improvident and dreamy with the thrifty and energetic, the voluble with the reticent, the romantic and humorous with the truthful and blunt of speech, the fiery and impulsive with the sober of thought, and how greatly is the type improved in the new race evolved from the union of both.

Turning from eugenics to more practical matters, it was the brain and the manual skill of the Viking that invented and perfected our modern sailing s.h.i.+p. Stripped of its barbaric excrescences at stem and stern, and of its rows of s.h.i.+elds and ornaments, the lines of the Viking s.h.i.+p of Gokstad[17] found there buried but entire, are the lines of our herring boats of fifty years ago. Sharp and partly decked at stem and stern only, like those boats, the Viking s.h.i.+p could live, head to the waves, even in the roughest sea. It was, too, a living thing, a new type of vessel handy to row or sail, and far in advance not only of the early British s.h.i.+p and Pictish coracle[18] but also of the Roman galley with lines like those of a ca.n.a.l barge, and also far in advance of the Saxon s.h.i.+p of war or merchandise. The only points of difference between the older type of herring boat and the Viking s.h.i.+p were the stepping of the mast further forward and the use of the fixed rudder in the modern vessel.

Not only did the Viking brain invent our modern s.h.i.+p, but it was the Viking spirit that impelled us as a nation to use the ocean as a highway. The Norseman had discovered America and West Africa many centuries before Columbus or Vasco di Gama. The Norse colonised[19]

Greenland, Labrador, and possibly even Ma.s.sachusetts, and it was on a voyage to Iceland that Jean Cabot heard of America, on whose continent he was the first modern sailor to land, and it is said that it was through him that Columbus, after he had discovered the West Indian Islands, first heard that North America had been proved to be a continent by Cabot's coasting voyage along its sh.o.r.e from Maine to Florida. The Vikings, too, taught us the discipline without which no s.h.i.+p can live through an ocean storm. Their spirit, too, when piracy had died out, led us into trade; for, as we have seen, the Viking was no mere pirate, but ever a trader as well.[20] Their sea-fights live in story, though their traders found no skald or bard, and it is thus that we hear less of their trading or of their civic or domestic life.

This spirit of theirs, like their blood, is ever with us still. It has gone into our race, and it keeps coming out in unexpected quarters.

Hidden under Celtic colouring and Highland dress, the Viking warrior is there in spirit, glorying in battle, though often apparently no more of a real "Barelegs" by race than was kilted King Magnus. The Berserk fury and stubborn tenacity of our Highland regiments derive their origin from the Viking as well as from the Celtic strain.[21]

Our sailors too, had they been Celts, would not readily have left smooth water. It was Viking not Celtic blood that drove them to the open sea. It was Viking skill that built the s.h.i.+ps, managed them in storms through Viking discipline, navigated them across the ocean, and gave us the naval and commercial supremacy which founded and preserves our empire overseas.

They came to us not only from Norway direct, westwards across the sea.

They came to us also from Normandy northwards through England. The first swarms of Nors.e.m.e.n had brought with them rapine and disorder.

Later on the Norman came to the north to curb such evils, and to organise, administer, and rule the land. The Normans succeeded in this as signally as the Saxon barons, introduced under Saint Margaret, Malcolm Canmore's Saxon queen, had failed. David I was by education a Norman knight. At heart he was an ecclesiastic. As Scotland's king, he was, in theory, owner of Scotland's soil from the Tweed to the Pentland Firth, and he disposed of it to his feudal barons, mainly Norman, and to religious foundations on Norman lines, as the Norman kings of England had done there before him, in order to organise and consolidate his kingdom; and his successors did the same.

Thus, as Professor Hume Brown puts it--[22]

"Directly and indirectly the Norman conquest influenced Scotland only less profoundly than England itself. In the case of Scotland it was less immediate and obtrusive, but in its totality it is a fact of the first importance in the national history."

It affected Scotland in the latter part of the times which we have considered right up to John o' Groats. Moray was divided among Normans and "trustworthy natives," and the scattering of its Pictish population gave the Mackays to Sutherland, and, largely blended with the Norse, they still occupy the greater part of it. The Freskyns, as "trustworthy natives," were introduced into Sutherland, after many a fight for it, by charter doubtless in Norman form; and Normans won Caithness in the persons of the earlier Cheynes and Oliphants and St.

Clairs, who, by inter-marriage with the descendants in the female line of a branch of the Freskyns, possessed themselves not only of the lands of the family of Moddan but of most of the mainland territories of the Erlend line, through Johanna of Strathnaver's daughters and great-grand-daughters.

At a time and in an age when liberty meant licence, the order which the Norman introduced into the north made more truly for real liberty and the supremacy of law, than the individual independence which the Norseman had left his native land to preserve; and though both feudalism and the blind obedience to authority then enjoined by the Catholic Church are no longer approved or required, and have long been rightly discarded, yet they served their purpose in their day, by evolving from the wild blend of Gaels and Nors.e.m.e.n, which held the land, a civilised people free from many of the worse, and endowed with many of the better qualities of either race.

NOTES

_The following abbreviations are used:

H.B. for Hume Brown's History of Scotland.

O.S. for Orkneyinga Saga.

O.P. for Origines Parochiales.

F.B. for Flatey Book.

O. and S. for Tudor's Orkney and Shetland.

B.N. Burnt Njal.

And see List of Authorities (ante) for full t.i.tles of Books referred to. Save where otherwise stated the references to the Sagas are to the chapters not pages_.

NOTES

CHAPTER I.

[Footnote 1: _Rhind Lectures_ 1883 and 1886, and see _The County of Caithness_, pp. 273-307.]

[Footnote 2: _Royal Commission 2nd Report, 1911_, and _3rd Report, 1911_; see also Laing and Huxley's _Prehistoric Remains of Caithness_, 1866.]

[Footnote 3: _Survivals in Belief among the Celts_, 1911.]

[Footnote 4: _Tacitus, Agricola_ 22-28.]

[Footnote 5: Coille-duine, or Kelyddon-ii.]

[Footnote 6: _H.B._, vol. i, p. 5.]

[Footnote 7: Anderson, _Scotland in Pagan Times_, p. 222. Two plates of bra.s.s found in Craig Carrill Broch. Copper 84%, tin 16%.]

[Footnote 8: See Laing and Huxley's _Prehistoric Remains in Caithness_, Laing ascribes a much greater antiquity to the _Burgs_, pp. 60-61. See Skene, _Chron. Picts and Scots_, pp. 157-160 as to a legend of their Scythian origin, and p. xcvi and p. 58.]

[Footnote 9: See Reeves' Life, and see _H.B._, vol. i, pp. 12-15; also Dr. Joseph Anderson's _Scotland in Early Christian Times_, 1879, p.

139.]

[Footnote 10: _H.B._, vol. i, pp. 10-17.]