CHAPTER X
CHILDREN OF THE MIST
We have seen how the Orcadians are mainly Norse. Landing on Caithness, once a shelf of wild Catti, or on its Sutherland, we find clans like the Gunns, the Keiths, and the Mackays, plainly or possibly of Viking stock, and a swarm of Sinclairs whose chiefs came from the south as confessed Normans. The greatest of the Macaulays, who seems to set little store by his Scottish descent, boasted his clan as sons of Olaf. All along the north-west coasts and in the islands we must note how common are Norse place-names, given by god-fathers who often brought gifts of fire and sword to the christening, or again, as in more than one authentic instance within historic records, might be shipwrecked Danes settling down by accident in some no-man’s-corner. Who can say what crews from other European lands may not have found or forced the same hospitality? As soldiers rather, Scots went much abroad in early days, and some of them came back again, not always leaving behind women and children of uncouth speech. Cromwell’s men, by the way, did not scunner to look upon Highland daughters of Heth. We catch modern Saxons intruding here, who, after a generation or two,—so experience shows in our own time,—may grow as ardent Gaels as ever chorused “Auld Lang Syne” at Highland gatherings. If one desire some idea of the cross-strains in this miscellany of population, let him read Skene’s Highlanders as corrected by his recent editor, Dr. Macbain, and by the author himself in his more mature Celtic Scotland. It is far from clear how much Pict and how much Scot went to the making of a Gaelic-speaking race, which, the harder one looks at it, the more puzzlingly suggests that hero described by a modern ballad-maker—
In a knot himself he ties,
With his grizzly head appearing in the centre of his thighs,
Till the petrified spectator asks in paralysed alarm,
Where may be the warrior’s body, which is leg and which is arm.
CAITHNESS COAST NEAR DUNNET HEAD