The most remarkable discovery of these characteristic Scandinavian interments that has hitherto occurred in Scotland was made in the island of Westray, Orkney, in 1849, by Mr. William Rendall.[[222]] A number of graves were found in the sandy links near Pierowall (the Hofn of the Saga), in some of which were swords and shield-bosses, indicating that the skeletons were those of men. But in one a pair of tortoise or shell-shaped brooches and a trefoil ornament were the only objects found with the skeleton. In another, a pair of these brooches were found on the breast, and a pair of combs, of the form here figured, lay on either side of the neck, apparently as they had fallen out of the hair. In a third, a pair of brooches, a pair of combs, and a bronze pin, were found. It appears from these examples that the brooches undoubtedly belonged to women, and that the warriors were usually buried with sword and shield and “panoply of war;” and, as we read in Ibn Fozlan’s account, the dog and the horse of the deceased appear also to have been sacrificed at the grave, and interred with him, in Orkney as well as on the banks of the Volga.
But we meet with few memorials of the daily life of the Norsemen beyond those which have been buried with them in the early period of their occupation of the Islands. Christianity abolished the custom of burying such relics with the dead, and for the remains of the Christian period we must look to the yet unexcavated sites of the skális and homesteads of which we read in the Saga. It would be equally interesting to the archæologist, and instructive to the historian, to be able to compare the relics from such sites as those of Kolbein Hruga’s castle in Weir, the castle of which Blán was the keeper in Damsey, or the skáli of Swein Asleifson at Langskail in Gairsay, with the extensive collections obtained in recent years from the “Pictish Towers” of Orkney, which have given us such suggestive glimpses of the domestic life of the period preceding the Norse occupation.
It gives a curious feeling of reality to the ancient legends when we can thus handle the blades and bucklers of which we read such stirring stories, and remember that it was because the Norse sword was then the longest, and the Norse arm the strongest, that we now read the earliest chapters of the history of northern Scotland in the guise of an Iceland Saga.
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE.
A.D.
795. First appearance of the Norse Vikings in the Western Seas. They plunder the Isle of Rachrin.
798. Invasion of the Isle of Man by the Norsemen. Inispatrick burned.
802. I Columbkill burned by the Norsemen.