“Next, then, I place the Sweathland horse who is a horse of little stature, lesser good shape, but least vertue; they are for the most part pied, with white legges and wall eyes; they want strength for the warres, and courage for journeying; so that I conclude they are better to look upon than imploy.”[5]
These records, combined with the strong family resemblance between Norwegian ponies and certain types of Shetland pony, lead us to conjecture that there is either some extent of common ancestry in those two breeds or some cross, near or remote, of one with the other. It is probable that the Scandinavian invaders, whose literature and mythology[6] as well as their place-names display a deep interest in horses, may have brought horses with them to Orkney and Shetland. With this common element, however, we also find a real difference.
While some Shetland ponies of the present-day closely resemble the Norwegian, there are others which belong to a wholly different type—ponies whose characteristics can only be described by the general term of “Oriental,” long-shouldered, fine-boned, small in head, and with an unmistakable Arab outlook. Such a type as this does not occur in the Scandinavian breeds; and its existence proves clearly the presence in the Shetland pony of some ancestral element not found in the Scandinavian horse. This is all the more clearly shown by the fact that the Shetland ponies of this Oriental type do not form pure continuous or separate strains within the breed, but crop out here and there, sometimes the parents, and sometimes the progeny, of ponies apparently purely Scandinavian. They are evidently reversions to an ancestral type which has deeply influenced the breed as a whole and remains an ineradicable element in it. No facts are yet available to show whether these Shetland ponies of Oriental character could be so interbred as to produce a race breeding true to this type. The attempt has never been made; since the general tendency of recent breeders has been rather to neglect and eliminate this kind of pony.
The existence of this strain in the Shetland pony is undeniable, however we may account for it; but, in attempting to explain it, we are almost entirely in the realm of conjecture. Two possible sources of an actual Oriental cross offer themselves for consideration.
In the year 1150 Jarl Rögnvald of Orkney and Shetland, while visiting Norway, became imbued with the idea of leading a Crusade to the Holy Land; and two years later he set out from Orkney for Jerusalem, arrived there after many adventures, returned by way of Constantinople to Apulia, and travelled thence on horseback to Denmark.[7]
The Orkneyinga Saga records the journey: “From there they sailed west to Púll (Apulia). Earl Rögnvald, Erling, Bishop William, and most others of their noblest men left their ships there, procured horses and rode to Rómaborg (Rome), and then from Róm until they came to Denmark. From there they went to Norway where the people were glad to see them. This journey became very famous, and all those who had made it were considered greater men than before.”[8]
It remains a matter of wholly uninformed conjecture whether these war-worn travellers were so bound in affection and admiration to the equine companions of their journeys and adventures that, instead of leaving them in Denmark, they brought them home to Orkney and Shetland, just as in our day British soldiers brought back to our shores the Basuto ponies that had won their hearts on the African veldt. It is a question to which there is no answer.
We come scarcely nearer to anything that can be accounted as proof when we bring the Shetland pony within the orbit of the vivid and entrancing drama of the Spanish Armada.
Legend has always borne that the Armada, steering its stricken course round the North of Scotland and through the Irish Sea, left horses scattered along the coasts in Shetland, Lewis, Mull, Galloway, and on the Irish shores. The records taken at close quarters come tantalisingly near to evidence; but they never quite reach that level, so far as Shetland is concerned.