All through the North flew the tidings of Brian’s battle, and the Norsemen felt that it was one of the most severe checks sustained by them in Western Europe. On the evening of the battle a strange portent happened in Caithness. A Norseman was walking out late at night alone. He saw before him a bower, which he had never seen before, and twelve women riding, two and two, toward it. They passed into the bower and disappeared from sight. Curious to know what had become of the women, he went up to the bower, and looked in through a narrow slit that served for a window. Horrible was the sight he saw. The women were seated in the bower, weaving at a loom. But when he looked he saw that skulls of men served as the weights, and that the web and weft were the entrails of dead men. The loom was made of spears, and swords were the shuttles, and as the weird women wove, blood dripped from the loom upon the floor. They sang this song as the shuttles sped, softly as though they keened the slain:—
The “Darradar-Liod”, or “Lay of the Darts.”
“See! warp is stretched
For warrior’s fall,
Lo! weft in loom
’Tis wet with blood;
Now fight foreboding,
’Neath friends’ swift fingers,
Our grey woof waxeth
With war’s alarms;