Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

I have thus given a general character of the contents of my departed library, and the materials of my proposed work. My stories form a kind of history of the district of country to which they belong—hence the title I have chosen for them; and, to fill up some of those interstices which must always be occurring in a piece of history purely traditional, I shall avail myself of all the little auxiliary facts with which books may supply me. The reader, however, need be under no apprehension of meeting much he was previously acquainted with; and, should I succeed in accomplishing what I have purposed, the local aspect of my work may not militate against its interest. Human nature is not exclusively displayed in the histories of only great countries, or in the actions of only celebrated men; and human nature may be suffered to assert its claim on the attention of the beings who partake of it, even though the specimens exhibited be furnished by the traditions of an obscure village. Much, however, depends on the manner in which a story is told; and thus far I may vouch for the writer. I have seriously resolved not to be tedious, unless I cannot help it; and so, if I do not prove amusing, it will be only because I am unfortunate enough to be dull. I shall have the merit of doing my best—and what writer ever did more? I pray the reader, however, not to form any very harsh opinion of me for at least the first four chapters, and to be not more than moderately critical on the two or three that follow. There is an obscurity which hangs over the beginnings of all history—a kind of impalpable fog—which the writer can hardly avoid transferring from the first openings of his subject to the first pages of his book. He sees through this haze the men of an early period “like trees walking;” and, even should he believe them to be beings of the same race with himself, and of nearly the same shape and size—a belief not always entertained—it is impossible for him, from the atmosphere which surrounds them, to catch those finer traits of form and feature by which he could best identify them with the species. And hence a necessary lack of interest.

CHAPTER II.

“Consider it warilie; read aftiner than anis.”

—Gavin Douglas.

ALYPOS.

The histories of single districts of country rarely ascend into so remote an antiquity as to be lost like those of nations in the ages of fable. It so happens, however, whether fortunately or otherwise, for the writer, that in this respect the old shire of Cromarty differs from every other in the kingdom. Sir Thomas Urquhart, an ingenious native of the district, who flourished about the middle of the seventeenth century, has done for it all that the chroniclers and senachies of England and Ireland have done for their respective countries; and as he united to a vigorous imagination a knowledge of what is excellent in character, instead of peopling it with the caco-demons of the one kingdom, or the resuscitated antediluvians of the other, he has bestowed upon it a longer line of heroes and demigods than can be exhibited by the annals of either. I avail myself of his writings on the strength of that argument which O’Flaherty uses in his Ogygia as an apology for the story of the three fishermen who were driven by tempest into a haven of Ireland fifteen days before the universal deluge. “Where there is no room,” says this historian, “for just disquisition, and no proper field of inquiry, we must rely on the common suffrages of the writers of our country; to whose opinions I voluntarily subscribe.”

Alypos, the forty-third in a direct line from Japhet, was the first, says Sir Thomas, who discovered that part of Scotland which has since been known by the name of Cromarty. He was contemporary with Rehoboam, the fourth king of Israel, and a very extraordinary personage, independent of his merits as a navigator. For we must regard him as constituting a link which divides into ancestors and descendants—a chain that depends unbroken from the creation of Adam to the present times; and which either includes in itself, or serves to connect by its windings and involutions, some of the most famous people of every age of the world. His grandmother was a daughter of Calcido the Tyrian, who founded Carthage, and who must have lived several ages before the Dido of Virgil; his mother travelled from a remote eastern country to profit by the wisdom of Solomon, and is supposed by many, says Sir Thomas, to have been the queen of Sheba. Nor were his ancestors a whit less happy in their friends than in their consorts. There was one of them intimately acquainted with Nimrod, the founder of the Assyrian Empire, and the builder of Babel; another sat with Abraham in the door of his tent, sharing with him his feelings of sorrow and horror when the fire of destruction was falling on the cities of the plain; a third, after accompanying Bacchus in his expedition to the Indies, and receiving from him in marriage the hand of Thymelica his daughter, was presented with a rich jewel when passing through Syria, by Deborah, the judge and prophetess of Israel. The gem might have been still in the family had not one of his descendants given it to Penthesilea, that queen of the Amazons who assisted the Trojans against Agamemnon. Buchanan has expressed his astonishment that the chroniclers of Britain, instead of appropriating to themselves honourable ancestors out of the works of the poets, should rather, through a strange perversity, derive their lineage from the very refuse of nations: Sir Thomas seems to have determined not to furnish a similar occasion of surprise to any future historian. There were princes of his family who reigned with honour over Achaia and Spain, and a long line of monarchs who flourished in Ireland before the expedition of Fergus I.

ETYMOLOGICAL LEGENDS.

The era of Alypos was one of the most important in the history of Britain. It was that in which the inhabitants first began to build cities, and to distinguish their several provinces by different names. It witnessed the erection of the city of York by one Elborak, a brother-in-law of Alypos, and saw the castle of Edinburgh founded by a contemporary chieftain of Scotland, who had not the happiness of being connected to him, and whose name has therefore been lost. The historian assigns, too, to the same age the first use of the term Olbion as a name for the northern division of the island—a term which afterwards, “by an Eolic dialect,” came to be pronounced Albion, or Albyn; and the first application of the name Sutors, from the Greek σωτηξες, preservers, to those lofty promontories which guard the entrance of the bay of Cromarty—a fact which Aikman the historian recommends, with becoming gravity, to the consideration of Gaelic etymologists. Much of a similar character, as appears from Sir Thomas, could have been brought under their notice in the reign of Charles I., when, as he states in one of his treatises, the names of all places in the shire of Cromarty, whether promontories, fountains, rivers, or lakes, were of pure and perfect Greek. Since that time, however, many of these names have been converted into choice trophies of the learning and research of those very etymologists;—even the derivation of the term Sutors has been disputed, but by the partisans of languages less ancient than either Greek or Gaelic. The one party write the contested dissyllable Suitors, the other Soutars, and defend their different modes of spelling each by a different legend—a species of argument practised at one time with much ingenuity and success by the contending Orders of St. Dominic and Loyola.

The promontories which bear this name are nearly equal in height, but when viewed from the west they differ considerably in appearance. The one, easy of access, crowned with a thick wood of pine, divided into corn-fields, and skirted at the base by a broad line of ash and elm, seems feminine in its character; while the other, abrupt, stern, broken into precipices, and tufted with furze, is of a cast as decidedly masculine. Two lovers of some remote age, had met by appointment in a field of Cromarty which commands a full view of the promontories in the aspect described. The young man urged his suit with the characteristic warmth of his sex—his mistress was timid and bashful. He accused her of indifference; and with all the fervour of a passion which converts even common men into poets, he exclaimed, pointing to the promontories, “See, Ada! they too are lovers—they are hastening to embrace; and stern and rugged as that carle-hill of the north may seem to others, he is not reckoned so by his lady-hill of the south;—see how, with all her woods and her furrows, she advances to meet him.”—“And think you,” rejoined the maiden, entering into the poetry of the feeling, “that these tongueless suitors cannot express their mutual regards without the aid of language; or that that carle of the north, rude as he is, would once think of questioning the faith and affection of his advancing mistress, merely because she advances in silence?” Her reply, say the people who contend for the English derivation of the word, furnished the promontories with a name; and as those alchemists of mind who can transmute etymology into poetry have not been produced everywhere, few names have anecdotes equally pleasing connected with their origin. The other legend is of a different character, and has a merit peculiar to itself, to be amenable to any known law of criticism.