Alternate friendly alliances and open warfare followed till A.D. 1034, when the Norwegians once more triumphed and obtained effectual possession of the greater part of the north of Scotland, where they established a kingdom under the powerful and talented Jarl Thorfinn, the son of Sigurd and of his wife, the daughter of the Scottish king Malcolm, who thereby ultimately acquired a hereditary right to the Scottish crown, similar to that which is believed to have paved the way to the previous accession of the first Dalriadic king of Scotland. We have thus reached a period of Scottish history over which modern literature has thrown a fictitious but singularly romantic interest. The lineal race of Kenneth MacAlpin, the Dalriadic king, having become extinct, the succession reverted to Duncan the son of Crinan, a powerful chief who had married the daughter of the last king of the Scottish race. But the old Celtic ideas of succession proved irreconcilable with his assumption of the crown, and the personal character of Duncan was little fitted to cope with the difficulties of his situation. His unambitious spirit indeed prevented his forcing himself into collision with the Norwegians, or disputing with Thorfinn his newly acquired dominions; and had he been able to communicate the same disposition to his subjects, his reign might have terminated in peace. But after enjoying his throne for about six years, his people took advantage of the absence of Thorfinn on an expedition to England, and putting him at their head, forced their way into the district of Moray with little opposition. But the Pictish natives of the north refused to recognise the right of Duncan to the crown, or to accept him as a deliverer from the Norwegian yoke, and headed by Macbeth, the maormor of Moray, they attacked him in the neighbourhood of Elgin, routed his army and put him to the sword. Macbeth pursued his success, made himself master of the whole kingdom, and with the sanction of the Norwegian jarl assumed the title of King of Scotland. Thus strangely were the questions of regal legitimacy and national independence at variance. It appears to have been solely as a tributary to Thorfinn that Macbeth reigned over the southern half of Scotland. Repeated unsuccessful attempts were made by the adherents of Duncan's party to recover possession of the throne for his son. In one of these, A.D. 1045, Crinan the father of Duncan was slain, who is styled in the Annals of Ulster "Abbot of Dunkeld,"—lay impropriation and the marriage of the clergy having both been common in Scotland prior to the reform of its church by the Saxon princess who became the wife of Duncan's son. The expedition of Duncan had been undertaken while Thorfinn and the chief Norwegian forces were engaged in assailing the Saxon possessions in England. The sons of Duncan accordingly sought refuge at the English court; and when Malcolm Canmore, Duncan's eldest son, returned to avenge his father's wrongs, he was accompanied by a Saxon army under the command of his uncle, Siward Earl of Northumberland. In securing by such means the possession of the Lothians, which was all that Malcolm was able at that time to wrest from Macbeth, he paved the way for that second and most important change, known in Scottish annals as the Saxon Conquest. Four years afterwards Macbeth was defeated and slain in the battle of Lumphanan, and on the death of Thorfinn, in 1064, Malcolm Canmore obtained final possession of the entire Scottish mainland, though the Norwegian jarls continued to retain undisputed hold of the Northern and Western Isles.
Such is a slight sketch of that important era in Scottish history; from the intrusion of the Scottish race into the Western Highlands, to the final ejectment of the Norwegians from the Scottish mainland, and the restoration of the crown to a Celtic prince at the head of a Saxon army. It is impossible to conceive of the presence of Norwegian settlers for so long a period on the mainland of Scotland without their greatly affecting the character of the native population. From A.D. 895, when the first Norwegian kingdom was established in the north of Scotland, to A.D. 1064, when that of Thorfinn came to an end at his death, a very large portion of the north of Scotland had been repeatedly held possession of for a considerable period by the Norwegians. Long periods of peace and friendly alliance afforded abundant opportunities for intermarriage; and we see in the marriage of the Orkney jarl with the daughter of the Scottish maormor, a clear proof that no prejudices interfered to prevent such unions. This was still less likely to be the case during the reign of Macbeth, which lasted for eighteen years, as the closest alliance and community of interests then subsisted between the Northern Celtic and Norwegian races, and to this period therefore we probably owe the chief changes on the aboriginal Scottish race which still distinguish their descendants from the purer Celtic races of the south and west of Ireland. The genealogies of many of the old Highland chiefs, and the history of the clans, furnish evidence of this intermixture of the races; and the physical characteristics of the natives of several northern districts of the Scottish Highlands abundantly confirm the same fact. Yet it is surprising how very partial the influence of the Northmen must have been. We have proofs of the introduction of Runic literature, and also of the use of Runic characters by the natives; yet if we except the Isle of Man, a dependency of Scotland both before and after its occupation by the Northmen, we have only the merest fragments of inscriptions in the northern runes found in Scotland. On the mainland some few local names are traceable to a Scandinavian origin. In the Scottish Lowland dialect a considerable number of words and many peculiarities of pronunciation are manifestly derived from the same source; while in the Orkney and Shetland Isles, customs, superstitions, language, and even legal formulas, all clearly point to their long occupation as an independent Norse jarldom, or as a dependency of the Danish crown. In the Western Isles, however, it has proved otherwise. There the language and race are still purely Celtic, and the ancient topographical nomenclature has been but slightly affected from their occupation by the Vikings and their Scandinavian successors. This is probably to be accounted for to a great extent by the fact, that the Hebrideans, like the natives of Man, fled on the occupation of their islands by the pirate Norsemen, and only very partially returned after the establishment of law and order under Ketil, the independent Norwegian jarl; so that these islands have been to a great extent colonized anew from the neighbouring mainland. Still extensive and durable traces remain to commemorate the intrusion of this race of northern warriors on the older colonists of Scotland, nor can we hesitate to ascribe somewhat of our peculiar national character and physical conformation to that intimate intercourse which prevailed more or less extensively for nearly two centuries, and indeed in the Orkney and Shetland Islands for a much longer period, between the Norwegian and Celtic races. On Scotland, as a whole, the influence of this Scandinavian colonization and conquest has been much more direct and effective than any results of the Roman Invasion. But both of these historic changes suffice to account for only a very few of the national peculiarities, or of the distinctive features of our earlier arts, and still require us to look to native sources for the larger number of archæological relics, and for the most characteristic classes of monumental remains.
FOOTNOTES:
[510] A Eolcha Albain Uile, translated from the Codex Stowensis, No. XLI. Collect. de Reb. Albanicis, Iona Club, p. 71. Albanus, from the Celtic god, Alw—Gaelic, Aluin, bright, beautiful; Alw-ion, Αλουίων, Albion, i.e., the island of Alw; Britus, Pryd, Prydain, i.e., Pryd, god of Britain. Welsh Archæologia, vol. i. p. 72. Meyer on the Celtic Dialects. Report, 1847, Brit. Assoc. Advancement of Science, p. 301. Bryt or Pryd, the god of the Britons, the Prydyn ap Ædd Mawr of the Welsh Triads.
[511] Skene's Highlanders of Scotland, vol. i. pp. 19, 23.
[512] Eumenius, Ritson's Caledonians, vol. i. p. 71.
[513] Ritson's Caledonians, vol. i. p. 120.
[514] Dr. Latham in treating of the Κέλται, sets down under the head of Phenomena of the System: "the Druids; the bards; the monumental remains of the character of Stonehenge—Máenhír, long stones;" and under the head of their Antiquities: "Coins, images, tumuli, and their contents."—Nat. Hist. of Man, p. 530. But this is a sweeping system of generalization, which takes for granted various points still open to question, if not already disproved. The derivation suggested, (ante, p. [68],) for the term Cromlech, if the correct one, seems to indicate that the true origin and character of these sepulchral memorials were as little known to the ancient Celtæ as to the "Druidical" antiquaries of last century.