Another haunting folk-song I heard here years ago—I must put it down to preserve it—at Vibstadt, Namsen Valley, on a hot midday I heard the bonders’ daughters sing it as they weeded lettuce in the blaze of light. They called it Barden’s Dod (The Death of the Bard), and we have the same air in our Highlands; it dates back to prehistoric times; and we call it “The Minstrel of the MacDonalds.” No one that I know sings or plays it now at home. But a year or two ago, on the top of a mountain in Southern Norway, as we rested at lunch, a Norse hunting companion began singing it, and I started, and he smiled and explained his wife was one of the little girls who had given it to me in Northern Norway twenty years before. The Norwegian words, I am told by a Norwegian antiquarian, belong to the Viking period.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
In the smoking-room on the way south on board we naturally talk much about fishing, for half our fellow-passengers have been salmon-fishing and there is much comparison of Bags and Rivers. Some have done better than they expected, others growl at their bags, and the season, and at the agent, whoever it was, that put them on to such a bad river. But all are charmed with Norse scenery, and Norse people. We come in for some questioning about bears. There is no invidious comparison between a bag of bears and a creel of salmon; but we have to be careful about whales, for it would be a little rough on the veteran salmon-fisher to cap his best with a yarn on whales: after he has, at length and with the utmost modesty, recounted the fight his fifty-pounder put up, and the hundred yards it took out, it would scarcely be considerate to refer to some fifty-ton or one-hundred-ton whale, and the miles of cable it had reeled off in a twinkling. Of course everyone knows a whale is not a fish—still, the slight similarity is such that whaling yarns are apt to be damping when fishing stories are going; though the true Walton angler is happy catching any size of fish; a six-ounce trout to me, in a Highland burn, is almost as good as a whale. Notwithstanding this delicate tact on our part, whaling was introduced one evening in the smoking-room, and the writer was rather surprised to find that several men had very little idea of the functions of whalebone or its place in the whale’s anatomy, so we had to draw diagrams, such as these here reproduced, to describe shortly the way whalebone works. This is a side view of the head of a finner whale; it shows the outer edges of the whalebone plates that hang round the sides of the upper jaw. The blades vary in thickness in different whales; in the common Balænoptera Borealis, such as this, it measures about a quarter of an inch thick and is about two feet at deepest. The blade has hair on its inside edge. If the whale’s head were cut across between the nose and eye, or corner of its mouth, the section would be like this. These hairs intertwine and form a surface to the palate like a well-worn cocoanut mat. The whale opens its mouth and takes in possibly a ton of water thick with small shrimps, partially closes its jaws and expels the water through the fibrous surface and out between the blades. I suppose by raising the enormous soft plum-coloured tongue (D in section) towards the hairy palate or mat of interwoven hairs at the edge of each plate (CC in section) it prevents the shrimps going out with the water, and the tongue works the shrimps down to its throat. I have not calculated the food which I have seen come out of a whale’s stomach when cut up, but I say, at a rough guess, forty to sixty gallons—three or four barrels of very minute shrimps. I have only seen the remains of one of the Right whale, Mysticetus, and those of the smaller, somewhat similar whale, Balæna Australis. The Right or Greenland whale had very long bone, up to eleven feet. To cover the whalebone, the lower lip is formed as in this jotting. Scoresby maintains that when the Right whale’s mouth is closed, the blades bend or fold back towards the throat. This seems probable.
A Finner’s Head
A Right Whale’s Head