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Updated: September 9, 2025
The misfortunes that had attended Kenric of Bute and Sir Piers de Currie were due almost entirely to the bad work of the wild men of Galloway, whose lust for slaughter and pillage, whose wanton plunderings of churches and slaying of women and children brought down upon the Scots the hatred of the Norsemen in whose lands these depredations had been made.
"But we are not afraid of those cowards, for no more courage is there in Danes than in wood goats. Never yet were Danes victorious over Norsemen, and they will not vanquish us today. But what chief flies the standards to the right?" "Those, lord, are the standards of Olaf the Swede King." "The son of Queen Sigrid the Haughty stands in need of a little practice in warfare," said Olaf.
Then other twenty men surrounded Kenric, menacing him and pressing forward to reach the children he defended. A man of Colonsay caught Ailsa by her hand, and with his dagger was about to take her life. With a great cry of furious rage Kenric sprang upon him and felled him. Closer still the Norsemen pressed in upon him.
They did not like this at all, even if their enemies were their first cousins, the Norsemen, who lived in Denmark and Sweden and Norway. What forced these hardy sailors to turn pirate we do not know, but once they had discovered the advantages and pleasures of a buccaneering career there was no one who could stop them.
Finn and Ossian belong to the mythic heroic cycle of the Gaels, and Arthur and Merlin to that of the Britons. These several shadowy forms are probably deities shorn of their divinity and given historic attributes and position, much as, among the Norsemen, Odin, when he ceased to be regarded as the All-father, or God, came to be reckoned as an ancestor of the kings.
He had once been a bondslave among Norsemen, and had known Olaf's father, King Triggvi, whom Olaf personally resembled. He could speak very well in the Norse tongue, and his soft and gentle voice was very soothing to all who heard it.
Here Colombo met the descendants of those brave Norsemen who in the tenth century had settled in Greenland and who had visited America in the eleventh century, when Leif's vessel had been blown to the coast of Vineland, or Labrador. What had become of those far western colonies no one knew.
Take their reward from them, and they will curse Him to His face. If Christianity had never borne itself more loftily than this, do we suppose that those fierce Norsemen who had learnt, in the fiery war-songs of the Edda, of what stuff the hearts of heroes are composed, would have fashioned their sword-hilts into crosses, and themselves into a crusading chivalry?
The chronicle says that the winter days were longer in Vineland than in Greenland, and names the exact length of the shortest day. Unfortunately, however, the Norsemen had no accurate system for measuring time; otherwise the length of the shortest winter day would enable us to know at what exact spot Leif's settlement was made.
The wonderful likeness which is shown between such tales as the 'Red Bull of Norway' in Mr Chambers' collection, and Katie Woodencloak in these Norse Tales, is to be accounted for by no theory of the importation of this or that particular tale in later times from Norway, but by the fact that the Lowland Scots, among whom these tales were told, were lineal descendants of Norsemen, who had either seized the country in the Viking times, or had been driven into it across the Border after the Norman Conquest.
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