contact in peace and
war with the Irish, "whose ancient civilisation was superior and therefore
stronger." Bergen, the old Norse capital, possessed a church dedicated to
St. Columba, and the revered relics of its patron, St. Sunniva, an Irish
maiden! As you sail into Rejkiavik, the capital of Iceland, you pass the
Westman Isles, so-called because of the Irish who had visited and dwelt
there. Now Iceland--that strange attractive island, where cold white snow
covers the hot volcanic heart--is the old home of the Sagas. It had been
first peopled by some Irish monks. Another settlement took place when
Queen Aud--widow of White Olaf, the Norse King of Dublin--went thither on
the death of her son. Norsemen and Irishmen, her kinsfolk and dependents,
accompanied her. Mr. Vigfusson, himself an Icelander, writes with a
generous fairness, characteristic of the race, as follows:

"The bulk of the settlers were men who, at least for one generation, had
dwelt among a Keltic population and undergone an influence which an old
and strongly marked civilisation invariably exercises among those brought
under it--an attraction which in this particular case was of so potent a
kind that centuries later it metamorphosed the Norman knights of the
foremost European kingdom with startling rapidity into Irish chieftains."
"Moreover," he adds, "we find among the emigrants of all ranks men and
women of pure Irish and Scottish blood, as also as many sprung from mixed
marriages, and traces of this crossing survive in the Irish names borne by
some of the foremost characters of the Heroic Age of Iceland, especially
the poets, of whom it is also recorded that they were dark men." He
considers that this close intercourse with the Celts had to do with
heightening and colouring the strong but somewhat prosaic Teuton
imagination into that finer and more artistic spirit manifested in the
Icelandic Saga. The classic land of the Saga was in West Iceland, and
there also the proportion of Irish blood was greatest. On the Norsemen who
still remain there the Irish influence was yet more effective and
powerful. Mr. Vigfusson makes an observation, which is a touching and keen
reproach to those on whom it devolves to publish the manuscript materials
of ancient Irish literature. He writes: "Only when it is possible to judge
fairly of the remains of the Keltic literature of the ninth, tenth, and
eleventh centuries, can any definite conception of the influence it
exerted