Such bale will now
Betide the Irish
As ne'er grows old
To minding men.
The web's now woven
The wold made red,
Afar will travel
The tale of woe.

X:
An awful sight
The eye beholdeth
As blood-red clouds
Are borne through heaven;
The skies take hue
Of human blood,
Whene'er fight-maidens
Fall to singing.

XI. Willing we chant
Of the youthful king
A lay of victory--
Luck to our singing!
But he who listens
Must learn by heart
This spear-maid's song
And spread it further.

XII.
* * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * *
On bare-backed steeds
We start out swiftly
With swords unsheathed
From hence away.

The nine centuries, above referred to, of Roman invasion, intestine
war, and ecclesiastical rivalry between the Pictish, Columban and
Catholic Churches had now, under Malcolm II, produced a kingdom of
Scotland, throughout which the Catholic was in a fair way to become
the predominant Church, and in which the authority of the Scottish
Crown was for the time being, nominally, but in the north merely
nominally, supreme on the mainland from the Tweed to the Pentland
Firth. The Isles of Orkney and Shetland and the whole of the Sudreyar
or Hebrides, however, owed allegiance, whether their jarls admitted
it or not, to the Crown of Norway, and the Scottish kings had no
authority over them.[40] Moreover, the Northmen--Danes and Norsemen
and Gallgaels--held the western seas from the Butt of Lewis to the
Isle of Man, and they had severed the connection between the Scots
of Ulster and the Scots of Argyll. The latter had thus been forced to
move eastwards, in order to avoid constant raids by the Irish Danes
and Norsemen and the Gallgaels, who thus possessed themselves of all
the coast of Scotland then known as Airergaithel or Argyll, which
extended up to Ross and Assynt, west of the Drumalban watershed.

Of the next nine centuries from 1000 to the present time it is
proposed to deal with the first two hundred and seventy years only,
which, with the preceding century and a half, form a chapter of
Scottish history complete in itself. The narrative, as already stated,
will be based largely upon the great Stories or Tales known as the
_Orkneyinga, St. Magnus'_, and _Hakonar Sagas_, and also upon Scottish
and English chronicles and records so far as they throw their fitful
light upon