Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Scandinavian Britain - III. The Norse Settlements - 2. Cheshire and Lancashire
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Heysham, upon which figures are sculptured which seem
to represent a kind of illustration of the "Völuspá,"
that poem of the Edda which the editors of the Corpus
Poeticum Boreale date about A.D. 1000 or a little
earlier—the heathen forecast of the Day of Doom
which the Christian world expected in that year.
The artist of this work, if he can be called an artist,
must have come from Yorkshire, but the poem no
doubt came from the Hebrides ; and the later years
of the tenth century fit the time when such work
could be imagined and executed. So we get a hint
of the life and belief on the shores of Morecambe
Bay when the colony was already well established,
rich enough to afford such monuments, Christianised
enough to recognise their meaning, and yet clinging
to the old associations and in touch by traffic and
peaceful intercourse with heathen kindred over-seas.
One more monument of the North Lancashire
group must be noticed as showing how long this
Norse colony lasted, using its old language and, in
spite of the Norman Conquest and all that the organisation
of the twelfth century meant, clinging to its
individuality. At Pennington in Furness is a Norman
tympanum of a church built about the middle of the
twelfth century, carved by "Hubert the mason" but
built under the patronage of Gamel de Pennington,
a descendant of the old Viking landholders of the
place. The inscription is in Scandinavian runes,
and the language is a clipped Norse, not yet passed
into English :—"(Ga)mial seti thesa kirk ;Hubert
masun van ..." So we have documents in stone,
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