Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Scandinavian Britain - III. The Norse Settlements - 6. The Earldom of Orkney
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Denna sida har korrekturlästs minst en gång.
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1904). It relates the adventures of an imaginary king
of England whose wife was carried off by Vikings to
a Scottish seaport, his children to the Norse colony
of Caithness, where they were fostered by kindly furtraders,
and he himself, after long wanderings, is brought
to the service of a merchant in Galinde (Galuide) or
Gavaide (Galvaide), that is to say, Galloway. The
story, like others of the period, is of British origin,
and can have been composed only in Cumbria or
Northumbria towards the end of the eleventh century,
and among people who, though they had a horror of
the piracy of an age by then passing away, were in
close connexion with Norse trading colonies in
Scotland. The great jarl is sketched with admiration,
perhaps from the famous Thorfinn ; the kind Caithness
traders are drawn to the life, not without hints of their
homeliness as compared with the refinement of the
South, and the benevolent and wealthy shipowner of
Galloway is the true ancestor of the merchant princes
who have made British commerce and philanthropy
famous. The unconscious testimony of this contemporary
picture of manners and men tells us, like
the monuments, a tale untold by the curt annals of
bloodshed and rapine, now no longer to be regarded
as the whole history of Scandinavian Britain.
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