Note (return) — Chapter II

After long continued raids, the Vikings no doubt saw that much of the land along the shore was fair and fertile compared with their own, and finally they came not merely to plunder and depart, but to settle and stay. When they did so, they came in large numbers and with organised forces13 and carefully prepared plans of campaign, and with great reserves of weapons on board their ships; and having the ocean as their highway, they could select their points of attack. They then, as we know from the localities which bear their place-names, cleared out the Pict from most of his brochs and from the best land in Cat, shown on the map by dark green colour, that is, from all cultivated land below the 500 feet level save the upper parts of the valleys; or they slew or enslaved the Pict who remained. Lastly, on settling, they would seize his women-kind and wed them; for the women of their own race were not allowed on Viking ships, and were probably less amenable and less charming to boot. But the Pictish women thus seized had their revenge. The darker race prevailed, and, the supply of fathers of pure Norse blood being renewed only at intervals, the children of such unions soon came to be mainly of Celtic strain, and their mothers doubtless taught them to speak the Gaelic, which had then for at least a century superseded the Pictish tongue. The result was a mixed race of Gall-gaels or Gaelic strangers, far more Celtic than Norse, who soon spoke chiefly Gaelic, save in north-east Ness. Their Gaelic, too, like the English of Shetland at the present time, would not only be full of old Norse words, especially for things relating to the sea, but be spoken with a slight foreign accent. How numerous those foreign words still are in Sutherland Gaelic, the late Mr. George Henderson has ably and elaborately proved in his scholarly book on "Norse Influence on Celtic Scotland." We find traces of Norse words and the Norse accent and inflexions also on the Moray seaboard, on which the Norse gained a hold. The same would be true of the people on the western lands and islands of the Hebrides.