anting in the good
work--that the story of St. Margaret and Malcolm Canmore was repeated,
though inversely, in the case of many a heathen Scandinavian jarl, who,
marrying the princely daughter of some Scottish chieftain, found in her
creed at last something more precious than herself; while his brother or
his cousin became, at Dublin or Wexford or Waterford, the husband of some
saffron-robed Irish princess, "fair as an elf," as the old saying was;
some "maiden of the three transcendent hues," of whom the old book of
Linane says:

Red as the blood which flowed from stricken deer,
White as the snow on which that blood ran down,
Black as the raven who drank up that blood;

--and possibly, as in the case of Brian Boru's mother, had given his fair-
haired sister in marriage to some Irish prince, and could not resist the
spell of their new creed, and the spell too, it may be, of some sister of
theirs who had long given up all thought of earthly marriage to tend the
undying fire of St. Bridget among the consecrated virgins of Kildare.

I am not drawing from mere imagination. That such things must have
happened, and happened again and again, is certain to anyone who knows,
even superficially, the documents of that time. And I doubt not that, in
manners as well as in religion, the Norse were humanised and civilised by
their contact with the Celts, both in Scotland and in Ireland. Both
peoples had valour, intellect, imagination: but the Celt had that which
the burly angular Norse character, however deep and stately, and however
humorous, wanted; namely, music of nature, tenderness, grace, rapidity,
playfulness; just the qualities, combining with the Scandinavian (and in
Scotland with the Angle) elements of character which have produced, in
Ireland and in Scotland, two schools of lyric poetry second to none in
the world.

And so they were converted to what was then a dark and awful creed; a
creed of ascetic self-torture and purgatorial fires for those who escape
the still more dreadful, because endless, doom of the rest of the human
race. But, because it was a sad creed, it suited better, men who had,
when conscience re-awakened in them, but too good reason to be sad; and
the minsters and cloisters which sprang up over the whole of Northern
Europe, and even beyond it, along the dreary western shores of Greenland
itself, are the symbols of a splendid repentance for their own sins and
for the sins of their forefathe