“Consider it warilie; read aftiner than anis.”--GAVIN DOUGLAS.
[Sidenote: ALYPOS.]
The histories of single districts of country rarely ascend into so
remote an antiquity as to be lost like those of nations in the ages of
fable. It so happens, however, whether fortunately or otherwise, for
the writer, that in this respect the old shire of Cromarty differs from
every other in the kingdom. Sir Thomas Urquhart, an ingenious native
of the district, who flourished about the middle of the seventeenth
century, has done for it all that the chroniclers and senachies of
England and Ireland have done for their respective countries; and as
he united to a vigorous imagination a knowledge of what is excellent
in character, instead of peopling it with the caco-demons of the
one kingdom, or the resuscitated antediluvians of the other, he has
bestowed upon it a longer line of heroes and demigods than can be
exhibited by the annals of either. I avail myself of his writings on
the strength of that argument which O’Flaherty uses in his Ogygia as an
apology for the story of the three fishermen who were driven by tempest
into a haven of Ireland fifteen days before the universal deluge.
“Where there is no room,” says this historian, “for just disquisition,
and no proper field of inquiry, we must rely on the common suffrages of
the writers of our country; to whose opinions I voluntarily subscribe.”
Alypos, the forty-third in a direct line from Japhet, was the first,
says Sir Thomas, who discovered that part of Scotland which has since
been known by the name of Cromarty. He was contemporary with Rehoboam,
the fourth king of Israel, and a very extraordinary personage,
independent of his merits as a navigator. For we must regard him as
constituting a link which divides into ancestors and descendants--a
chain that depends unbroken from the creation of Adam to the present
times; and which either includes in itself, or serves to connect by its
windings and involutions, some of the most famous people of every age
of the world. His grandmother was a daughter of Calcido the Tyrian, who
founded Carthage, and who must have lived several ages before the Dido
of Virgil; his mother travelled from a remote eastern country to profit
by the wisdom of Solomon, and is supposed by many, says Sir Thomas,
to have been the queen of Sheba. Nor were his ancestors a whit less
happy in their friends than in their consorts. There was one of them
intimately acquainted with Nimrod, the founder of the Assyrian Empire,
and the builder of Babel; another sat with Abraham in the door of his
tent, sharing with him his feelings of sorrow and horror when the fire
of destruction was falling on the cities of the plain; a third, after
accompanying Bacchus in his expedition to the Indies, and receiving
from him in marriage the hand of Thymelica his daughter, was presented
with a rich jewel when passing through Syria, by Deborah, the judge
and prophetess of Israel. The gem might have been still in the family
had not one of his descendants given it to Penthesilea, that queen of
the Amazons who assisted the Trojans against Agamemnon. Buchanan has
expressed his astonishment that the chroniclers of Britain, instead of
appropriating to themselves honourable ancestors out of the works of
the poets, should rather, through a strange perversity, derive their
lineage from the very refuse of nations: Sir Thomas seems to have
determined not to furnish a similar occasion of surprise to any future
historian. There were princes of his family who reigned with honour
over Achaia and Spain, and a long line of monarchs who flourished in
Ireland before the expedition of Fergus I.
[Sidenote: ETYMOLOGICAL LEGENDS.]
The era of Alypos was one of the most important in the history of
Britain. It was that in which the inhabitants first began to build
cities, and to distinguish their several provinces by different names.
It witnessed the erection of the city of York by one Elborak, a
brother-in-law of Alypos, and saw the castle of Edinburgh founded by a
contemporary chieftain of Scotland, who had not the happiness of being
connected to him, and whose name has therefore been lost. The historian
assigns, too, to the same age the first use of the term Olbion as a
name for the northern division of the island--a term which afterwards,
“by an Eolic dialect,” came to be pronounced Albion, or Albyn; and
the first application of the name Sutors, from the Greek σωτηξες,
_preservers_, to those lofty promontories which guard the entrance of
the bay of Cromarty--a fact which Aikman the historian recommends, with
becoming gravity, to the consideration of Gaelic etymologists. Much
of a similar character, as appears from Sir Thomas, could have been
brought under their notice in the reign of Charles I., when, as he
states in one of his treatises, the names of all places in the shire of
Cromarty, whether promontories, fountains, rivers, or lakes, were of
pure and perfect Greek. Since that time, however, many of these names
have been converted into choice trophies of the learning and research
of those very etymologists;--even the derivation of the term Sutors
has been disputed, but by the partisans of languages less ancient than
either Greek or Gaelic. The one party write the contested dissyllable
Suitors, the other Soutars, and defend their different modes of
spelling each by a different legend--a species of argument practised at
one time with much ingenuity and success by the contending Orders of
St. Dominic and Loyola.
The promontories which bear this name are nearly equal in height, but
when viewed from the west they differ considerably in appearance.
The one, easy of access, crowned with a thick wood of pine, divided
into corn-fields, and skirted at the base by a broad line of ash
and elm, seems feminine in its character; while the other, abrupt,
stern, broken into precipices, and tufted with furze, is of a cast
as decidedly masculine. Two lovers of some remote age, had met by
appointment in a field of Cromarty which commands a full view of the
promontories in the aspect described. The young man urged his suit
with the characteristic warmth of his sex--his mistress was timid and
bashful. He accused her of indifference; and with all the fervour of
a passion which converts even common men into poets, he exclaimed,
pointing to the promontories, “See, Ada! they too are lovers--they are
hastening to embrace; and stern and rugged as that carle-hill of the
north may seem to others, he is not reckoned so by his lady-hill of
the south;--see how, with all her woods and her furrows, she advances
to meet him.”--“And think you,” rejoined the maiden, entering into the
poetry of the feeling, “that these tongueless _suitors_ cannot express
their mutual regards without the aid of language; or that that carle
of the north, rude as he is, would once think of questioning the faith
and affection of his advancing mistress, merely because she advances
in silence?” Her reply, say the people who contend for the English
derivation of the word, furnished the promontories with a name; and as
those alchemists of mind who can transmute etymology into poetry have
not been produced everywhere, few names have anecdotes equally pleasing
connected with their origin. The other legend is of a different
character, and has a merit peculiar to itself, to be amenable to any
known law of criticism.
In some age of the world more remote than even that of Alypos, the
whole of Britain was peopled by giants--a fact amply supported by
early English historians and the traditions of the north of Scotland.
Diocletian, king of Syria, say the historians, had thirty-three
daughters, who, like the daughters of Danaus, killed their husbands
on their wedding night. The king, their father, in abhorrence of the
crime, crowded them all into a ship, which he abandoned to the mercy of
the waves, and which was drifted by tides and winds till it arrived
on the coast of Britain, then an uninhabited island. There they lived
solitary, subsisting on roots and berries, the natural produce of the
soil, until an order of demons, becoming enamoured of them, took them
for their wives; and a tribe of giants, who must be regarded as the
true aborigines of the country, if indeed the demons have not a prior
claim, were the fruit of these marriages. Less fortunate, however,
than even their prototypes the Cyclops, the whole tribe was extirpated
a few ages after by Brutus the parricide, who, with a valour to which
mere bulk could render no effectual resistance, overthrew Gog-Magog,
and Termagol, and a whole host of others, with names equally terrible.
Tradition is less explicit than the historians in what relates to
the origin and extinction of the race, but its narratives of their
prowess are more minute. There is a large and very ponderous stone in
the parish of Edderton, which a giantess of the tribe is said to have
flung from the point of a spindle across the Dornoch Firth; and another
within a few miles of Dingwall, still larger and more ponderous,
which was thrown from a neighbouring eminence by a person of the same
family, and which still bears the marks of a gigantic finger and thumb
impressed on two of its sides. The most wonderful, however, of all
their achievements was that of a lady, distinguished even among the
tribe as the _Cailliach-more_, or great woman, who, from a pannier
filled with earth and stones, which she carried on her back, formed
almost all the hills of Ross-shire. When standing on the site of the
huge Ben-Vaichard, the bottom of the pannier is said to have given
way, and the contents falling through the opening, produced the hill,
which owes its great height and vast extent of base to the accident.
Prior to the invasion of Brutus, the promontories of Cromarty served as
work-stools to two giants of this tribe, who supplied their brethren
with shoes and buskins. They wrought together; for, being furnished
with only one set of implements, they could not carry on their trade
apart; and these, when needed, they used to fling to each other across
the opening of the firth, where the promontories are only about two
miles asunder. In process of time the name Soutar, a shoemaker,
was transferred by a common metonymy from the craftsmen to their
stools--the two promontories; and by this name they have ever since
been distinguished. Such are the etymological legends of the Sutors,
opposed each to the other, and both to the scholarlike derivation of
Sir Thomas; which must be confessed, however, to have been at one time
a piece of mere commonplace, though it has since become learning.
I have seen in the museum of the Northern Institution a very complete
collection of stone battle-axes, some of which were formed little
earlier than the last age by the rude natives of America and the
South Sea Islands; while others, which had been dug out of the cairns
and tumuli of our own country, witnessed to the unrecorded feuds and
forgotten battle-fields of twenty centuries ago. I was a good deal
struck by the resemblance which they bore to each other--a resemblance
so complete, that the most practised eye could hardly distinguish
between the weapons of the old Scot and those of the New Zealander.
Both seemed to have selected the same rude materials, employed the same
imperfect implements, and wrought after the same uncouth model. But man
in a savage state is the same animal everywhere, and his constructive
powers, whether employed in the formation of a legendary story or of
a battle-axe, seem to expatiate almost everywhere in the same rugged
track of invention. For even the traditions of this first stage may be
identified, like its weapons of war, all the world over. Mariner, in
his account of the Tonga Islands, tells us that the natives pointed
out to him a perforated rock, in the hollow of which, they said, one
of their gods, when employed in fishing, entangled his hook, and that,
pulling lustily to disengage it, he pulled up the whole island (one
of the largest of the group) from the bottom of the sea. Do not this
singular story, and the wild legend of Ben-Vaichard, though the product
of ages and countries so widely separated, belong obviously to the same
rude stage of invention?
[Sidenote: EPIC POETRY OF THE MIDDLE AGES.]
There may be some little interest in tracing the footprints of what
I may term the more savage traditions of a country in the earlier
pages of its history, and in marking how they blend with its imperfect
narratives of real but ill-remembered events, on the one hand, and its
mutilated imitations of the masterpieces of a classical literature, on
the other. The fabulous pages of English history furnish, when regarded
in this point of view, a not uninteresting field to the legendary
critic. They are suited to remind him of those huts of the wild Arab,
composed of the fragments of ruined grandeur which the traveller finds
amid the ruins of Palmyra or Balbec, and in which, as he prosecutes his
researches, he sees the capital totter over the architrave, the base
overtop the capital, masses of turf heaped round the delicate volute,
which emulated in granite the curled tresses of a beautiful female,
and the marble foliage of the acanthus crushed by the rude joist which
bends under a roof of clay and rushes. Perhaps the reader may indulge
me in a few brief remarks on this rather curious subject.
Diocletian, the Syrian king of the English legend, is, as Buchanan
justly remarks, a second Danaus, and owes his existence to the story
of his prototype; but the story of the marriages of his daughters with
an order of demons, which, according to that historian, the English
have invented through a pride of emulating the Gauls and Germans,
who derive their lineage from Pluto, does not appear to me to be so
legitimately traced to its original. The oldest of all the traditions
of Britain seem to be those which describe it as peopled at some remote
era by giants;--they are the broken vestiges, it is possible, of those
incidents of Mosaic history which are supposed to be shadowed out in
the fables of the giants of Grecian mythology, or they are perhaps
mutilated remains of the fables themselves. It seems more probable,
however, that they should have originated in that belief, common to the
vulgar of all countries, that the race of men is degenerating in size
and prowess with every succeeding generation, and that at some early
period their bulk and strength must have been gigantic. Judging of
them from their appearance, they must have been known in a very early
age--an age as early perhaps as that of the stone battle-axe; and what
more probable than that they should have attracted the notice of the
chroniclers, who would naturally consult tradition for the materials of
their first pages? But tradition, though it records the achievements
of the giants, is silent respecting their origin. A first link would
therefore be wanting, which could only be supplied by imagination; and
as, like every other class of writers, the chroniclers would find it
easier to imitate than to invent, it is not difficult to conceive how,
after having learned in their cloisters that in an early age of the
world the sons of God had contracted marriages with the daughters of
men, and that heroes and giants were the fruit of the connexion--they
should blend a legend imitative of the event with the stories of the
giants of Britain. Their next employment, for it would be too bold an
attempt to link so terrible a tribe to the people of their own times,
would be to show how this tribe became extinct, and the manner in which
the country was first peopled with men like themselves.
There is but one way in which anything probable can be acquired
concerning the origin of a people who have no early history; but the
process is both difficult and laborious. There is another sufficiently
easy, which barely reaches the possible, and which the historians of
eight hundred years ago would have deemed the more eligible of the
two. Instead of setting themselves to ascertain those circumstances
by which the several families of men are distinguished, or to compare
the language, character, and superstitions of the people of their own
country with those of the various tribes of the Continent, they would
apply for such assistance as the imitator derives from his copy, to
the histories of other kingdoms. From their connexion with the Latin
Church they would be conversant with Roman literature, and acquainted
with the story of Æneas as related by the historians, and amplified
and adorned by Virgil. And thus, what may be termed the third link of
their history, has come to bear a discernible resemblance to the early
history of Rome. The occasion of the wanderings of Brutus resembles
that of the expatriation of Tydeus, or rather that of the madness of
Œdipus, but he is the Æneas of England notwithstanding. His history
is a kind of national epic. Cornæus is his Achates. He finds hostile
Rutulians, headed by a Turnus, in the giants and their leader; and
Britain is both his Italy and his Trinacria, though, instead of fleeing
from the Cyclops, he conquers them.
The legend of Scotland may also be regarded as a national epic. It
is formed on the same model with the story of Brutus, but it has the
merit of being a somewhat more skilful imitation, and there is nothing
outrageously improbable in any of its circumstances. Galethus, its
hero, is the Æneas of Scotland. He was the son of Cecrops, the founder
of Athens, and, like Romulus, made himself famous as a captain of
robbers before he became the founder of a nation. Having repeatedly
invaded Macedonia and the neighbouring provinces of Greece, he was in
imminent danger of being overpowered by a confederacy of the states he
had injured, when, assembling his friends and followers, he retreated
into Egypt, at a time when that kingdom was ravaged from its southern
boundary to the gates of Memphis by an army of Ethiopians. Assuming on
the sudden a new character, he joined his forces to those of Pharaoh,
gave battle to the invaders, routed them with much slaughter, pursued
them into Ethiopia, and after a succession of brilliant victories over
them, compelled them to sue for peace. On his return he was presented
by the king with the hand of his daughter Scota, and made general in
chief of all the forces of the kingdom. Disgusted, however, by the
cruelties practised on the Israelites, and warned by Moses and an
oracle of the judgments by which these cruelties were to be punished,
he fitted out a fleet, and, accompanied by great numbers of Greeks and
Egyptians, set sail from the river Nile with the intention of forming a
settlement on the shores of the Mediterranean. After a tedious voyage
he arrived at a port of Numidia, where no better success awaited him
than was met with by Æneas in the scene of his first colony. Again
putting to sea, he passed the Pillars of Hercules, and after having
experienced in the navigation of the straits dangers similar to those
which appalled Ulysses when passing through the Straits of Messina,
he landed in that part of Spain which has ever since been known by
the name of Portugal. He found in this country a second Tiber in the
river Munda, and a fierce army of Rutulians in the inhabitants. But
his good fortune did not desert him. He vanquished his enemies in one
decisive battle, dispossessed them of their fairest provinces, built
cities, instituted laws, conquered and colonized Ireland, and, dying
after a long and prosperous reign, left his kingdom to his children.
Prior to his decease, his subjects, both Greeks and Egyptians, were
termed Scots, from their having sunk their original designations in
that name, out of courtesy to their Queen Scota--a name afterwards
transferred to Albyn by a colony from Ireland, who took possession of
it a few ages subsequent to the age of Galethus. Such is the fable of
what may be regarded both as the historic epic of Scotland, and as the
most classical of all the imitations of the Æneid which were fabricated
during the middle ages.
Sir Thomas has recorded nothing further of his ancestor Alypos, than
that he followed up his discovery of Cromarty by planting it with a
colony of his countrymen, who, though some of his ancestors had settled
in Portugal several ages before, seem to have been Greeks. Of sixteen
of his immediate descendants, it is only known that they were born,
and that they married--some of them finding honourable consorts in
Ireland, some in Greece, and one in Italy. The wife of that one was a
sister of Marcus Coriolanus--a daughter of Agesilaus the Spartan, a
daughter of Simeon Breck, the first crowned king of the Irish Scots, a
daughter of Alcibiades, the friend and pupil of Socrates, and a niece
of Lycurgus the lawgiver, were wives to some of the others. Never was
there a family that owed more to its marriages.
[Sidenote: ASTORIMON.]
Nomaster, the son-in-law of Alcibiades, disgusted by the treatment
which that great but ambitious statesman had received from his
country, took leave of Greece, and, “after many dangerous voyages
both by sea and land, he arrived at the harbour Ochoner, now called
Cromarty.” It owed its more ancient name to Bestius Ochoner, one of
the sixteen immediate descendants of Alypos, and the father, says the
genealogist, of the Irish O’Connors; the name which it now bears is
derived by Gaelic etymologists from the windings and indentations of
its shores.[2] Nomaster, immediately on his landing, was recognised
by the colonists as their legitimate prince, and he reigned over
them till his death, when he was succeeded by his son Astorimon, a
valiant and accomplished warrior, in whom the genius and heroism of
his grandfather seem to have been revived. And the events of his time
were suited to find employment. For in this age an immense body of
Scythians, after voyaging along the shores of Europe in quest of a
settlement, were incited by the great natural riches of the country
to make choice of Scotland; and, pouring in upon its western coasts,
they dispossessed the natives of some of their fairest provinces. But
the little territory of Astorimon, though one of the invaded, was
not one of the conquered provinces. The Scythians, under Ethus their
general, intrenched upon an extensive moor, which now forms the upper
boundary of the parish of Cromarty; and the grandson of Alcibiades
drew out his forces to oppose them. A battle ensued, in which the
Scythian general was killed in single combat by Astorimon; and his
followers, dispirited by his death, and unable to contend with an army
trained to every evolution of Greek and Roman discipline, were routed
with immense slaughter. The Scythians afterwards became famous as the
Picts of Scottish history; and _Ethus_, their leader, is reckoned
their first king. Sir Thomas, to the details of this battle, which he
terms the great battle of _Farna_,[3] has added, that “the trenches,
head-quarters, and castrametation” of the invading army can still be
traced on a moor of Cromarty.
This moor, which formed a few years ago an unappropriated common, but
which was lately divided among the proprietors whose lands border on
it, has evidently at some remote period been a field of battle. It is
sprinkled over with tumuli and little heathy ridges resembling the
graves of a churchyard. The southern shore of the Cromarty Firth runs
almost parallel to it for nearly fourteen miles; and upon a hill in the
parish of Resolis, which rises between it and the firth, and which is
separated from it by a deep valley, there are the vestiges of Danish
encampments. And there is perhaps scarcely an eminence in Scotland on
which in the early ages an invading army could have encamped with more
advantage than on this hill, or a moor upon which the invaders could
have been met with on more equal terms than on the moor adjacent. The
eminence is detached on the one side from the other rising grounds of
the country by a valley, the bottom of which is occupied by a bog, and
it commands on the other an extensive bay, in which whole fleets may
ride with safety; while the neighbouring moor is of great extent, and
has few inequalities of surface. Towards its eastern boundary, about
six miles from the town of Cromarty, there is a huge heap of stones,
which from time immemorial has been known to the people of the place as
_The Grey Cairn_, a name equally descriptive of other lesser cairns in
its vicinity, but which with the aid of the definite article serves to
distinguish it. Not more than thirty years ago the stones of a similar
cairn of the moor were carried away for building by a farmer of the
parish. There were found on their removal human bones of a gigantic
size, among the rest a skull sufficiently capacious, according to the
description of a labourer employed by the farmer, to contain “two
lippies of beer.”
[Sidenote: THE SPECTRE SHIPS.]
About fifteen years ago, a Cromarty fisherman was returning from
Inverness by a road which for several miles skirts the upper edge of
the moor, and passes within a few yards of the cairn. Night overtook
him ere he had half completed his journey; but, after an interval of
darkness, the moon, nearly at full, rose over the eminence on his
right, and restored to him the face of the country--the hills which
he had passed before evening, but which, faint and distant, were
sinking as he advanced, the wood which, bordering his road on the one
hand, almost reached him with its shadow, and the bleak, unvaried,
interminable waste, which, stretching away on the other, seemed lost
in the horizon. After he had entered on the moor, the stillness which,
at an earlier stage of his journey, had occasionally been broken by
the distant lowing of cattle, or the bark of a shepherd’s dog, was
interrupted by only his own footsteps, which, from the nature of the
soil, sounded hollow as if he trod over a range of vaults, and by
the low monotonous murmur of the neighbouring wood. As he approached
the cairn, however, a noise of a different kind began to mingle with
the other two; it was one with which his profession had made him
well acquainted--that of waves breaking against a rock. The nearest
shore was fully three miles distant, the nearest cliff more than
five, and yet he could hear wave after wave striking as if against a
precipice, then dashing upwards, and anon descending, as distinctly as
he had ever done when passing in his boat beneath the promontories of
Cromarty. On coming up to the cairn, his astonishment was converted
into terror.--Instead of the brown heath, with here and there a fir
seedling springing out of it he saw a wide tempestuous sea stretching
before him, with the large pile of stones frowning over it, like one
of the Hebrides during the gales of the Equinox. The pile appeared as
if half enveloped in cloud and spray, and two large vessels, with all
their sheets spread to the wind, were sailing round it.
The writer of these chapters had the good fortune to witness at this
cairn a scene which, without owing anything to the supernatural, almost
equalled the one described. He was, like the fisherman, returning from
Inverness to Cromarty in a clear frosty night in December. There was no
moon, but the whole sky towards the north was glowing with the Aurora
Borealis, which, shooting from the horizon to the central heavens,
in flames tinged with all the hues of the rainbow, threw so strong a
light, that he could have counted every tree of the wood, and every
tumulus of the moor. There is a long hollow morass which runs parallel
to the road for nearly a mile;--it was covered this evening by a dense
fleece of vapour raised by the frost, and which, without ascending, was
rolling over the moor before a light breeze. It had reached the cairn,
and the detached clump of seedlings which springs up at its base.--The
seedlings rising out of the vapour appeared like a fleet of ships, with
their sails dropping against their masts, on a sea where there were
neither tides nor winds;--the cairn, grey with the moss and lichens of
forgotten ages, towered over it like an island of that sea.
But I daresay I have imparted to the reader more of the fabulous
history of Cromarty than he will well know how to be grateful for. One
other remark, however, in better language, and a more vigorous style
of thinking than my own, and I shall have done;--it may show that Sir
Thomas, however unique as a man, forms, as a historian, only one of a
class.
[Sidenote: OLAUS RUDBECK.]
“The last century,” says the philosophic Gibbon, “abounded with
antiquarians of profound learning and easy faith, who, by the dim
light of legends and traditions, of conjectures and etymologies,
conducted the great-grandchildren of Noah from the tower of Babel to
the extremities of the globe. Of these judicious critics,” continues
the historian, “one of the most entertaining was Olaus Rudbeck,
professor in the university of Upsal. Whatever is celebrated either in
history or fable, this zealous patriot ascribes to his country. From
Sweden, the Greeks themselves derived their alphabetical characters,
their astronomy, and their religion. Of that delightful region (for
so it appeared to the eyes of a native), the Atlantis of Plato,
the country of the Hyperboreans, the Garden of the Hesperides, the
Fortunate Islands, and even the Elysian fields, were all but faint
and imperfect transcripts. A clime so profusely favoured by nature
could not long remain desert after the flood. The learned Rudbeck
allows the family of Noah a few years to multiply from eight to about
twenty thousand persons. He then disperses them into small colonies to
replenish the earth and to propagate the human species. The Swedish
detachment (which marched, if I am not mistaken, under the command of
Askenos, the son of Gomer, the son of Japhet), distinguished itself by
more than common diligence in the prosecution of this great work. The
northern hive cast its swarms over the greater part of Europe, Africa,
and Asia; and (to use the author’s metaphor), the blood circulated from
the extremities to the heart.”