cross. We will believe that that was the lesson which the Norsemen
learnt, after many a wild and blood-stained voyage, from the monks of
Iona or of Derry, which caused the building of such churches as that
which Sightrys, king of Dublin, raised about the year 1030, not in the
Norse but in the Irish quarter of Dublin: a sacred token of amity between
the new settlers and the natives on the ground of a common faith. Let us
believe, too, that the influence of woman was not wanting 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