Scandinavian-Britain

CHESHIRE AND LANCASHIRE2OIHeysham, upon which figures are sculptured which seemto represent a kind of illustration of the " Voluspa,"that poem of the Edda which the editors of the CorpusPoeticum Boreale date about A.D. 1000 or a littleearlier the heathen forecast of the Dayof Doomwhich the Christian world expected in that year.The artist of this work, if he can be called an artist,must have come from Yorkshire, but the poem nodoubt came from the Hebrides ;and the later yearsof the tenth centuryfit the time when such workcould be imagined and executed. So we get a hintof the life and belief on the shores of MorecambeBay when the colony was already well established,rich enough to afford such monuments, Christianisedenough to recognise their meaning, and yet clingingto the old associations and in touch by traffic andpeaceful intercourse with heathen kindred over-seas.One more monument of the North Lancashiregroup must be noticed as showing how long thisNorse colony lasted, using its old language and, inspite of the Norman Conquest and all that the organisationof the twelfth century meant, clinging to itsindividuality. At Pennington in Furness is a Normantympanum of a church built about the middle of thetwelfth century, carved by " Hubert the mason " butbuilt under the patronage of Gamel de Pennington,a descendant of the old Viking landholders of theplace. The inscription is in Scandinavian runes,and the language is a clipped Norse, not yet passedinto English : "(Ga)mial seti thesa kirk ;Hubertmasun van . . ." So we have documents in stone,