Blair Collection > Celtic gleanings, or, Notices of the history and literature of the Scottish Gael

124 LECTURE III.
Danes ; this place is found in Caithness, on the
very borders of the ancient Scandinavian set-
tlements of the country. There is among the
natives a tradition of a battle having been
fought there, and remains indicative of sepul-
ture at a very remote period are also discovered
in the neighbourhood. But we have no reason
to believe that the Danes formed any settle-
ments in Caithness before the ninth century,
and the necessary inference is, that this poem
(" Dan air Crom G-hleann," given in M'Callum's
collection, p. 106), which bears every mark of
authenticity, is of a period not earlier than
that century. The probability is, that these
fragments are of various dates, and various
authors ; some of them, it may be, as ancient as
the period of the Eomans, and some of them as
late as the invasion of the Danes, and some even
later, while fragments may be of an antiquity
higher than the introduction of Christianity.
Internal evidence indicates those fragments
which belong to what is usually called the Ossi-
anic era, or the second or third century. That
the names of the Fingalians, and the memory
of their ^feats, existed at a very early period in
Scotland, can be very satisfactorily established.
Besides the reference to them in the more
ancient Scottish poets their names occur in our