But what in this respect the Anglo-Saxons were obliged to leave undone, was for the most part accomplished by the warlike and shrewd men of the Scandinavian North, who were then masters of the sea. Even from the oldest times, connections, both of a warlike and peaceful nature, had existed between Scotland and the opposite shores of Scandinavia. The old Sagas, for instance, bear witness that the Danish king Frode’s daughter, Ulfhilde, was married to “the founder of the Scottish kingdom;” and that the Danish prince Amleth (Hamlet) married the Scotch queen, Hermuntrude. From Denmark, moreover, and particularly from Jutland, many colonists afterwards emigrated to the Scotch Lowlands, whose coasts were, besides, plundered by the Danish Vikings. The Danish colonists, even in the north of England, were much mixed with Norwegians, and this was still more the case in the Scottish Lowlands. The more north the districts lay, the farther were they removed from Denmark, and the nearer did they approach Norway; whilst the features of the country much more resembled the Norwegian fiords, valleys, and rocks. Whilst, therefore, the Scandinavian colonists in the Lowlands were of Norwegian-Danish descent, the Highlands and islands farthest towards the north and west, were conquered, and in part peopled, by Norwegians only. This happened about the same time as the Danish conquests and settlements in England. The Norwegians founded kingdoms on the northern and western coasts of Scotland, which existed for centuries after the destruction of the Danish power in England. They introduced their own manners, customs, and laws, and gave Norwegian names to the places colonized by them. They appear not unfrequently to have married native Celts; at least it is often stated that Norwegian chiefs married daughters of the Celtic, or Pictish, and Scotch aristocracy, whose pure nationality and power were thus gradually broken down. The unfortunate Celts were now in a painful position. The Celtic Scots in the Lowlands were pressed upon by the Anglo-Saxons and Northmen, whilst the Pictish Highlanders were assailed both from the Lowlands and from the Norwegian kingdoms in the west and north. The most essential result of the Norwegian conquests and settlements in the Scotch Highlands was, that the Northmen, in conjunction with the Norwegian-Danish colonists in the Lowlands, and with the Anglo-Saxons who dwelt there, overthrew the Celtic dominion, and, like the Danes in England, prepared the way for the eventual triumph of the Norman spirit and Norman institutions. In the Lowlands this took place in the twelfth century, but much later in the Highlands and surrounding islands.