"Sueno, the Norways' King, craves composition;
Nor would we deign him burial of his men
Till he disbursed, at Saint Colmes Inch,
Ten thousand dollars to our general use."
Inchcolm is the only island of the east coast of Scotland which derives
its distinctive designation from the great Scottish saint. But more than
one island on our western shores bears the name of St. Columba; as, for
example, St. Colme's Isle, in Loch Erisort, and St. Colm's Isle in the
Minch, in the Lewis; the island of Kolmbkill, at the head of Loch Arkeg,
in Inverness-shire; Eilean Colm, in the parish of Tongue;[33] and, above
all, Icolmkill, or Iona itself, the original seat and subsequent great
centre of the ecclesiastic power of St. Columba and his successors.[34]
An esteemed antiquarian friend, to whom I lately mentioned the preceding
reference to Inchcolm by Shakspeare, at once maintained that the St.
Colme's Isle in Macbeth was Iona. Indeed, some of the modern editors[35]
of Shakspeare, carried away by the same view, have printed the line
which I have quoted thus:--
"Till he disbursed, at Saint Colme's-kill Isle,"
instead of "Saint Colmes ynch," as the old folio edition prints it. But
there is no doubt whatever about the reading, nor that the island
mentioned in Macbeth is Inchcolm in the Firth of Forth. For the site of
the defeat of the Norwegian host was in the adjoining mainland of Fife,
as the Thane of Ross tells the Scotch king that, to report his victory,
he had come from the seat of war--
"from Fife,
Where the Norwegian banners flout the sky."
The reference to Inchcolm by Shakspeare becomes more interesting when we
follow the poet to the original historical foundations upon which he
built his wondrous tragedy. It is well known that Shakspeare derived the
incidents for his story of Macbeth from that translation of Hector
Boece's _Chronicles of Scotland_, which was published in England by
Raphael Holinshed in 1577. In these Chronicles, Holinshed, or rather
Hector Boece, after describing the reputed poisoning, with the juice of
belladonna, of Sueno and his army, and their subsequent almost complete
destruction, adds, that shortly afterwards, and indeed while the Scots
were still celebrating this equivocal conquest, another Danish host
landed at Kinghorn. The fate of this second army is described by
Holinshed in the following words:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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