Fabulous, however, as are these accounts, yet that, long before either the Danish or even the Saxon invasions, the coasts of the Baltic had sent forth colonies to the British Isles, is a fact to which foreign as well as domestic tradition bears testimony. The conjecture of Tacitus, that the people called Picts were a Germanic or northern race, is confirmed by the traditional accounts of this people, preserved in the chronicles of Britain; and all the early Scandinavian legends concur with the annals of Ireland in intimating, at some remote period, relations of intercourse between the two countries. We have seen, in a preceding part of this work, what almost certain grounds there are for believing that those Scyths, or Scots, who, at the time when Ireland first became known to modern Europe, formed the dominant part of her people, were a colony from some region bordering on the Baltic Sea which had, a few centuries before, gained possession of this island. From whatever part these Scythian adventurers may have arrived, whether from the Cimbric peninsula, the islands of the Baltic, or the Scandinavian shores, it may be concluded that with that region the occasional intercourse was afterwards maintained, and those alliances and royal intermarriages formed of which, in our ancient traditions and records, some scattered remembrances still remain. With respect to those swarms of sea-rovers who, throughout the dark and troubled period we are now approaching, carried on their long career of havoc and blood, though known most popularly in English history by the general name of Danes, they are but rarely, and not till a late period, thus designated in our annals. By Tigernach, the earliest existing annalist, they are invariably called Gâll, or Strangers; while, in the Annals of Inisfallen, of Ulster, and of the Four Masters, they are styled indifferently either Galls, Gentiles, Dwellers on the Lakes, or Pirates; but in not more than two or three instances are they called Normans, and as seldom Danes.[294] [Sidenote: 795 to 820.]