The unworthy and fushionless had not this bliss. Their portion was a region cold, foggy, and cheerless. And it is thought that the author of Adamnan’s vision may have got his cold and wet imagery of the place of woe from the pagan invaders. St. Brendan, in his _Navigatio Brendani_, a book well known in medieval Europe, gives a legend which is one of the most singular products of Celtic imagination. He found Judas upon a rock in the midst of the Polar seas. Once a week he passes a day there to refresh himself from the fires of Hell. A cloak that he had given to a beggar is hung before him and tempers his sufferings. As St. Brendan lived in the middle of the sixth century the subject of the legend is pre-Norse, and it is the heat that is represented as infernal. Dante, it will be remembered, reserves the ice and cold for the last degree of torment in the Inferno. And of Highland bards, Duncan Macrae, David Mackellar, and others, down to the eighteenth century, have introduced the same idea. Indeed, it has even been hinted that the tendency of the Highland preacher to dwell upon the sterner aspects of our faith may well be due to the lingering influence of the northern paganism. But this we think rather far-fetched and unlikely, for other less ancient influences, local and potent, have been at work to depress the outlook of the Gael. The Norseman, however, is still with us in hidden and often unknown corners of our life, our literature, and our history. Perhaps to him we owe our continuance as a race to this day. He has carried with him over the wave the breath of freedom and strenuous endeavour, and infused them into the life of this great nation, helping Britain to build up and maintain a world-wide empire and supremacy upon the seas. But judging his influence upon Gaelic literature solely, we cannot say that, so far as it is known, it was of a helpful or even far-reaching kind. In the first shock of invasion it would rather seem to have been ruinous and deleterious in its effects, arresting development and dispersing the rising literary activity. But what if it could be proved by further research that while distinctly hostile to the ecclesiastical order in all its manifestations and productions, and therefore its books, the appearance of the Norsemen in these islands revived the interest in the native sagas, so that the scribes were encouraged to write them down and preserve them for future ages. Then verily it might with strictest veracity be said that to the Vikings we owe the cream of our literature, for it is a recognised fact that “the sagas and historic tales, and the poetry that is mingled with them, are of far greater importance from a purely literary point of view” than all the ecclesiastical transcriptions and contributions of the period. But this is a suggestion we offer as not at all improbable, and, like the whole subject of Norse influence, is worthy of a fuller investigation than any it has yet received.