Once
settled, the Norse exerted such steady pressure on their southern
Pictish neighbours in Ross and Moray, and kept them so fully occupied
in war or by the constant menace of it from the north, that successive
Scottish kings were in their turn left comparatively free, on their
own northern frontier, from Pictish attacks, and were therefore
enabled to consolidate their own kingdom in the south of Scotland and
to beat the English back to the line of the Tweed. Afterwards they
were able to turn their attention to the consolidation of the mainland
north of the Grampians,[3] by first overcoming the Picts in Moray,
and then the Norse in Cat, and establishing the feudal system and the
Catholic Church.
Worshipping, as the Vikings did, amongst others, the "fair white god
Baldr of golden beauty," and accounting as base-born "hellskins" those
of darker hue, it seems strange that they should so soon have taken
to themselves Celtic wives. But we have seen that they came by sea and
that no Norse women were allowed in Viking ships,[4] and thus it was
Celtic mothers alone that perpetuated the race. They also taught the
children the Gaelic tongue, and, on the mainland in all Sutherland and
Caithness save the north-eastern portions of the latter, Gaelic soon
became again the only spoken language.
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