A-Z: Norsemen

"...Wake ye from your sleep of death,

Minstrels and bards of other days!
For the midnight wind is on the heath,
And the midnight meteors dimly blaze:
The Spectre with the Bloody Hand,
Is wandering through the wild woodland;
The owl and the raven are mute for dread,
And the time is meet to awake the dead!

"Souls of the mighty, wake, and say
To what high strain your harps were strung
When Lochlin* plough'd her billowy way,
And on your shores her Norsemen flung?
Her Norsemen train'd to spoil and blood,
Skill'd to prepare the Raven's food,
All, by your harpings, doom'd to die
On bloody Largs** and Loncarty.***

"Mute are ye all? No murmurs strange
Upon the midnight breeze sail by;
Nor through the pines, with whistling change
Mimic the harp's wild harmony!
Mute are ye now? — Ye ne'er were mute,
When Murder with his bloody foot,
And Rapine with his iron hand,
Were hovering near yon mountain strand.

–– Walter Scott, "The Bard's Incantation"

The complete text can be found at Wikisource

*  Lochlann (earlier Laithlind) is a geographical region in Classical Gaelic literature and in the history of Early Medieval Ireland. In the modern Gaelic and Welsh (Llychlyn) languages it signifies Scandinavia, and more specifically Norway. ("Lochlann," Wikipedia)

** "The Battle of Largs was an engagement fought between the armies of Norway and Scotland near the present-day town of Largs in North Ayrshire on the Firth of Clyde in Scotland on 2 October 1263. . . . The result was inconclusive, but in the long term favoured the Scots." ("Battle of Largs," Wikipedia)

*** "The historian Hector Boece (1465–1536), in his History of the Scottish People, records that, in 990, Kenneth III of Scotland defeated the Danes near Luncarty." ("Luncarty," Wikipedia)