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from your own Rydal poet, Wordsworth, may serve to show their 

 character: — 



For why ? because the good old rule 



Sufficeth them, the simple plan, 

 That they should take who have the power, 



And they should keep who can. 



And yet, when we examine the records given by language, their 

 words and ways must have had a great effect in the North and in 

 Lakeland at least, upon the formation of home language, and upon 

 that with which home language is most intimately connected — the 

 manners and customs of social life. 



I have thought it well in dealing with this subject, to commence 

 with the proper names of the streams and mountains, and such 

 other natural features of Lakeland as may seem to bear any testi- 

 mony to the language of the Norsemen — for whenever a race of 

 men have inhabited a country, though they may for centuries have 

 passed away and been forgotten, yet the chances are very great 

 that they have left some trace of their language in what may at 

 length have become the proper names of the country. And just 

 as our hills and valleys are made up of various strata, and contain 

 beneath them fossils, which, when rightly read, indicate their 

 inhabitants in the long bygone ages — ^just so do the names of the 

 same hills and valleys contain a stratification of the language of 

 the various races who one after another had their homes amongst 

 them ; and when they as distinctive races, were gradually merged 

 in or supplanted by other races, left their most lasting records, 

 not in the tumuli or cairns which they reared over their ashes, but 

 in the names which they assigned to the everlasting hills. 



The language of the Norsemen has often occurred to me in the 

 names of the hills and streams when I have been crossing Redbank 

 from Grasmere, or wandering about at Langdale Head. In the 

 Norse staker, a tall, columnar rock, we have there The Stake, and 

 The Pike of Stickle. In Kringle Crags, which seem to form the 

 segments of a circle, we have the Norse kringla, a circle. Gills 

 and becks are both Norse; and I need not tell you in what 

 abundance those names cluster about the head of Langdale, 



