Ill] 



AND HISTORIC TIMES 



347 



the black horse though greatly esteemed never managed to get 

 a strong foothold in Scandinavia, for, as has been pointed out, 

 the Norwegian and Icelandic ponies continued to be dun, skew- 

 bald, and piebald down to the present, and there is good 

 evidence that even in the sixteenth century, when large black 

 horses were very general all through the Low Countries, 

 Denmark and Germany, many Swedish horses were not very 

 far removed in colour from what they had been in the days 

 of Beowulf. 



Fig. 100. Sleipnir, the gi-ey eight-legged horse of Odini. 

 (From a Swedish rock-carving.) 



Olaus Magnus^ says that the horses of Sweden were 

 particularly well adapted for travelling through marshy, hilly, 

 and forest country, that the Norwegian horses were of moderate 

 size, strong, and courageous, and particularly excellent in 

 mountains and rocky ground, that the ponies of Oeland were 

 very diminutive and therefore of little use, and that any good 



1 From a photograph kindly sent to me by my friend Dr Oscar Montelius, ' 

 Director of the Stockholm Museum. The grotesque conception of a horse with 

 eight legs to give him extra speed may have been suggested by a two-horse 

 chariot. On the earliest British coins (Evans, Coins of the Ancient Britons, 

 PI. i) the two horses of the biga on the coins of Philip II of Macedon have been 

 converted into a single horse with eight legs. ' 



2 Gothorum Sueonumque Historia, Lib. xvii. cap. 8 (ed. Rome, 1555). 



