418 THE HORSES OF PREHISTORIC [CH. 



When lugolf and his folk settled in Iceland that island 

 had never known any human inhabitants save a few Irish 

 anchorites, who cannot be deemed to have contributed anything 

 towards the population, or to the domestic animals found there 

 later on. If these ecclesiastics had brought horses with them 

 — a thing in itself not very likely — these animals would 

 have been Irish or Hebridean in origin. On the other hand 

 the Norse settlers brought with them their families, house- 

 hold goods, and domestic animals, amongst which horses were 

 almost certainly included. It is important to bear in mind 

 that although all these colonists were Norsemen, more than 

 half of them, as is definitely proved by the Landnamaboc — 

 an ancient record of the names, ancestors, and holdings of the 

 early settlers — had been living in the British Isles before they 

 removed to Iceland, and that only a minority went direct from 

 Scandinavia. It is therefore highly probable that the original 

 stock of the ponies of Iceland and the Faroes came partly from 

 Ireland, and partly from Norway, but as has been well pointed 

 out the proportion that came from the former country was 

 probably greater, inasmuch as some of the settlers from Scan- 

 dinavia did not go directly to Iceland, but first went and 

 sojourned for a while in the Western Isles. It is therefore not 

 improbable that if these colonists brought ponies with them, 

 the latter would be of the Hebridean or Irish breeds. 



That the ponies of the Hebrides had been brought from 

 Ireland by the Irish monks who settled at loua (lona) is ren- 

 dered almost certain by a famous passage in Adamnan's Life of 

 St Columha^. In the evening of his life the old man, worn out 

 with age, went about lona in a cart to visit the brethren 

 who were at work on the other side of the island. On the day 

 he died, he and his attendant Diormit " went to bless the barn 

 which was near at hand, and after having blessed two heaps of 

 winnowed corn that lay therein, the saint left the barn, and in 

 going back to the monastery rested half-way at a place where 

 a cross, which was afterwards erected, and is standing to this 

 day, fixed into a mill-stone, may be observed on the roadside. 



1 Adamnan's Life of St Columba (Reeves' ed.), pp. 95-6. 



